[[Mohan K.V 2014-02-15, 20:56:30 Source]]
सदास्वादः
56
इको यण् अचि
(iko yaṇ aci)
Meaning
“When ac occurs, of ik, yaṇ” — this has all the features of a sūtra: extreme brevity, full of technical terms (ac, ik, yaṇ) and conveying a lot in a little. A famous quip in Sanskrit goes, “अर्ध-मात्रा-लाघवेन पुत्रोत्सवं मन्यन्ते वैयाकरणाः” (ardha-mātrā-lāghavena putra-utsavaṃ manyante vaiyākaraṇāḥ) “Shortening a sūtra by half a syllable gives grammarians as much joy as the birth of a son!” Let’s see how happy this chapter’s sūtra would have made its author!
Context
We’ll take a short technical detour in this chapter, and briefly visit the acclaimed masterpiece that is at the foundation of Sanskrit’s extensive grammar, Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. Pāṇini is estimated to have lived some 2500 years ago somewhere in North-west India, and is known mainly for this work. There are a few works of poetry (all lost) and some individual verses here and there attributed to him, but that’s about all we know.
The Aṣṭādhyāyī is a very advanced, very technical work on grammar. In fact, modern linguistics caught up with the heights Pāṇini had scaled only in the past century or so. Sanskrit was already flourishing by Pāṇini’s time, and there had been multiple attempts at writing a grammar for it. However, Pāṇini’s was so successful that it eclipsed earlier ones, none of which are available today. His version of the rules was so widely adopted that the start of the age of Classical Sanskrit is traditionally identified with his time.
The work has around 4000 sūtras that define various aspects of the language. A crucial feature of the work is that it is heavy on grammatical detail (including very specific exceptions for details like river names), but short on theory. Very little is explicitly stated about the scope or order of applying the sūtras for practical use. Therefore, grammatical rules can only be inferred from it, with the help of an intermediary. The work is like a compressed file, and we need instructions from outside of it on how to decompress it and apply it. These instructions may come from other explanatory works of the grammatical tradition, such as commentaries, or from teachers in the tradition of vyākaraṇa.
Over the largest part of the subcontinent’s history, these sūtras (and the rules inferred from them) were the cornerstone of grammatical scholarship; at many times, they were a cornerstone of education itself. They were intended to be memorized, and any argument would be settled by quoting a right set of rules. It is almost like a system of law for the language, where knowing the rules and applying them in the right circumstances is everything. Just like with laws, everything has to be ‘explained’ and reasoned out, and be consistent with the rest of the system. Some inferred rules (like those of sandhi), which might be compared to traffic laws, are used and applied every day in spoken and written Sanskrit. Some others, which may be compared to obscure property inheritance laws, are called to question only when one wants to understand a rare word. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid making laws for them just because they’re a rare occurrence. Of course, not every possible human activity can be covered — just like laws, grammatical rules impose conditions on only a small part of the language, such as defining the correct forms of words, whereas the vast majority of activity, such as assigning meaning to those forms, proceeds by convention (rūḍhi). Again like with law, the ‘creativity’ in grammar lies in applying old rules in new circumstances to produce new things — for example, in coining new derivative verb forms by appealing to precedent in other similar verbs. With time, spheres of activity change, and grammatical rules may be become archaic or irrelevant, just like laws do. A good grammarian, like a good lawmaker, is constantly looking out to see which rules help and which rules hinder the creative activity of the times he lives in, and accordingly acts to improve them. For example, perhaps today we need a new system to define and govern words connected to our interactions with computers (a major activity indeed), because the results of applying existing rules are rather unsatisfactory (gaṇaka-yantra, antarjāla, etc.). And finally, grammarians, like lawmakers and judges, can get quite disconnected from the real world and spend all their time in the nuances of consistency, history and reasoning of laws, without any idea of their practical application at all. :-)
Let’s dive in and check out a few examples from the Aṣṭādhyāyī. Pāṇini orders the Sanskrit alphabet in a form called the Māheśvara sūtras. There are many popular legends that the very alphabet of Sanskrit was born out of the drum of Śiva, a poetic conception that has deep metaphorical meaning – the master of the universe, granting it the ability to describe itself. The sūtras themselves are very clever:
अ इ उ ण् । ऋ ऌ क् । ए ओ ङ् । ऐ औ च् । ह य व र ट् । ल ण् । ञ म ङ ण न म् । झ भ ञ् । घ ढ ध ष् । ज ब ग ड द श् । ख फ छ ठ थ च ट त व् । क प य् । श ष स र् । ह ल् ॥
a i u ṇ | ṛ ḷ k | e o ṅ | ai au c | ha ya va ra ṭ | la ṇ | ña ma ṅa ṇa na m | jha bha ñ | gha ḍha dha ṣ | ja ba ga ḍa da ś | kha pha cha ṭha tha ca ṭa ta v | ka pa y | śa ṣa sa r | ha l ||
Note how this is a different arrangement from the ‘standard’ alphabet, which tries to group by the location of sounds: there, we first have the vowels, which are defined as sounds that one can sustain (‘aaaa…’ vs ‘k’); Then the consonants begin, starting with the velars (kaṇṭhya) (k kh g gh…), where the back of the tongue is up against the palate; then the palatals (tālavya), with the middle of the tongue raised against the palate (c ch j jh…), and so on.
