ABSTRACT
Here, the presentation of Viikyawida 'the doctrine that a sentence is the primary unit of language', which is Bhartrhari's own doctrine, is presented in proper terms. For him, the indivisible singularity of a sentence and its meaning is the real thing, while the segmentation into words and wordcomponents, and their meanings, is simply a subsequently developed useful fiction (lwlpita). Now, when he presents the view of his opponents, he simply reverses this terminology. He says that the Padavadins give priority to distinctions or segments, and argue that the singularity or indivisibility (abheda) of sentence and its meaning is subsequently built. It is not clear that any school which might be included under the broad term Padavada holds such a view. 16 For Pataiijali, clearly, the sentence is a samghiita or samudaya 'a group/collection', and the sentence meaning is a network of vyapelqa 'mutual expectancies'. The sentence meaning does not even fit in the category of ekiirthrbhiiva 'unification of meaning', let alone any notion of abheda 'non-distinction'. The same would be the case with Mimii.rhsakas and Nyaya-Vaise~ikas. Thus, while reading Bhartrhari, one needs to be constantly on guard, and notice the ways in which his presentation of the opposing views is skewed by the use of his own terminology.
