10. 4.2 THE THEORY OF RASA PURIFIED

4.2 THE THEORY OF RASA PURIFIED

The New Dramatic Art, of Abhinavagupta (c. 1000)

We know considerably more about the eleventh-century Kashmirian thinker Abhinavagupta (his last work is dated 1015) than any writer discussed so far-about his family, his teachers and students, his religious and philosophical views-in part because so much of his oeuvre has been preserved, in part because he is voluble about his associates, and in part because he left a short poetic autobiography of a kind we have for no other contributor to the Reader.48 Among his extant works are two important texts on aesthetics, both commentaries, one on Anandavardhana's Light on Implicature, entitled The Eye; the other on Bharata's Treatise on Drama, named, punningly, The New Dramatic Art or Abhinava's Dramatic Art.49 (Other works on literature that have been lost include his Exegesis on the Literary Investigations of his teacher Bhatta Tota.) In addition, he is the author of an extensive body of philosophical-theological texts in the tradition of the monist Shaivism of Kashmir. The chronological relationship of his aesthetic to metaphysical works is reasonably clear, and there is no doubt that the former preceded the latter (he tells us he was "greedy for the rich rasa of literature" until he was "seized with devotion" to Shiva).50 Abhinavagupta is thus one of the relatively few exceptions to the rule that whereas literary theorists might also contribute to philosophy (and most had affiliations to one or another school), philosophers rarely contributed to aesthetics. These were evidently viewed as more or less separate disciplinary specializations, even discrete realms of thought-until, for a brief moment, Abhinava changed the rules of the game and combined aesthetics and metaphysics, in his own scholarly career at least, if not as fully in his aesthetic theory as some scholars have suggested. On the contrary, his aesthetics seems more autonomous from his theology than what we usually read in secondary accounts; whereas understanding his philosophical treatises may require understanding something of his aesthetics, the reverse is not unconditionally the case. By far the greatest part of Abhinava's theory of literary art fits squarely within the disciplinary formation he inherited, in everything from the central problematics to the principal categories and technical vocabulary. Moreover, while Abhinava is also often viewed as the thinker whose conception of rasa stamped all future developments in the discourse-many later writers (there are numerous exceptions) largely identify their conception of rasa as deriving from his-what is not entirely clear is how much of that conception was in fact Abhinava's. The two extant works on aesthetics, The Eye and The New Dramatic Art, the second of which was written later,51 offer rather different ways of thinking about rasa, no doubt in part as a result of the different concerns of the primary works for which these commentaries were composed. The purpose of The Eye is to explain and defend Anandavardhana's conception of implicature, and in the course of executing that task Abhinava does something quite remarkable. Although Ananda consecrated rasa as the very goal of literature in a way no thinker before him (save Bharata) had done, rasa itself remained for him what it was for his predecessors, a phenomenon related to the formal organization of the literary text. And like his predecessors, Ananda was concerned with the textual processes that produce the sense of a feeling. While it is of course the viewer/reader who is ultimately cognizing the feeling, the feeling is that of the characters in the text, once it is "enhanced" and made cognizable by the aesthetic elements. Ananda's only consideration was how to make sense of the linguistic mechanism by which this feeling is created: it can never be directly expressed, he decided, or even figuratively communicated; it can only be implied. In the same way that the more important narrative component or the more powerful figure of speech is the one that is implied, not expressed, so emotion in the character can only be implied by the assemblage of the aesthetic elements, and can never be simply declared. Living as much as a century and a half after Ananda, in a thoughtworld that had experienced the conceptual revolution in aesthetics initiated by Bhatta Nayaka, Abhinava aimed-or at least this seems the unavoidable conclusion-to rescue Ananda from his own obsolescence. He sought to do this by transforming Ananda's linguistic modality (śabdavrtti), whereby rasa was cognized, into a psychological modality (cittavrtti), whereby rasa was experienced. Rasa now became something "manifested" not in the text by means of the aesthetic elements but by the activation of the "predispositions" associated with the stable emotions that preexist in the heart of the sensitive reader.52 This is undoubtedly a more subtle and interesting theory, but one that Ananda would almost certainly have been perplexed to see