The Māheśvara sūtras, in contrast, are designed to identify sets of letters with ease. The half-consonants in them, which are marked here in red, are meant to be read as end markers in a sequence. So, for example, the word ‘aṇ’ means ‘all letters from a to ṇ’, i.e. ‘a i u’ (we ignore the end markers). ‘ik’ means ‘everything from i to k’, i.e ‘i u ṛ ḷ’. ‘ac’ means ‘everything from a to c’, i.e ‘a i u ṛ ḷ e o ai au’. Note now that ‘ac’ covers all the vowels (their dīrgha forms are implicitly covered). So the word ‘ac’ is a short form for ‘all vowels’! The same idea holds for the rest — for example, ‘yaṇ’’ means ‘ya va ra la’. ‘hal’ means ‘all consonants’ (we’re counting from the first occurence of ‘ha’).
This kind of a system allows for fantastic levels of brevity. For example, this chapter’s phrase appears as a definition of the very common yaṇ sandhi:
इको यण् अचि (6.1.77)
iko yaṇ aci
“When ac occurs, of ik, yaṇ”
That’s all the sūtra says. Now we know from the Māheśvara sūtras what ac, ik and yaṇ mean, so if we ‘expand’ the sūtra, it means:
“When followed by a vowel, ‘i, u, ṛ and ḷ’ are replaced by ‘ya, va, ra, and la’ respectively”
We know this from countless examples of the sandhi: इति अपि (iti api) becomes इत्यपि (ityapi); न तु एव (na tu eva) becomes न त्वेव (na tveva); राज ऋषि (rāja ṛṣi) becomes राजर्षि (rājarṣi). Note that this rule does not apply if similar vowels come beside each other — गिरि ईश (giri īśa) is गिरीश, not गिर्यीश. This is because of an exception to our rule caused by another rule that comes later, 6.1.101. One can begin to see how an intermediary is necessary to infer practical working rules from the highly compressed Aṣṭādhyāyī sūtras!
Stepping back, we see how this little sūtra ’expands’ into a detailed rule! Looking again at the quip at the start of the chapter, we can be pretty confident that Pāṇini was thrilled. :-)
Let us now consider another famous notational contribution of Pāṇini, ‘tagging’. Let’s start with verbs. Sanskrit verbs are a very unruly bunch, with enormous variety in the forms they appear in. The verbs themselves (for example, kṛ, ‘do’) can appear in two forms — the ‘parasmai-pada’ (‘karoti’, ‘does’) and the ‘ātmane-pada’ (‘kurute’, same meaning). Then there are the innumerable derivative forms: causative forms (‘kārayati’, ‘causes to do’), desiderative forms (‘cikīrṣati’, ‘wants to do’), present continuous participles (‘kurvat’, ‘doing’), past particles (‘kṛtaḥ’, ‘done’), infinitives (‘kartum’, ‘in order to do’), indeclinables (‘kṛtvā’, ‘having done’), noun forms of the action (‘karaṇa’, ‘the act of doing’, ‘kriyā’, the act itself), noun forms of the actor (‘kartā’, ‘doer’), noun forms denoting necessity (‘kārya’ and ‘kartavya’, both forms meaning ‘something that must be done’) … we could go on for a few tens of pages like this, and even then, we’d only cover the ‘regular’ forms, that most verbs have! There are hundreds and hundreds of Sanskrit derived forms that are special cases, and these must somehow be ‘explained’ and reasoned out!! Poor Pāṇini has a very tough job!
Similar words undergo similar grammatical transformations when they appear in these different forms. For example, as we discussed in the last chapter, we know in English that the past tense of ‘find’ is ‘found’, so any verb that ends in an ‘-ind’ is likely to have its past tense as a modification to ‘-ound’. This works for, say, ‘bind’, but not for ‘mind’, for which we create an exception. Pāṇini had to create a system to identify such groups, and it is called the anubandha system. Like with the half-consonants in the Māheśvara sūtras, Pāṇini defines ‘markers’, which he calls ‘it’s.
Let’s take an example. One of the rare special forms is a type of word formed by the suffix ‘-trima’, which gives the meaning, “Obtained by X”. So ‘paktrima’ means ‘obtained by cooking’ and ‘kṛtrima’ means ‘obtained by doing (i.e man-made)’. To identify all verbs that have this form, the start-marker डु ‘ḍu’ is defined (3.3.88). If it appears in front of a root, it means it can form a ‘-trima’ word. Note how the marker letter seems odd — we don’t have many Sanskrit words with ‘ḍa’ appear in them. This is deliberate, as the chances of confusing a marker with a ‘normal’ word are minimized. We’ll see all kinds of weird, rare letters being used as markers.
