Shringaraprakasha 8.p1.7

8.p1.7

Here, because even curds have not been produced, through the impossibility of the subsequent production of buttermilk, the enjoining of drinking buttermilk is negated. / Where an effect is averted by a contradictory word or meaning, that is negation by contradiction (virodhanaiṣedhikī). The first of these is as follows: / “Let their leaves be torn away, which do not come from that direction; / seeing whose face are those people kept alive?” / Here, [the sentence] “Those news are to be inquired of; those who do not come from that direction” [presents a contradiction]. Through a sentence conflicting in its former and latter parts, the nominative does not attach to anything; just as the word “blue” (nīla), expressing the universal of its own meaning, is connected directly with the nominative case by distinguishing the meaning of the nominal stem, and similarly the word “lotus” (utpala). That very word which merely denotes an undistinguished meaning, even in the proximity of another word, remains that very word; therefore, the form determined as capable of denoting that meaning conveys that very meaning even in the proximity of another word. For difference of form does not allow the sense of taste, in the absence of the sense of sight, to manifest sweetness and the like, nor does it gain the capacity to manifest blueness and the like in the presence of sight. Rather, a person who has ascertained the meaning of two words, upon their juxtaposition, by the power of usage, by the mutual compatibility of the two meanings to coalesce, and by the apprehension of a single sentential form, conceives them mutually in the relation of qualifier and qualified (viśeṣaṇa-viśeṣya) through the relation of primary and subordinate. To explain: where a qualifier and a qualified attain unity in a single meaning, the word there conveys this basis residing in the prior and posterior words. The word “lotus,” setting forth, proceeds as an apprehension of all lotuses; the word “blue,” setting forth in that very same locus, delimits it as a specific apprehension. Or rather, “blue,” which while proceeding requires a relation of less or more, and which by this very property is capable of applying to everything, is restricted to a qualified suitability by another word, namely “lotus.”