Mahābhāṣya

The text called ‘Mahābhāṣya’, or ‘The Great Commentary’ ascribed to Patañjali (approximately 150 BC) belongs to the Sanskrit grammatical tradition known as ‘vyākaraṇa’, which is one of the six auxiliary disciplines for understanding the Vedas. The type of text called ‘bhāṣya’ in the body of Indian literature is aimed to explain the meaning of sūtras and justify the use of its own terms. In his Mahābhāṣya Patañjali comments on1700 sūtras of ‘Ashtādhyayī’ of Pāṇini (approximately 500 BC) which is the central grammatical text, and also on more than 1500 vārticas of Kātyāyana who was the first to elaborate on Pāṇini’s sūtras. Little is known about the author of the ‘The Great Commentary’ but his name is held with great respect by Indian grammarians as well as he is recognized as the major authority on Pāṇini’s Sanskrit Grammar. In the history of Indian literature the text of Mahābhāṣya became an important frontier in the development of linguistic thought and philosophy as it goes beyond plain commentary but discusses more general linguistic and philosophical issues such as the purpose of grammar that is to teach on correct words (‘śabdānuśāsanā’), nature of the word and relations between a word, its meaning, and an object denoted which was later brought into debates between the Mimamsa, Nyaya and Buddist schools over the next fifteen centuries, he also defines an early notion of ‘sphota’ which was later elaborated in Bhartŗihari’s Vākyapadīya (6th century AD) and finally, touches upon contemporary to him debates between Vedic and non -Vedic groups, some historical events, and cultural assumptions. Among the commentators of Mahābhāṣya Bhartŗihari is considered to be the first. His elaborate commentary called ‘Dīpikā’ together with Vākyapadīya became another important landmark in the history of linguistics in India. Other famous commentaries are Kaiyaṭa’s ‘Pradīpa’or ‘The Lamp’ which sheds light on the difficult moments of Mahābhāṣya and Nageśa Bhaṭṭa’s ‘Uddyota’. Their texts were also widely commented on by Pravartakopādhyāya, Annambhaṭṭa, Nārāyaṇīya, and the others. In the West first translation of Mahābhāṣya was made by James R. Ballantyne in 1856, thus opening native Indian grammatical tradition to a wider European scholarly audience. The discovery of this tradition influenced the development of general and comparative linguistics. Nowadays Sanskrit grammatical tradition provokes interest in the fields of computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, mathematics, logic and some others.