Let’s take another example of a transformation. We mentioned parasmai-pada and ātmane-pada forms; Some verbs appear in both these forms under some conditions, and to identify such verbs, the end-marker ञ् ‘ñ’ is defined (1.3.72). ‘kṛ’ is an example — it can appear both as ‘karoti’ and ‘kurute’. Notice again the choice of a rare letter as the marker. Hardly any word uses ‘ñ’ by itself in Sanskrit.
Now if the verb root ‘kṛ’ was listed as डुकृञ् ḍukṛñ, we’d know straight from the name that the root belongs to these two groups. That’s exactly how it is listed in Pāṇini’s Dhātu-pāṭha, a compendium of verb roots:
डुकृञ् करणे (8.10)
‘ḍukṛñ karaṇe’
“The root kṛ, has the ḍu and ñ tags, and means ‘do’”.
What are some other verbs in this class? Searching the Dhātu-pāṭha, we find ‘डुभृञ्’ ‘ḍubhṛñ’, which when untagged exposes the root ‘bhṛ’ (to support), from which we get ‘bharati’ (‘he supports’). No surprise, it has a -trima form, ‘bhartrima’, which means ‘maintained, nourished or supported’, and is found in both parasmai-padi and ātmane-padi (bharati and bharate).
(As an aside, this verb root is the source of everything from ‘bhāra’ (‘weight’) to ‘bhartṛ’ (‘master’, literally ‘bearer’), ‘bhāryā’ (‘wife’, ‘she who must be supported’), ‘bhrātr’ (‘brother’), ‘bhṛtya’ (‘servant’, ‘one who is maintained’), ‘Bharata’ (proper name, meaning ‘maintainer’), and ‘Bhārata’ (‘that of Bharata’) :-) )
We can go down similar rabbit-holes into fascinating worlds with ‘डुदाञ्’ ‘ḍudāñ’ ‘give’, ‘डुधाञ्’ ‘ḍudhāñ’ ‘bear’, ‘डुमिञ्’ ‘ḍumiñ’ ‘measure’, … :-)
These markers can be used for any kind of tagging, not just verbs. Their purpose is to identify groups, so that rules can be formulated to apply to these groups as a whole. We saw a version of tags used in the Māheśvara sūtras and in classifying verbs; they are also used to define sandhis, vibhakti suffixes, verb endings in different tenses and moods, etc.
Phew! To the modern reader, the exact details of such classification can be quite boring and irrelevant. A number of rules seem to be made to account for concepts that seem very obscure to us now. For example, we can now consult an electronic resource and pull out every word that has the suffix ‘-trima’ in it. Let’s do that right now. If we go to the GRETIL online text of Bhaṭṭi’s Rāvaṇavadha (the most famous work of ‘grammatical poetry’, which we had featured in Chapter 31), and search in the page for ‘-trima’, we find just 5 unique hits (1.10 vipaktrima, 1.13 dattrima, 4.37 a-samskṛtrima, anuptrima, abhṛtrima). Searching all of Monier-Williams dictionary gives us three additional ones (khanitrima, pūtrima, vihitrima). Searching all of Hellwig’s DCS gives us no additional hits. The ḍu marker thus groups just eight words in virtually all of available literature! How much more obscure could you get?! The extreme brevity is also unnecessary to modern readers who don’t need to keep the whole grammar memorized. A beginner is also often thwarted by the idiosyncratic organization of the work, where a sūtra in Book 1 suddenly appears in the middle of totally unrelated topics, and influences the application of another sūtra in Book 7; long lists of exceptions and ‘special cases’ appear frequently, too. But such concerns aside, we should keep in mind that Pāṇini’s contribution is the system of thought that he produced.
Parting Thought
It is clearly evident that one can tie oneself into knots with this subject. Some perspective is necessary, and Śaṅkarācārya seemed to have exactly that in mind when he wrote his evergreen poem 1200 years ago:
भज गोविन्दं भज गोविन्दं गोविन्दं भज मूढमते ।
सम्प्राप्ते सन्निहिते काले नहि नहि रक्षति “डुकृञ् करणे” ॥
bhaja govindaṃ bhaja govindaṃ govindaṃ bhaja mūḍhamate |
samprāpte sannihite kāle nahi nahi rakṣati “ḍukṛñ karaṇe” ||
“Worship Govinda, you fools, worship Govinda!
When Death is at your doorstep, chanting ‘ḍukṛñ karaṇe’ won’t help you!”
There is a legend that Śaṅkara wrote this poem when he saw a tyrannical grammar teacher forcing his poor students to learn the Dhātu-pāṭha by rote, as if it was the most important thing in the world. The ‘ḍukṛñ karaṇe’ is the same one we laboured to explain in this chapter — if the toil of reading it leads to nothing more than a fuller appreciation of this one verse of Śaṅkara’s masterpiece, we shall be overjoyed :-)
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