Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.13

v2.c83.13

Taking their cue from this somewhat mystical conception, the Ālaṃkārikas developed the idea of *dhvani* by analogy. The several expressed parts of a poem, they held, reveal the unexpressed deeper sense, which is something singular and different from the denotative and indicative elements both in order and in essence, and which is termed the *dhvani* (lit. ‘sound’, ‘echo’, ‘tone’) or *vyaṅgya artha* (suggested sense) in poetry. The word *dhvani* itself, as Ānandavardhana pointed out, is sometimes used by the grammarians for the word or letters which reveal the *sphoṭa*. Mammaṭa’s remarks in this connexion are pertinent. In his *vṛtti* on the definition given by him of *dhvani* (i 4), he says that the *dhvani* is, according to the grammarians, that word which reveals the all-important *sphoṭa*, inasmuch as through it arises the knowledge of the word’s meaning. Others, by which he signifies the writers on the *dhvani*-theory in Poetics, carry this doctrine of the grammarians a step further and apply the term *dhvani* to the meaning, as well as to the word which is capable of suggesting a meaning superseding the one which is directly expressed. Intrinsically the two theories have scarcely any mutual connexion; but what the Ālaṃkārikas really wanted was an authority for their assumption of the power of *vyañjanā*, which the great grammarians did not acknowledge. The *sphoṭa*-theory of the grammarians, however, presupposed something similar, for the *varṇas* of a word reveal, as it were, the ideal word. Hence it afforded an analogy which could at least boast of the authority of the Vaiyākaraṇas, the *prathame vidvāṃsaḥ*, and which could therefore be seized upon by the Ālaṃkārikas as the foundation of their own theory of suggestion. It may also be pointed out that the sense of 'manifestation' which exists in the *vyañjanā* is an idea which, we have already noted⁸, is not unfamiliar to Indian philosophical speculation. The *vyañjanā* does not consist in the utterance of something new, but in the manifestation of something already existing; it is, to use a familiar illustration from Indian philosophical systems, like the revealing of the already existing jar by the lamp. Although the general concept of *dhvani* connects itself with such half-mystical currents of thought, Ānandavardhana yet takes care to point out (pp. 232-4) that this *dhvani* is not, as often supposed, something mystical but something that can be properly defined and grasped; and he has no sympathy with those schools which would dismiss it, as Kapila has dismissed the *sphoṭa* from the philosophical realm, on the ground that it is something inexplicable (*anākhyeya*).