Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.11

v2.c83.11

that the system demonstrated by him is built on the system of the grammarians, who were the earliest theorists to apply the term *dhvani* to the spoken letter which reveals the *sphoṭa*⁷. Abhinavagupta, commenting on this passage, perhaps goes too far in following up, after the authority of the *Vākya-padīya*, all the details of the *sphoṭa*-theory, but there is hardly any doubt that the writers on Poetics had this theory before them when they elaborated their own system of *dhvani*. The *sphoṭa*, which has been likened to the neo-platonic logos, is often translated by the terms ‘expression’, ‘notion’, ‘concept’ or ‘idea’; but none of these terms brings out its essential nature. Some philosophers propounded and the grammarians took it for granted that a word has intrinsically a word-prototype corresponding to it. The *sphoṭa* is not exactly this word-prototype, but it may be explained as the sound of a word as a whole, and as conveying a meaning apart from its component letters (*varṇas*). The *sphoṭa* does not contain exactly the sounds of the word in the order peculiar to the letters, but the sounds or something corresponding to them are blended indistinguishably into a uniform whole. When a word is pronounced, its individual sounds become reflected in some degree in the order of the *sphoṭa* in which the particular sounds are comprised; and as soon as the last sound dies away, the *sphoṭa*, in which the idea corresponding to all these sounds is comprised, becomes manifest and raises to our consciousness the idea thus associated. The sounds of a word as a whole, therefore, and apart from those of the constituent letters, reveal the *sphoṭa*.