Shringaraprakasha 8.p1.22

8.p1.22

|| Now, proximity (sannidhi) || When an appropriate and expected [word or meaning] is immediately adjacent, that is proximity. It is twofold: having expression as its domain, and having the expressed as its domain. Of these, that caused by utterance has expression as its domain; that caused by invariable concomitance (avinābhāva) has the expressed as its domain. The first of the two is as follows: / 'By her playful smile, by her pure, gentle speech, / by her light glance, by her heavy gait, / and by her yawns, by her displayed hips— / by that life of mine that has slipped away, she kills.' / Here, the qualifiers "pure" and so forth are connected with "playful smile" and so forth according to their proximity. The second is as follows: / 'May fire not [burn] you, nor the wind, nor the rut-maddened elephant, nor the axe, / nor the rush of the river's water, nor the thunderbolt! May you be well, O tree, together with the creeper!' / Here, the action "may it burn" and the like, supplied through proximity caused by its invariable concomitance, is connected with fire and the like. [Objection:] Now, why is mutual expectancy not also accepted as caused by invariable concomitance, just like proximity? For whatever cannot be without something else is necessarily expected by it. An action indeed has invariable concomitance with a syntactic role; having understood that, one inquires into the syntactic role. Likewise, having understood the syntactic role, [one inquires into] the action. [Reply:] That is incorrect. For there would be no ground for the cessation of inquiry. If inquiry into syntactic roles were to occur through invariable concomitance, and no other [item] beyond the syntactic role were inquired into because of the absence of purpose, then even upon understanding the mere action, where there is no purpose served by knowing the syntactic role, there would be no inquiry. For when an action is understood as something to be performed, its performance is impossible without taking up a syntactic role; hence [inquiry is] purposeful from knowing the syntactic role; but in mere statement of fact about the present and the like, because it is not something to be performed, there is no purpose in knowing the syntactic role. And yet there too they consider the sentence incomplete, and its incompleteness is due to its expressing an expectant meaning; and for this very reason they even make an ellipsis there. If understanding as something to be performed were present there as well, there would be an inquiry into every single syntactic role without remainder there too.