Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v1.c5.28

v1.c5.28

If any deduction is permissible from the name ‘*Alaṃkāra*’ (lit. embellishment) given to the discipline as well as from the contents of the earliest existing works on the subject, it will appear that the science started *a posteriori* out of the very practical object of analysing poetic embellishments of speech with a view to prescribe definite rules of composition; but it cannot be doubted that it received a great impetus from the highly developed enquiry into the forms of language made by the grammarians. From internal evidence as well as from the testimony, which admits of little doubt, of some of the ancient authorities on Poetics, it is clear that the theoretical background of the discipline was, to some extent, founded on the philosophical speculations on linguistics, so that Grammar, one of the oldest and soundest sciences of India, was its god-father and helped it towards ready acceptance. Ānandavardhana speaks of his own system as being based on the authority on the grammarians, to whom he pays an elegant tribute as the first and foremost thinkers (*prathame hi vidvāṃso vaiyākaraṇāḥ, vyākaraṇa-mūlatvāt sarva-vidyānām*, p. 47); while Bhāmaha, one of the earliest known formulators of poetic theory, not only devotes one whole chapter to the question of grammatical correctness—a procedure which is followed by Vāmana—but also proclaims openly the triumph of the views of Pāṇini (vi 63). Apart from such details as the linguistic analysis of the idea of comparison referred to above, it can be easily shown that some of the fundamental conceptions of poetic theory, relating to speech in general, are avowedly based on the views of the grammarians to the exclusion of other schools of opinion. Thus the question whether the convention (*saṃketa*), whereby the expressed meaning of a word (*abhidhā*) is to be understood, is accepted by a reference to the views of the grammarians on this point. The grammarians hold, in opposition to the Naiyāyikas, Saugatas and Mīmāṃsakas, that the import of a word is either *jāti*, *dravya*, *kriyā* or *guṇa*, as expressed by the dictum *catuṣṭayī śabdānāṃ pravṛttiḥ*, cited from the *Mahābhāṣya*¹ by Mukula (p. 4) and Mammaṭa (*Svp.* p. 2.) Indeed, the whole analysis of the two functions of word and its sense, called *abhidhā* and *lakṣaṇā*², are borrowed from the grammatico-philosophical ideas already elaborated by the grammarians; and even the new aesthetic system of Ānandavardhana, in establishing the third function of *vyañjanā* attempts to seek an authority for its theory on the analogy of the quasi-grammatical theory of *sphoṭa*, which is associated with the name of the pre-pāṇinian grammarian Sphoṭāyana, and which we find fully developed in the *Vākyapadīya*