On the Saddhatusamiksa, a Lost Work Attributed to Bhartrhari: An Examination of Testimonies and a List of Fragments.

• Author: Ratie, Isabelle
• Position: Essay

AN INTRIGUING LOST WORK

Bhartrhari's magnum opus, the Vakyapadiya, (1) has drawn much scholarly attention for over a century and triggered some heated debates, the most famous of which pertains to the authorship of the old Vrtti that comments on its first two parts. (2) But the Vakyapadiya is by no means the grammarian-philosopher's only work: he is also believed to have authored a commentary--usually referred to as the Mahabhasyadipika--on Patanjali's Mahabhasya? The attribution of the Satakatraya to the author of the Vakyapadiya seems to be late and probably spurious, (4) but several scholars (5) have noticed in the past decades that a tradition dating back at least to the tenth century of our era ascribes to Bhartrhari another work of which very little is known. To date, the latter's content remains shrouded in mystery: only a few scattered fragments of it survive through later quotations, (6) and its title is uncertain, as two versions of it are found in the sources that allude to it, namely, Sabdadhatusamiksa and Saddhatusamiksa (more precisely, these are two versions of the full title, since the work is also often referred to with abbreviated forms such as Samiksa and Dhatusamiksa). (1) What this "examination" (samiksa) was really about is far from obvious at first sight, as the word dhatu, in a grammatical context, usually means 'verbal root', but if this is how it is to be interpreted here, the title Saddhatusamiksa hardly makes sense (sato means 'six', but there are thousands of roots in the Sanskrit language), while Sabdadhatusamiksa ("an examination of the verbal roots of language") sounds oddly redundant--not to mention that the few fragments that have come down to us have nothing to do with verbal roots. And whatever the title of this work was, even its attribution to Bhartrhari has recently been questioned. (8)

This article does not claim to answer all the vexed questions surrounding this intriguing lost work. Its goal is merely to clarify once and for all the issue of its title and to show, through the examination of a few thus far neglected references to it in later Indian philosophical literature, that even if no manuscript of it ever comes to light, we can still hope to obtain some precious informations on its content simply by paying attention to what its medieval readers had to say about it. Since to my knowledge, no attempt has been made so far to gather the known quotations from this text, a list of fragments is given below as an appendix.

WAS THE TITLE OF THE WORK SABDADHATUSAMIKSA OR SADDHATUSAMIKSA?

The remarks that first drew attention to this lost work ascribed to Bhartrhari are found in the Sivadrsti by Somananda (c. 900-950) and its commentary (Vrtti) by Utpaladeva (c. 925-975). (9) The passages in question, which seem to be known to all the modern scholars who mention Bhartrhari's lost Samiksa, occur immediately after Somananda completes his lengthy criticism of Bhartrhari's contention that ultimate reality is to be equated with the subtle level of speech (vac) called Pas'yantl. (10) Somananda then accuses Bhartrhari of going well beyond his abilities as a mere grammarian when he claims to venture into metaphysical territory (11) and ends up displaying a sheer simulacrum of knowledge, which, Somananda adds, he offers not only "here" (iha) but also in another work:

What is the point of [your] investigation of [soteriological] knowledge (vijnananvesana) that has left the plane of grammar [and] is not an appropriate topic of discussion for you? [And it is] not only here [that you] have stated this pseudo-knowledge (vijnanabhasana): [you have] also expressed it in the Samiksa. (12) Utpaladeva explains the passage in the following way:

Your investigation of the correct knowledge to be pursued with treatises that have liberation as their goal has "left the plane of grammar"--[grammar being] nothing but the activity of teaching the correct words that are the causes of the understanding of meaning -; [this investigation], which is "not appropriate for you," [i.e., not appropriate] as a task for you, is useless! And not only has the learned Bhartrhari stated this pseudo-correct knowledge precisely here, with this discourse on Pasyanti, but also in the Sabdadhatusamiksa. (13) In the 1934 Kashmir Series of Text and Studies (KSTS) edition of Utpaladeva's Vrtti (made on the basis of a single sarada manuscript) (14) as well as in the partial edition of the Sivadrsti and Vrtti thereon in a recent study by John Nemec, (15) the title is given as Sabdadhatusamiksa (although none of the manuscripts used for the latter bears this reading); (16) and most scholars have accepted this without discussion. Taking for granted that just like Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya and his commentary on the Mahabhasya, this work too must have dealt with language, they seem to have found the presence of the word sabda in the title entirely natural. The use of the word dhatu, however, seems to have caused a certain uneasiness since the usual meaning of 'verbal root' in a grammatical context did not seem relevant here, so that the vague meaning of 'root-cause' was preferred among the few historians who ventured an explanation of the title. Thus K. A. Subramania Iyer:

