Sphoṭa (Sanskrit:स्फोट,IPA:[ˈspʰoːʈɐ]; "bursting, opening", "spurt") is an important concept in the Indian grammatical tradition ofVyakarana, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse andmeaning.
The theory ofsphoṭa is associated withBhartṛhari (c. 5th century[1]), an early figure in Indic linguistic theory, mentioned in the 670s by Chinese travellerYijing. Bhartṛhari is the author of theVākyapadīya ("[treatise] onwords andsentences"). The work is divided into three books, theBrahma-kāṇḍa, (orĀgama-samuccaya "aggregation of traditions"), theVākya-kāṇḍa, and thePada-kāṇḍa (orPrakīrṇaka "miscellaneous").
He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages:
Bhartṛhari is of theśabda-advaita "speechmonistic" school which identifies language and cognition.According toGeorge Cardona, "Vākyapadīya is considered to be the major Indian work of its time on grammar, semantics and philosophy."
While thesphoṭa theory proper (sphoṭavāda) originates withBhartṛhari, the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartṛhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.
Sanskritsphoṭa is etymologically derived from the rootsphuṭ 'to burst'.It is used in its technical linguistic sense byPatañjali (2nd century BCE), in reference to the "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. Patañjali'ssphoṭa is the invariant quality of speech. The acoustic element (dhvani) can be long or short, loud or soft, but thesphoṭa remains unaffected by individual speaker differences. Thus, a singlephoneme (varṇa) such as /k/, /p/ or /a/ is an abstraction, distinct from variants produced in actual enunciation.[2]Eternal qualities in language are already postulated byYāska, in hisNirukta (1.1), where reference is made to another ancient grammarian,Audumbarāyaṇa, about whose work nothing is known, but who has been suggested as the original source of the concept.[3]The grammarian Vyāḍi, author of the lost textSaṃgraha, may have developed some ideas insphoṭa theory; in particular some distinctions relevant todhvani are referred to by Bhartṛhari.[4]
There is no use ofsphoṭa as a technical term prior to Patañjali, butPāṇini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian namedSphoṭāyana as one of his predecessors. This has induced Pāṇini's medieval commentators (such asHaradatta) to ascribe the first development of thesphoṭavāda toSphoṭāyana.
The account of the Chinese travellerYijing places a firmterminus ante quem of AD 670 on Bhartṛhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century.[1] By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartṛhari who wrote theŚatakatraya.
In theVākyapadīya, the termsphoṭa takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartṛhari intended to say.Sphoṭa retains its invariant attribute, but sometimes its indivisibility is emphasized and at other times it is said to operate at several levels.In verse I.93, Bhartṛhari states that thesphota is the universal or linguistic type—sentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds).[2]
Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he viewssphoṭa as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness.[5] Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, theśabda-brahman, or "Eternal Verbum".Early Indologists such asA. B. Keith felt that Bhartṛhari'ssphoṭa was a mystical notion, owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartṛhari's text,Vākyapādiya, where it is discussed. Also, the notion of "flash or insight" or "revelation" central to the concept also lent itself to this viewpoint. However, the modern view[according to whom?] is that it is perhaps a more psychological distinction.
Bhartṛhari expands on the notion ofsphoṭa in Patañjali, and discusses three levels:
He makes a distinction betweensphoṭa, which is whole and indivisible, andnāda, the sound, which is sequenced and therefore divisible. Thesphoṭa is the causal root, the intention, behind an utterance, in which sense is similar to the notion oflemma in mostpsycholinguistic theories of speech production. However,sphoṭa arises also in the listener, which is different from the lemma position. Uttering thenāda induces the same mental state orsphoṭa in the listener - it comes as a whole, in a flash of recognition orintuition (pratibhā, 'shining forth'). This is particularly true forvakya-sphoṭa, where the entire sentence is thought of (by the speaker), and grasped (by the listener) as a whole.
Bimal K. Matilal (1990) has tried to unify these views - he feels that for Bhartṛhari the very process of thinking involves vibrations, so that thought has some sound-like properties. Thought operates byśabdana or 'speaking', - so that the mechanisms of thought are the same as that of language. Indeed, Bhartṛhari seems to be saying that thought is not possible without language. This leads to a somewhatwhorfian position on the relationship between language and thought. Thesphoṭa then is the carrier of this thought, as a primordial vibration.
Sometimes thenāda-sphoṭa distinction is posited in terms of thesignifier-signified mapping, but this is a misconception. In traditional Sanskrit linguistic discourse (e.g. in Katyāyana),vācaka refers to the signifier, and 'vācya' the signified. The 'vācaka-vācya' relation is eternal for Katyāyana and theMīmāṃsakas, but is conventional among the Nyāya. However, in Bhartṛhari, this duality is given up in favour of a more holistic view - for him, there is no independent meaning or signified; the meaning is inherent in the word or the sphoṭa itself.
Sphoṭa theory remained widely influential in Indianphilosophy of language and was the focus of much debate over several centuries. It was adopted by most scholars ofVyākaraṇa (grammar), but both theMīmāṃsā andNyāya schools rejected it, primarily on the grounds ofcompositionality. Adherents of the 'sphota' doctrine were holistic or non-compositional (a-khanḍa-pakṣa), suggesting that many larger units of language are understood as a whole, whereas the Mīmāṃsakas in particular proposed compositionality (khanḍa-pakṣa). According to the former, word meanings, if any, are arrived at after analyzing the sentences in which they occur. This debate had many of the features animating present day debates in language oversemantic holism, for example.
TheMīmāṃsakas felt that the sound-units or the letters alone make up the word. The sound-units are uttered in sequence, but each leaves behind an impression, and the meaning is grasped only when the last unit is uttered. The position was most ably stated byKumarila Bhatta (7th century) who argued that the 'sphoṭas' at the word and sentence level are after all composed of the smaller units, and cannot be different from their combination.[6] However, in the end it is cognized as a whole, and this leads to the misperception of thesphoṭa as a single indivisible unit. Each sound unit in the utterance is an eternal, and the actual sounds differ owing to differences in manifestation.
TheNyāya view is enunciated among others by Jayanta (9th century), who argues against theMīmāṃsā position by saying that the sound units as uttered are different; e.g. for the sound [g], we infer its 'g-hood' based on its similarity to other such sounds, and not because of any underlying eternal. Also, thevācaka-vācya linkage is viewed as arbitrary and conventional, and not eternal. However, he agrees with Kumarila in terms of the compositionality of an utterance.
Throughout the second millennium, a number of treatises discussed thesphoṭa doctrine. Particularly notable is Nageśabhaṭṭa'sSphotavāda (18th century). Nageśa clearly definessphoṭa as a carrier of meaning, and identifies eight levels, some of which are divisible.
In modern times, scholars of Bhartṛhari have includedFerdinand de Saussure, who did his doctoral work on thegenitive inSanskrit and lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European languages at the Paris and at theUniversity of Geneva for nearly three decades. It is thought that he might have been influenced by some ideas of Bhartṛhari, particularly thesphoṭa debate. In particular, his description of thesign, as composed of the signifier and the signified, where these entities are not separable—the whole mapping from sound to denotation constitutes the sign—seems to have some colourings ofsphoṭa in it. Many other prominent European scholars around 1900, including linguists such asLeonard Bloomfield andRoman Jakobson, were influenced by Bhartṛhari.[7]