Dr PurusQttama Bilimoria's book on sabdapramaIJa is an important one,
and so is likely to arouse much controversy. I am pleased to be able to
write a Foreword to this book, at a stage in my philosophical thinking
when my own interests have been turning towards the thesis of
sabdapramaIJa as the basis of Hindu religious and philosophical
tradition. Dr Bilimoria offers many novel interpretations of classical
Hindu theories about language, meaning, understanding and knowing. These
interpretations draw upon the conceptual resources of contemporary
analytic and phenomenological philosophies, without sacrificing the
authentIcity that can arise only out of philologically grounded
scholarship. He raises many issues, and claims to have resolved some of
them. Certainly, he advances the overall discussion, and this is the
best one could hope for in writing on a topic to which the best minds of
antiquity and modern times have applied themselves. In this Foreword, I
wish to focus on one of the issues which I have raised on earlier
occasions, and on which Dr Bilimoria has several important things to
say. The issue is: is sabdabodha eo ipso a linguistic knowing, i. e.,
sabdapramll, or does Sabdabodha amount to knowing only when certain
specifiable conditions are satisfied. It the second alternative be
accepted, these additional conditions could not be the same as the
familiar Ilsatti (contiguity), yogyata (semantic fitness), dka;, k ll
(expectancy) and tlltparya (intention), for these are, on the theory,
conditions of sabdabodha itself.