The name of the work is in accordance with the philosophy of Bhartrhari. The name of the work means: Investigation into the word as the dhatu, that is, the root-cause (the Ultimate Reality). This title agrees with Bhartrhari's Sabdadvaita, the doctrine that the ultimate Reality from which the universe proceeds is of the nature of the word. (17) Mulakaluri Srimannarayana Murti makes similar remarks:

Somananda ... remarked that Bhartrhari has also dealt with ... the higher knowledge about the ultimate reality, transgressing the limits of the grammarian in this book which is meant for explaining the forms of the noun and the verb. For Bhartrhari sabdadhatu-samiksa means an inquiry into the root cause (dhatu) of s'abda, i.e. Sabdabrahman, the Ultimate reality, corresponding to what was expounded in the Brahma-kanda of the Vakyapadiya. Therefore all the works of Bhartrhari are based on one principle that Vyakarana is intimately connected with the Ultimate reality, namely Sabdabrahman, besides explaing the form of words in Sanskrit. (18) More recently, other scholars (Johannes Bronkhorst, John Nemec, Mark Dyczkowski), although aware that there is another version of the work's title, have chosen to keep using the one found in the KSTS edition. (19) This is rather surprising, since in 1994 Raffaele Torella had already published a book (20) in which he noted that two different titles are attributed to the work: in the Spandapradipika, a commentary on the Spandakarika by Bhagavatotpala/Utpalavaisnava (21)--another Kashmirian author who must have lived slightly later than Utpaladeva (22)--the title of the work is said to be the Saddhatusamiksa; (2)^ and according to Torella, this latter form of the title is certainly the correct one.

Torella's reason for preferring the second version (24) is to be found in the sequel of Utpaladeva's commentary on the Sivadrsti. For according to Somananda, (25) Bhartrhari cannot rightfully claim--as he does in a verse of his Samiksa quoted by Somananda himself and that appears to have been the mangala verse of the work (26)--that reality, "the body of which is nothing but an infinite (ananta) consciousness that is unlimited by place, time and [form]," can only be grasped through "one's own experience." According to Utpaladeva, such an experience is impossible for the following reason:

Since [this] is a pluralistic doctrine (bhedavada), given that [its proponent] accepts six elements (dhatusatka), the association [of the reality that he praises] with space and time is inevitable; therefore the infinity (anantatva) [that the verse ascribes to the ultimate reality] should [rather] be called a limitation by space and time! (27) And therefore what experience could there be of [this entity supposedly] unlimited by place and time? [Somananda] means that their relation is impossible. (28) Utpaladeva is making clear here that the work in question bore its title because its author admitted six dhatus, (29) and as already emphasized by Torella, this shows that we should discard the KSTS reading Sabdadhatusamiksa as the lectio facilior (10)--facilior because when it comes to Bhartrhari, we immediately expect a reference to language, and also because the six dhatus mentioned in passing in Utpaladeva's Eivadrstivrtti do not seem to be reminiscent of any notion found in the Vakyapadiya. It is very probable that for these two reasons, the reading Saddhatusamiksa was later felt to be defective and wrongly corrected into Sabdadhatusamiksa.

But this passage in Utpaladeva's Sivadrstivrtti is not the only piece of evidence that the Saiva nondualists who lived in Kashmir around the end of the first millenium CE undoubtedly knew this work under the title Saddhatusamiksa. As explained below, in a recently discovered and edited fragment of his lost Isvarapratyabhijnavivrti, Utpaladeva alludes to some "proponents of the theory of the six elements" (saddhatuvadin), and Abhinavagupta explains in his commentary that in that passage Utpaladeva is targetting "the author of the Saddhatusamiksa" (saddhatusamiksakara); (31) moreover, earlier in his commentary on Utpaladeva's Vivrti, Abhinavagupta already mentions the Samiksa, which he also explicitly ascribes to Bhartrhari (tatrabhavant). (32) And as will be seen below, in both passages of his Vivrtivimarsini, Abhinavagupta specifies that these six dhatus are to be understood as 5+1 elements. This is an important point, because it enables us to rule out once and for all the hypothesis of a corruption of the word Sabda[degrees] into Sat[degrees] in these texts: the reading Saddhatusamiksa must have been prior to the reading Sabdadhatusamiksa.

WHAT ARE THE KNOWN FRAGMENTS ABOUT?

Now, what are the fragments of...