  The Sanskrit grammatical tradition which has commenced with Panini's
Astadhyayi mostly as a Padasastra has culminated as a Vakyasastra, at the hands
of Bhartrhari. The grammarian-philosopher Bhartrhari and his authoritative work
'Vakyapadiya' have been a matter of study for modern scholars, at least for
more than 50 years, since Ashok Aklujkar submitted his Ph.D. dissertation at
Harvard University. The notions of a sentence and a word as a meaningful
linguistic unit in the language have been a subject matter for the discussion
in many works that followed later on. While some scholars have applied
philological techniques to critically establish the text of the works of
Bhartrhari, some others have devoted themselves to exploring philosophical
insights from them. Some others have studied his works from the point of view
of modern linguistics, and psychology. Few others have tried to justify the
views by logical discussions.
  In this paper, we present a fresh view to study Bhartrhari, and his works,
especially the 'Vakyapadiya'. This view is from the field of Natural Language
Processing (NLP), more specifically, what is called as Cognitive NLP. We have
studied the definitions of a sentence given by Bhartrhari at the beginning of
the second chapter of 'Vakyapadiya'. We have researched one of these
definitions by conducting an experiment and following the methodology of
silent-reading of Sanskrit paragraphs. We collect the Gaze-behavior data of
participants and analyze it to understand the underlying comprehension
procedure in the human mind and present our results. We evaluate the
statistical significance of our results using T-test, and discuss the caveats
of our work. We also present some general remarks on this experiment and
usefulness of this method for gaining more insights in the work of Bhartrhari.
