(, ; "bursting, opening", "spurt") is an important concept in the Indian grammatical tradition of Vyakarana, relating to the problem of speech production, how the mind orders linguistic units into coherent discourse and meaning.
The theory of is associated with Bhartṛhari ( 5th century), an early figure in Indic linguistic theory, mentioned in the 670s by Chinese traveller Yijing. Bhartṛhari is the author of the Vākyapadīya ("[treatise] on words and sentences"). The work is divided into three books, the Brahma-kāṇḍa, (or Āgama-samuccaya "aggregation of traditions"), the Vākya-kāṇḍa, and the Pada-kāṇḍa (or Prakīrṇaka "miscellaneous").
He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages: Conceptualization by the speaker (Paśyantī "idea") Performance of speaking (Madhyamā "medium") Comprehension by the interpreter (Vaikharī "complete utterance").
is of the "speech monistic" school which identifies language and cognition. According to George Cardona, "Vākyapadīya is considered to be the major Indian work of its time on grammar, semantics and philosophy."
Etymology
While the theory proper () originates with , the term has a longer history of use in the technical vocabulary of Sanskrit grammarians, and Bhartṛhari may have been building on the ideas of his predecessors, whose works are partly lost.
Sanskrit is etymologically derived from the root 'to burst'. It is used in its technical linguistic sense by Patañjali (2nd century BCE), in reference to the "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. Patañjali's sphoṭa is the invariant quality of speech. The acoustic element (dhvani) can be long or short, loud or soft, but the sphoṭa remains unaffected by individual speaker differences. Thus, a single phoneme (varṇa) such as /k/, /p/ or /a/ is an abstraction, distinct from variants produced in actual enunciation. Eternal qualities in language are already postulated by Yāska, in his Nirukta (1.1), where reference is made to another ancient grammarian, , about whose work nothing is known, but who has been suggested as the original source of the concept. The grammarian Vyāḍi, author of the lost text Saṃgraha, may have developed some ideas in sphoṭa theory; in particular some distinctions relevant to dhvani are referred to by Bhartṛhari.
There is no use of as a technical term prior to Patañjali, but Pāṇini (6.1.123) refers to a grammarian named as one of his predecessors. This has induced Pāṇini's medieval commentators (such as Haradatta) to ascribe the first development of the to .
The account of the Chinese traveller Yijing places a firm terminus ante quem of AD 670 on Bhartṛhari. Scholarly opinion had formerly tended to place him in the 6th or 7th century; current consensus places him in the 5th century. By some traditional accounts, he is the same as the poet Bhartṛhari who wrote the Śatakatraya.
In the , the term sphoṭa takes on a finer nuance, but there is some dissension among scholars as to what Bhartṛhari intended to say. Sphoṭa retains its invariant attribute, but sometimes its indivisibility is emphasized and at other times it is said to operate at several levels. In verse I.93, Bhartṛhari states that the sphota is the universal or linguistic type — sentence-type or word-type, as opposed to their tokens (sounds).
Bhartṛhari develops this doctrine in a metaphysical setting, where he views sphoṭa as the language capability of man, revealing his consciousness. Indeed, the ultimate reality is also expressible in language, the śabda-brahman, or "Eternal Verbum". Early Indologists such as A. B. Keith felt that Bhartṛhari's sphoṭa was a mystical notion, owing to the metaphysical underpinning of Bhartṛhari's text, Vākyapādiya, where it is discussed. Also, the notion of "flash or insight" or "revelation" central to the concept also lent itself to this viewpoint. However, the modern view is that it is perhaps a more psychological distinction.
Bhartṛhari expands on the notion of sphoṭa in Patañjali, and discusses three levels: varṇa-sphoṭa, at the syllable level. George Cardona feels that this remains an abstraction of sound, a further refinement on Patañjali for the concept of phoneme- now it stands for units of sound. pada-sphoṭa, at the word level, and vakya-sphoṭa, at the sentence level.