Abstract
The present paper is focused on the way Vayākaraṇas and Ālaṃkārikas analysed a specific kind of karmadhāraya compounds, taught in Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.1.56 and 72 and later associated with the upamā- and the rūpaka-figures respectively. On the basis of a fresh interpretation of the relevant grammatical sources, the authors try both to understand how the theorists involved them in their analysis and to reconstruct the several steps of the inquiries realized by the modern scholarship on this topic. Nonetheless their research is targeted on the interpretation of these two Pāṇini rules and they conclude that these rules do not actually target similes and metaphorical identifications, but, on the one hand, A 2.1.55-56 deal with a functional pair of figurative compounds involving an upamāna and an upamita, i.e. a reference standard and something which is benchmarked, and, on the other, A 2.1.72 closes a series of karmadhāraya-rules, aimed at illustrating A 2.1.57. Furthermore, they exclude that Pāṇini in A 2.1.55-56 used the term sāmānya as a tertium comparationis, even though Patañjali had already advanced—but eventually rejected—this interpretation.
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This paper is a joint work discussed and shared in its entirety by both authors. Maria Piera Candotti, however, is directly responsible for Sects. 1, 2.1, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 4 and Tiziana Pontillo for Sects. 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.3, 3.4. All translations are the authors’, unless explicitly stated otherwise. We are glad to have the opportunity to thank prof. Gunilla Gren-Eklund for her generous reading of our text and her precious comments. Only during the last revision of our paper, after receiving the peer review reports, did we have the chance of reading the just-issued contribution which Yigal Bronner devoted to Udbhaṭa (2016), in which the third paragraph under the title “Rethinking Rūpaka: The First Theory of Metaphor in Sanskrit Poetics” emphasizes the opposition between upamā and rūpaka as respectively targeted on “stating a resemblance between X and Y” and “equating or identifying them” (Bronner 2016, pp. 92–93). These pages also include the following remarks which significantly highlight the relevance of an area of inquiry to which we have dedicated some effort in the past few years: “Note that there is also a grammatical undercurrent to this discussion. The grammarians analyzed simile in the context of two types of nominal compounds, where either the entities themselves, as in the tiger-man (noun-noun) variety, or their attributes, as in compounds of the snow-white (noun-adjective) type, are likened. [2016, p. 92 note 33: ‘See Aṣṭādhyāyī, 2.1.56 and 2.1.55, respectively’] The early discussion of rūpaka drew on this analysis, even though Pāṇini never sanctioned a rūpaka-specific compound (rūpakasamāsa). This created a problem for those who wanted to analyze rūpaka as a variation on simile while remaining faithful to Pāṇini, and it led to a spectrum of unhappy solutions. Bhāmaha treated rūpaka as if it existed solely within the confines of nominal compounds that were identical in form to the tiger-man variety discussed by Pāṇini apropos of simile, presumably in order to lend the analysis a Pāniṇian authority, although the poetic praxis offered many examples outside compounds. [2016, p. 93 note 34 refers to BHKA 2.23-24] But Vāmana, already in the Jayāpīḍa moment, denied outright that rūpaka could even exist inside compounds, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, presumably precisely for the same reason: the absence of an explicit Pāṇinian decree. [2016, p. 93 note 34 refers to VKA ad 4.3.6 and adds: ‘Another possible explanation is that Vāmana, like Udbhaṭa, was already silently moving away from the simile paradigm for analyzing rūpaka.’] Moreover, he highlights the change of perspective on rūpakas inaugurated by Udbhaṭa, who “no longer refers to the entities in rūpaka but to the words that denote them”. Cf. KASS 1.11: śrutyā sambandhavirahād yat padena padāntaram | guṇavṛtti pradhānena yujyate rūpakam tu tat, “Rūpaka is a word that is connected to a predominant word in its secondary/attributive capacity because a connection based on its explicit meaning is impossible”. In the context of this observation, he also points out that it was Udbhaṭa (Vivaraṇa fr. 22b l.8) who “decisively cut the Gordian grammatical knot that tied rūpaka to compounds expressing similitude by identifying a different Pāṇinian noun-noun compound type, the mayūra-vyaṃsaka or “picaroon-peacock” variety, as its locus.” (Bronner 2016, pp. 93–94). Although we could not fully integrate Bronner’s contribution in our paper, we have now at least tried to explain where and why some interpretations of ours are divergent from his on the mentioned underlying relationship between Sanskrit Poetics and the Pāṇini rules on figurative compounds.
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Candotti, M.P., Pontillo, T. Late Sanskrit Literary Theorists and the Role of Grammar in Focusing the Separateness of Metaphor and Simile. J Indian Philos 45, 349–380 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-017-9312-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-017-9312-8