Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v1.c5.10

v1.c5.10

By the time of Pāṇini, this conception of *upamā* seems to have been tacitly recognised, and we find him using in this connexion the technical terms *upamāna*³, *upamita*⁴ and *sāmānya*⁵ as well as general expressions like *upamā*⁶ (used in the sense of the rhetorician's *upamāna*), *aupamya*⁷, *upamārthe*⁸ and *sādṛśya*¹. It is noteworthy that in nearly fifty *sūtras* distributed all over his work, Pāṇini incidentally discusses, from the grammarian's point of view, the influence of the conception of comparison on the language, in the varied dominion of affixes, including case and feminine suffixes, *kṛt*, *taddhita* and *samāsānta* terminations², in the making of compounds³ and in accent⁴. The same influence is also traceable in the idea of *atideśa*, a term which is not used by Pāṇini himself but which is made clear by his commentators, and which may be translated as ‘extended application by analogy or similarity’. Kātyāyana, in several *vārttikas*⁵, follows Pāṇini in noting the same influence of the idea of similitude, while Śāntanava in his *Phiṭ-sūtra* discusses it in connexion with accentuation.⁶ In the *Mahābhāṣya* on II. 1. 55, Patañjali has defined and illustrated Pāṇini's use of the term *upamāna*.⁷ A *māna* or measure, he says, is that which is employed in ascertaining a thing unknown; *upamāna* is approximate to the *māna* and determines the thing not absolutely (but approximately), *e.g.*, when we say ‘a *gavaya* is like a cow’.⁷ Strictly speaking, a writer on Poetics will not accept the example adduced by Patañjali as an instance of poetic *upamā*¹, inasmuch as the characteristic charmingness essential in a poetic figure is wanting in such a plain expression; but this grammatical analysis of the general idea of comparison is an early and near approach to the technical conception of Poetics.²