A History of Sanskrit Literature c25.s3.4

c25.s3.4

The theory finds its origin in the analysis of language and meaning. The phrase, a herdsmen's station on the Ganges, is obviously as it stands absurd; the denotation (*abhidhā*) gives no sense, and we are obliged to find a transferred sense (*lakṣaṇā*) which gives us the sense of a station on the bank of the Ganges. This shows the incompatibility of the literal sense as one factor, and the possibility of giving an allied meaning as another. But this is not all; there is brought to us by such a phrase deliberately used in poetry a sense of the holy calm of such a station situated on the sacred stream with all its associations of piety. This, it is contended, is not given by implication, but by the power of suggestion which is derived from the poet's purpose (*prayojana*) in applying the phrase. This doctrine of suggestion which the grammarians did not accept could be based on a philosophical opinion of the grammarians themselves. They recognized the Sphoṭa,² a mysterious entity, a sort of hypostatization of sound, of which action sounds were manifestations, and the same idea of the revelation of something inherent (*vyañjanā*) is found in the Vedānta, where all is a manifestation of the underlying reality, the Brahman or absolute. There were common-sense people³ who held that all could be put down to denotation; a word might be regarded like an arrow which could pierce armour and slay the foe in a single movement, without inventing new phases of operation, while yet others⁴ claimed that the signification, Tātparya, resulting from the taking of words together in a sentence explained all that was required, and others¹ again held that even this idea of Tātparya was needless, because the words had the power *per se* of conveying their relations with other words to make up a whole. A further school, which became more insistent later, declared that suggestion was not real, and that what was explained by suggestion ought to be accounted for by inference. From the mention of the station on the Ganges one at once inferred the intention of the speaker to convey the ideas of purity, &c.