Dear members of the Indology listserv,
I have recently been wondering about the nature of the copula in
Sanskrit grammar (both in theory and in practice), and specifically
whether and how often the form /asti/ is used as a copula in Classical
Sanskrit. I am sorry if this subject has been raised before on this
list, but from my search of the archives it seems it has not been
addressed directly.
Any user of Sanskrit will know that there need be no word meaning "to
be" (i.e., no copula) in a sentence expressing that "X is Y" (i.e., a
nominal sentence). But from the exchange between Profs. Deshpande and
Bronkhorst in the pages of /Annals BORI/, I gather that at least
some /vaiyākaraṇa/s understood there to be a "silent,"
copulative /asti/ in such nominal sentences as /Devadattaḥ pācaka
odanasya/ or even /Rāmo gataḥ/. (Whether Pāṇini himself was likely to
have had such an understanding was there the /vivādāspada/.)
On the other hand, I have been told by someone whose knowledge of
Sanskrit usage I hold in high esteem that authors of classical
Sanskrit almost never use /asti/ in this way, and that such usage
might even be considered wrong. This same person has suggested to me
that (part of) the reason for this may lie in the fact that technical
terms derived from the form /asti/ (please bear in mind that I am
speaking here only of the form /asti/, not of forms of the root /as-/
in other tenses, persons, or numbers), such as /āstika/ or /astitva/,
are invariably connected with /asti/'s existential (or perhaps
"adessive") meaning. I have noted that Speijer seems aware of no such
avoidance, and gives a couple examples of what he understands to be
copulative /asti/ from the story literature (/Sanskrit Syntax/ §§2-3).
I would therefore like to know if there is any literature discussing
this avoidance (or perhaps even proscription) of using /asti/ as
copula. A pre-modern discussion would be especially interesting, but I
would also appreciate further secondary resources, or even your own
thoughts.
With best wishes,
Jason Cannon-Silber
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