Language and Reality

On an Episode in Indian Thought, Brill's Indological Library, Volume 36, Johannes Bronkhorst, Brill (2011)

PREFACE TO THE FRENCH EDITION

The book is based on a series of lectures delivered in Paris in May 1997.
Its main subject is the “correspondence principle,” exploring the relationship between language and reality in classical Indian thought.
The study is presented as an exploratory contribution, focusing on a representative but not exhaustive selection of Indian philosophical cases.

CHAPTER ONE - INTRODUCTION: WORDS AND THINGS

1. Aim of the Lectures

The lectures focus on the “correspondence principle” in classical Indian thought: the conviction that words in a sentence correspond exactly to the things in the situation described.
This principle was prominent in the first half of the first millennium CE and influenced various philosophical schools, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
The goal is to identify this principle as a unifying question behind the diverse positions of different schools of thought.

2. Early Brahmanical Literature

Early Brahmanical texts suggest a close connection between words and things, often describing an original, undivided state of “name and form.”
This belief underpins the efficacy of magical formulas and the widespread use of etymologies in Vedic literature to reveal the essence of things.
Myths explain this connection by stating that ancient sages (ṛṣis) with superior knowledge named things, or that the world was created from the words of the Veda.
Pāṇini’s grammar rule of ekaśeṣa (using one plural word for multiple objects instead of repeating the word) implies a fundamental acceptance of a one-to-one correspondence between a word and an object.

3. Pāṇini’s Grammar

Pāṇini’s grammar is synthetic, combining meaning-bearing elements (roots, suffixes) to form words, in contrast to the later, analytical approach of Patañjali, for whom whole words are the primary meaning-bearers.
The term for grammar, vyākaraṇa, is interpreted not as “analysis” or “formation,” but as the “separation” or “differentiation” of linguistic elements from the objects they denote.
This interpretation is based on Vedic passages where the verb vyākṛ- describes the primordial separation of name and form, reinforcing the idea of a close link between language and reality.

4. A Passage from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad

A passage where Śvetaketu’s father teaches him presents a contrasting view within Brahmanical thought.
It states that different objects made of a single substance (e.g., clay pots from clay) are mere modifications (vikāra) and names (nāmadheya), while the underlying substance is the only reality.
This position, where speech can conceal a deeper reality, is noted for its similarity to later Buddhist ideas.

5. The Structures of Languages

Thinkers in ancient India, including Buddhists and grammarians, generally believed that different languages differed only in vocabulary (word forms), not in their fundamental structure.
Sanskrit was often considered the correct and universal language, with other languages viewed as its corruptions.
This conviction allowed conclusions drawn from the structure of Sanskrit to be seen as universally applicable.

6. The Buddhist Contribution

Scholastic Buddhism developed an ontology based on lists of ultimate, irreducible elements called dharmas.
According to this view, only the dharmas truly exist; composite, macroscopic objects of experience (like persons or chariots) are not real entities.
These composite objects are considered “existent by designation” (prajñaptisat), meaning they are merely names or concepts, as illustrated by the chariot analogy in the Milindapañha.

7. Vaiśeṣika and Language

The Vaiśeṣika system is a Brahmanical ontology that, like scholastic Buddhism, provides an exhaustive enumeration of all that exists.
Unlike Buddhism, Vaiśeṣika affirms the reality of the phenomenal world.
Its core categories—substance (dravya), quality (guṇa), and motion (karman)—correspond to the primary word types in Sanskrit: nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
This suggests that the Vaiśeṣika system uses the structure of language as a guide to map the structure of reality.

8. Verbal Knowledge

Vaiśeṣika texts treat language as a source of knowledge, referring to “verbal knowledge” as a form of inference.
The Nyāya Sūtra and its commentary critique an opponent (likely an early Vaiśeṣika thinker) for holding that language itself, independent of a trustworthy speaker, can be a valid means of knowledge.
This debate suggests that some Vaiśeṣikas explicitly believed that language could be used directly to gain knowledge about the world’s ontological structure.

CHAPTER TWO - THE CORRESPONDENCE PRINCIPLE

The chapter discusses the “correspondence principle,” an intuition shared by many classical Indian thinkers.
This principle holds that the elements of a situation described by a sentence must correspond one-to-one with the words of that sentence and must coexist simultaneously.

1. The Contradictions of Nāgārjuna

The Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna used the correspondence principle to reveal contradictions in the phenomenal world.
For a sentence like “the pot arises,” the principle requires a pot to exist to be the agent of the action “arises.”
However, if the pot already exists, it has no need to arise, creating a contradiction.
Nāgārjuna used such arguments to challenge those who affirmed the reality of the phenomenal world.

2. The Reactions of Other Thinkers

Indian thinkers reacted to the challenge posed by Nāgārjuna and the correspondence principle in two main ways.
The first solution was to maintain that the effect (e.g., the pot) already existed in some form before its arising.
The second solution was to reject or adapt the correspondence principle itself.

3. Sarvāstivāda

This Buddhist school’s core doctrine provided a ready-made solution to the problem of arising.
Their name means “all things exist,” which refers to their belief that dharmas exist in the past, present, and future.
Therefore, an object can arise because it already exists in its future state.
The text suggests this school was aware of these problems even before Nāgārjuna.

4. Sāmkhya

This school developed the doctrine of satkāryavāda, which states that the effect pre-exists in its cause.
This doctrine directly answers the problem of arising by asserting that the object to be created is already present.
One of their arguments was that for a cause to be a cause, its effect must exist simultaneously with it.
The related doctrine of sarvasarvātmakatvavāda (everything is made of everything) addressed the problem of disappearance.

5. The Āgamaśāstra of Gauḍapāda

This early Vedānta text uses arguments similar to Nāgārjuna’s.
It concludes that since something that exists cannot arise (as it’s already there) and something that doesn’t exist cannot arise (as it’s not there), there is no arising in ultimate truth.

6. Śaṅkara

In his commentary on the Āgamaśāstra, Śaṅkara explains and seems to accept the arguments for non-arising.
However, in his other major works, Śaṅkara consistently supports satkāryavāda, the view that the effect pre-exists.
He argues that an action like “arising” requires an agent; therefore, in “the pot arises,” the pot must exist to be the agent of its own arising.

7. Kashmiri Śaivism

This school presents a variant of satkāryavāda.
The effect exists before it arises, not in its physical cause (like a seed), but within the creative consciousness of God.
God is the true agent of all actions, including “arising” and “existing.”

8. Jainism

The story of the heretic Jamāli highlights the problem of the coexistence of present and past (e.g., “what is being made has been made”).
The Jaina solution, articulated by Jinabhadra, is that an object is “in the process of being made” only in the final moment of its creation, the very moment it has been made.
This preserves the correspondence principle by collapsing the duration of the action into a single instant.
Jaina philosophy also uses different “points of view” (naya) to state that an object can be seen as eternal from the perspective of substance, while arising from the perspective of its modifications.

9. Early VaiśeṣiKa

This school officially held that the effect does not pre-exist (asatkāryavāda).
However, to solve the problem of arising, early texts suggest they posited a temporary, obscure form of existence for the effect during the period of its production.
An object was said to have an “essence” (astitva) even before it was connected with the universal “existence” (sattā).

10. Critiques of the Existence of a Thing before Its Arising

Some thinkers critiqued the satkāryavāda position.
An opponent in Śaṅkara’s work argues that Nāgārjuna’s reasoning is a fallacy based only on words, ignoring the real-world connection between a seed and a sprout.
The Jaina thinker Mallavādin argues against the Sāṃkhya view by pointing out that a cause does not always produce its effect, thus breaking the necessary link of simultaneous existence.

11. Nyāya

The Nyāya school proposed a “semantic” solution to the problem.
They argued that words do not refer only to individuals but also to universals (jāti).
In “the pot arises,” the word “pot” refers to the eternal universal “pot-ness,” which is always present, thus satisfying the correspondence principle without the individual pot having to pre-exist.
Other solutions mentioned in their texts include a word referring to its cause (e.g., “mat” referring to the grass) or to past and future objects.

12. Mīmāṃsā

This school also adopted a semantic solution, arguing that words refer to forms (ākṛti) or universals.
In the Vedic injunction “One should pile a falcon-pile,” the word “falcon” must refer to the eternal form of a falcon, not an individual bird, because an individual cannot be the object of the action of piling bricks.

13. The Abhidharmakośa Bhāṣya of Vasubandhu

Vasubandhu, representing the Sautrāntika view, rejects the Sarvāstivāda doctrine that past and future exist.
He proposes that present words can refer to past and future objects.
He also dissolves the problem by rejecting the distinction between an agent and its action for verbs like “arises,” arguing that the dharma and its arising are not two separate entities.

14. The Abhidharmasamuccaya of Asaṅga and Its Bhāṣya

This Yogācāra text treats the problem of arising as a “profundity” or mystery.
It states that while effects arise from conditions, they are not “made” by them, meaning the conditions are not agents.
This appears to tolerate a contradiction with the correspondence principle, suggesting it is not always valid.

15. Bhartṛhari

The grammarian-philosopher Bhartṛhari was acutely aware of the problem and proposed several solutions.
He argued that the referent of a word could be an eternal universal (jāti), an immutable substance (dravya), a “metaphorical existence” applicable to past and future things, or a mental reality (buddhi).
All these solutions preserve the correspondence principle by providing an existing referent for words in problematic sentences.

16. The Problem of Negation

The correspondence principle creates a problem for negative statements, as a word must refer to something for the negation to be meaningful.
This challenge likely led later Vaiśeṣika to add “absence” (abhāva) as a seventh real category.
The Naiyāyika Uddyotakara argued that existential negation (e.g., “the soul does not exist”) is self-contradictory because the word “soul” must refer to an existing object to be meaningful.

17. Dignāga and Verbal Knowledge

The Buddhist logician Dignāga offered a revolutionary solution by rejecting the correspondence principle.
His theory of apoha (exclusion) states that a word’s meaning comes not from referring to a positive entity (like a universal) but from excluding everything that is not its object.
The object of a word is a conceptual construction, not a real entity, which severs the direct link between language and reality and dissolves Nāgārjuna’s paradoxes.

18. The Bodhisattvabhūmi

This Yogācāra text also rejects a strict correspondence between words and things.
It argues that since a single object can be referred to by many different words, the object’s nature cannot be identical to any one word.
This undermines the foundation of Nāgārjuna’s arguments by denying the one-to-one link between language and reality.

19. Prajñākaragupta

This later Buddhist thinker uses sentences like “the sprout arises” in his arguments, but not to engage with the correspondence principle.
His use of these examples for different purposes suggests that by his time, the paradoxes that troubled earlier thinkers were no longer a central philosophical concern.

20. Indian Thinkers and the Correspondence Principle

The correspondence principle was likely an unstated, shared intuition rather than an explicit doctrine.
Thinkers were clearly aware of its implications, as shown by their complex arguments, but they rarely discussed the principle itself because its validity seemed obvious to them.
The study of such implicit assumptions is crucial to understanding the development of classical Indian thought.

APPENDIX - THE MAHĀPRAJĀĀPĀRAMITĀŚĀSTRA AND THE SĀṂKHYA TANMĀTRAS

A major change occurred in Sāṃkhya doctrine, likely around the 5th century CE, where the five qualities were replaced by the five tanmātras in the list of fundamental tattvas.
In the earlier Sāṃkhya, qualities were derived from the elements and were the final evolutes; in the later version, tanmātras precede the elements.
The Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra (early 5th century CE) describes an evolutionary sequence where the five tanmātras arise from ahaṃkāra and in turn produce the five great elements (mahābhūtas).
In this text, elements are formed by a combination of multiple tanmātras; for example, earth is produced jointly by all five tanmātras (sound, touch, colour, taste, and smell).
This contrasts with the view in the Yuktidīpikā, where each element arises from a single, specific tanmātra which itself possesses a cumulative number of qualities (e.g., earth arises from the single ‘smell’ tanmātra which has five qualities).
The description in the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra suggests that tanmātras were conceived as atomic constituents (aṇu) that combine to form the elements, an interpretation supported by Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation.
The Yoga Bhāṣya and Utpaladeva’s work also provide evidence for an atomic interpretation of tanmātras, viewing them as the subtle building blocks of the gross elements.
The introduction of tanmātras may have been a way to make the Sāṃkhya view of matter (as constituted by qualities) more substance-like and compatible with the doctrine of satkāryavāda (the effect pre-exists in the cause).
Vyomaśiva’s Vyomavatī presents a hybrid Sāṃkhya-Vaiśeṣika view where the śabdatanmātra (sound-tanmātra) is treated as a type of atom that can constitute a molecule (dvyaṇuka).
However, classical Sāṃkhya, as represented by the Yuktidīpikā, ultimately rejected the atomic nature of tanmātras.
The Yuktidīpikā argues that tanmātras cannot be atoms because a cause (prakṛti) must be larger than its effect (vikṛti). Therefore, the tanmātras must be larger than the macroscopic elements they produce.