Contents: Publisher's note. Foreword. Keynote address. Editor's introduction. 1. Veda revelation according to Bhartrhari/Ashok Aklujkar. 2. Bhartrhari and his Vedic tradition/Johannes Bronkhorst. 3. Bhartrhari and Patanjali: traditions preserved/George Cardona. 4. Revisiting the notion of Sista in Bhartrhari/Madhav M. Deshpande. 5. Thought, language and consciousness: Bhartrhari's view of language/K.D. Tripathi. 6. Thought and language: the Bhartrharian perspective/Tandra Patnaik. 7. Does language map the reality: Bhartrhari's view/Mithilesh Chaturvedi. 8. Time as power of word according to Bhartrhari/Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat. 9. On Bhartrhari's notion of 'power' (sakti)/Hideyo Ogawa. 10. Vidya and Avidya in Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya/Vladimir P. Ivanov. 11. Did Bhartrhari give us a philosophy of language/P.K. Mukhopadhyay. 12. Bhartrhari as a philosopher of language/R.C. Pradhan. 13. Changing approaches to language in Indian schools of thought vis-a-vis Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya/Karunasindhu Das. 14. Vak as Pratyavamarsa: Bhartrhari from Abhinavan perspective/Navjivan Rastogi. 15. From an adversary to the main ally: the place of Bhartrhari in the Kashmirian Saiva Advaita/Raffaele Torella. 16. Dhvani in Bhartrhari and Abhinavagupta's philosophical works/Anna Radicchi. 17. Bhartrhari and the Jainas/Jan E.M. Houben. 18. Mimamsa and Buddhist criticism on Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiya 2.119 and his counterarguments/Toshiya Unebe. 19. Bhartrhari and the syntax of Sanskrit gerunds/Brendan S. Gillon. 20. The case of the accusative: contemporary relevance of Bhartrhari on the Karakas/Arindam Chakrabarti. 21. Bhartrhari on sesa relationships/Vincenzo Vergiani. 22. All words denote the universal (jati): Bhartrhari's approach/Yoshie Kobayashi. 23. The conception of linga in Vakyapadiya III.13/Fernando Tola and Carmen Dragonetti. 24. Some remarks on the term 'vakyabheda' in Bhartrhari's Mahabhasya-dipika/Noriyuki Kudo. 25. Bhartrhari as a 'cognitive linguist'/Jan E.M. Houben. 26. Comparing Humboldt and Bhartrhari/Ana Agud. 27. A bibliography on Bhartrhari/Yves Ramseier.
"This volume is the outcome of the international seminar on Bhartrhari: Language, Thought and Reality held in New Delhi on 12-14 December 2003 as part of the centenary celebrations of Motilal Banarsidass. In this seminar, scholars from all over the world presented their interpretations of Bhartrhari's philosophy, some in the light of the modern trends in philosophy and linguistics, others in the backdrop of Indian tradition.
This volume contains almost all the papers presented at the seminar along with some other papers invited from scholars who could not participate in the seminar to make it comprehensive. The papers discuss the metaphysics of Bhartrhari and his ideas about questions concerning language and reality. Some of the papers compare Bhartrhari with western philosophers and linguists like Wittgenstein, Grice, Searle, Humboldt, Chomsky and Goldberg, thus showing his relevance to problems in contemporary philosophy and linguistics. It is clear that after the initial efforts in the fourth to sixth decades of the twentieth century, Bhartrhari studies have now gained a significant momentum." (jacket)
