Old Theme, New Debates Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa on Autonymy

Identified at an early date, autonymy has always been an important theme in the discourse of Indian Sanskrit grammarians. But this phenomenon also aroused the interest of other ancient Indian language theorists, and rightly so. In the section of the Vaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇasāra devoted to the object(s) of noun ( nāmārthanirṇaya ), Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa comments on two kārikās taken from Bhaṭṭojī Dīkṣita’s Vaiyākaraṇasiddhāntakārikā relating to autonymy. It is not a mere gloss: the seventeenth century grammarian seeks above all to reaffirm the authority of the theses developed within the Pāṇinian school by refuting doctrines defended in other circles. This is an opportunity for us to study the dimensions of the autonymic phenomenon around which the ‘new’ debates crystallize. For between Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya and Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s Vaiyākaraṇabhūṣaṇasāra are the ins and outs of the autonymy issue the same? What is at stake at Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa’s time? These are the main questions this paper tries to provide answers to.