by making a wholesale onslaught on the bases of the Nyaya system. From now
on, Dignaga and his successor Dharmakirti were the representative Buddhists
in the eyes of outsiders, targets of attacks by many notable Hindu philosophers,
and defended by counterblasts which made up much of the activity of later
Buddhist philosophy.Bhartrihari’s Language Philosophy. Bhartrihari (ca. 500) is emblematic of the
new creative situation that arose with the confluence of Buddhist and Hindu
networks. He weaves together common themes of Buddhism and the increas-
ingly philosophical Hinduism, and sets off major new directions in both.
Bhartrihari was a grammarian, an old technical specialty among the Brahman
scholars which enjoyed considerable repute across religious camps. Bhartrihari
made strong claims to raise the religious and metaphysical importance of his
discipline. He is associated with the revival of an Upanishadic cult which held
that chanting the sacred syllable aum brings contact with Brahman, the essence
of reality. This was a broadening of the most conservative Vedic tradition that
the correct pronunciation of the hymns is the key to their ritual power. As in
so many other instances, a reactionary move set in motion a creative innova-
tion. Bhartrihari participated in Buddhist circles at Nalanda, where one Ma-
hayana faction was mantra-yana, or tantrism, which also focused on chanting
magic syllables, among which aum was especially honored. Bhartrihari’s cult
of language may well have been an attempt to transcend the philosophical
differences between Buddhism and Hinduism.^42
For Bhartrihari, the world is constituted by language. Language itself is
divine, the manifestation of Brahman. The world of multiplicity does not really
exist; it merely comes from the way in which language is spoken. Bhartrihari
uses the old grammatical distinction, going back to Patañjali (ca. 150 b.c.e.),
between the meaning of a word and the actual sounds by which it is spoken;
the latter vary among speakers, but the former is constant. Bhartrihari gener-
alizes this to argue that the meaning of a word, which may be ambiguous when
uttered alone, emerges from the context of the sentence as a whole, or from
the larger passage in which it appears. Bhartrihari uses this theory of language
to support philosophical holism. He goes so far as to argue that the parts of
language do not really exist; to split a sentence into words, and these into
roots, suffixes, and so forth, is useful only for analysis, or for teaching someone
who does not yet know how to speak, and is superfluous for those who can
(EIP, 1990: 10–11). Bhartrihari’s argument is a counterpart to the Mad-
hyamika analysis of the reification of aggregates. An action such as “cooking”
takes place over time; the word cooks merely collects these events. Ultimately
all the distinctions of language are unreal separations within a single whole.
Bhartrihari’s sphota, the trans-verbal unit of meaning, is something like a
230 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths