Silence at the Origin of Speech: Paśyantī, Sphoṭa, and the Projection of the World in Bhartṛhari

In Bhartṛhari’s sphoṭa (“flash”) theory, Silence—which I use to render paśyantī, the highest level in the threefold hierarchy of speech—represents the purely non-verbal phase of speech and the point of origin from which articulated speech emerges. Bhartṛhari characterizes this through the metaphor of a peahen’s egg: just as a full, multicolored peacock is implicitly present within the egg’s yolk, the complete sentence and its sequential constituents are held implicitly in Silence as an undifferentiated whole. This paper addresses three interrelated questions addressed in Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya: how Silence can be understood as pure, non-conceptual subjectivity; how it differs from mere ineffability; and how it unfolds in a way that it generates an appearance of the world.