Portrait of the grammarian as an artist

Abstract The enigmatic final sūtra of Pāṇini’s Grammar has long challenged commentators to interpret it as an ingenious illustration of phonology, involving a reinstatement of a rule, suspended in the body of the grammar, that the open vowel a is closed in fluent speech. The possibility is considered, though ultimately rejected, that the sutra is predicate-first and not predicate-last. Parallels are drawn with other passages in Pāṇini, where multiple readings are possible for the same passage. Given the creativity we know to have been pervasive in his work, a reinterpretation of the final sūtra is proposed, whereby the rule suspension is situated in the text itself, to be read as an uroboros.