From commentary to paribhāṣās: Kātyāyana and Patañjali vis-à-vis Vyāḍi

The present paper is targeted on three turning points in the long story of the development of paribhāṣās. Two of these collections descended from the earliest testimony of Vyākaraṇa metarules, i.e. those included in Pāṇini’s grammar (5th/4th c. BCE), while one has been handed down as the first independent collection of paribhāṣās and attributed to Vyāḍi. In particular, a shift is highlighted between Kātyāyaṇa’s (3rd c. BCE) integrative approach (vacana) and Patañjali’s (2nd c. BCE) recourse to implicit paribhāṣās in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a powerful hermeneutical tool. This shift helps in interpreting the need for a validation and collection of implicit pāṇinian paribhāṣās as carried out by authors such as Vyāḍi.