presented as his own. It is therefore at once surprising and unsurprising to realize how rarely Abhinava refers to "manifestation" or its synonym "implicature" in his later New Dramatic Art. He only mentions the idea in passing, and nowhere offers anything remotely approaching a full exposition, certainly nothing on the scale found in the synopsis of his theory that Ruyyaka, writing a century and a half later (and almost certainly in ignorance of The New Dramatic Art), provides in a text given below.53 This silence is surprising not only because manifestation/implicature is core to his view in The Eye but also because that would be the terminology adopted by all later Sanskrit thinkers for the new reader-centered aesthetics. At the same time, it is unsurprising if we hypothesize, perfectly reasonably, not only that Abhinava found his earlier notions to be of diminished importance for a commentary on the Treatise on Drama but also that his own theory had matured, unrecognized though this possibility may be in the secondary literature-and even in the Sanskrit intellectual tradition. For although the theory found in The Eye (or in many cases just the précis of it in Mammata's Light on Poetry) had the greater effect on the history of aesthetics, this is only the result of an astonishing fact: aside from a group of thinkers all working in late twelfth-century Gujarat (Hemachandra, his students Ramachandra and Gunachandra, authors of the Mirror of Drama, and a commentator on another vanished work of literary criticism, Examination of The Wishing Vine, Kalpalatāviveka), no succeeding writer on aesthetics had access to The New Dramatic Art. The work was preserved in what seems to have been a single manuscript (and some late medieval copies of it), and not in Kashmir or even in Gujarat but in Malabar in the far southwest. The notion of implicature became less relevant for Abhinava's later thinking about rasa, so we may continue to hypothesize, not only because it was less relevant for the work he was commenting on but also because in his mature theory something else, radically different, had come to take its place. What that something else is we can clearly deduce from the inaugural argument of his "critical reconstruction" of rasa theory.54 Abhinava begins by likening literature to scripture in terms of its capacity to generate in the reader a "surplus comprehension": when we read in the Veda how someone performed a sacrifice and received great benefits from it, we are naturally inclined to apply that story to ourselves. Literature works in precisely the same way, prompting us to apply to ourselves, or to "commonize," the elements of the narrative. "Drama," so runs one of Abhinava's definitions, "is some subject matter that every viewer 'actualizes' as his own by the process of 'commonization,' and thereupon relishes."55 What is grasped by this new aesthetic apprehension is no longer the character's stable emotion but the viewer's own, and "thus grasped, the stable emotion is rasa." The experience of rasa has now become the experience of one's own pure consciousness. Abhinava names this, somewhat obscurely, anuvyavasāya, a term that in normal philosophical discourse refers to a kind of secondary, or reflexive, awareness, or knowledge of a knowledge, but which he uses, he tells us, synonymously with "tasting, savoring, rapture, relishing, absorption, 'experience,' and so on"; and he offers an explicit gloss to signal its newly charged meaning: it is "on the order of direct awareness," and "consists of the light of the bliss that is one's own pure consciousness": "In our view, what is being savored is simply one's own awareness, and this is uniformly blissful."56 (While aesthetic awareness is itself a special kind of pleasure called "bliss," in the course of an aesthetic experience one can also feel what seems to be displeasure, such as pain or fear; but "these are merely one's latent dispositions, of desire, grief, and so on, that serve to add variety to this awareness.")57 And he is careful at the same time to dematerialize, as it were, the "taste" that is rasa: it is "not some already existent thing but in essence simply this very process of relishing, which exists only as long as the relishing itself exists and does not last beyond it."58 If this sounds familiar, it is because many of the same ideas, and much of the same terminology, are found in the earlier theory of Bhatta Nayaka and his disciples, Dhanamjaya and Dhanika, respectively author of and commentator on The Ten Dramatic Forms. Bhatta Nayaka based his entire reformulation of aesthetics on a hermeneutical model, borrowing from Mimamsa its central notion of "actualization," or the process embedded in the imperative language of scripture that prompts us to act in the world. All the key terms that Bhatta Nayaka either made his own or perhaps even coined, such as "commonization" and "absorption," were taken over by Abhinava as building blocks of his own theory; he even appropriates his opponent's three-part hermeneutic model.59 However much Abhinava may criticize Bhatta Nayaka in The Eye as well as in The New Dramatic Art; however much he may protest

-in accordance with a commonplace of Sanskrit intellectual history, that all later innovations are always-already contained in nuce in the foundational knowledge-that he is relating "simply what the sage [Bharata] himself has said, and nothing new at all,"60 his "purified" theory of aesthetics is largely that of Bhatta Nayaka (even the transformation of the idea of "manifestation" may originally have been the latter's).61 The very fact that he opens his own reconstruction this way shows that he has fully accepted Bhatta Nayaka's grand analogy: that the same mechanism that enables us to understand, and to become the subject or "agent" of, a commandment of scripture and so to actualize by ourselves the action prescribed by its discourse, enables us to understand and become the subject or agent of a literary text, to actualize its affective charge. Even Abhinava's extended reflection on the nature of aesthetic consciousness may owe something to Bhatta Nayaka, who was the first to think about these matters, for we find it already in Dhanamjaya a generation (it seems likely) before Abhinava ("When there is a fusion of the mind with the meaning of the literary work, there arises the bliss that is the self, which constitutes the savoring of rasa"), and in his commentator Dhanika ("The stable emotion ... when brought within the sphere of savoring-a state of intensely blissful consciousness -... becomes rasa").62 And of course, the very idea of "absorption" or "repose" as the core characteristic of aesthetic cathexis was already enunciated by Bhatta Nayaka, along with the corollary that aesthetic consciousness, when rendered so completely joyful and luminous, is akin to the ecstasy of spiritual self-transcendence, given that "the self-other distinction vanishes" (so Dhanika). Abhinava accepts this fully,63 though it is noteworthy, in view of his later theological career, how little in fact he has to say in The New Dramatic Art about the precise boundaries of aesthetic and religious consciousness. That said, there is a wide range of astonishingly rich and subtle ideas that are original to Abhinava. He is the first scholar to produce an intellectual history of aesthetics, from Dandin to his own time-indeed, it is his history alone that enables us to produce ours. He is the first to argue out in a philosophical mode that aesthetic rapture is "an apprehension ... in which only pleasure appears," that all the emotions we experience in an aesthetic event "are primarily pleasant, insofar as the pure homogeneous illumination that takes the form of the relishing of one's own consciousness is in essence blissful,"64 a point that will be challenged or defended over the next half-millennium (under what description, Jain scholars in particular wished to know, can we claim that the aesthetic experience of violence or horror is really "pleasurable"?). He provides a remarkable account of the "hindrances" that obstruct aesthetic experience, and how these can be removed (that is, by the creators of dramatic art, not the viewer). It is of the nature of human awareness to be constrained by the primary categories of space and time, by our identities, by the phenomena of our everyday lives. Drama is designed precisely to counteract our natural proclivities toward distraction, disbelief, and the like by such strategies as the use of plausible narratives or the neutralization of the actors' space-time constraints through the use of costumes. In fact, Abhinava's phenomenological description of the transformation of the viewer's awareness through the magic of drama as it unfolds step by step offers some of the most penetrating accounts of aesthetic psychology available anywhere (see On Drama and On the Nature of Dramatic Acting, below). He makes subtle observations on the fact that rasa is a "process of tasting" (rasyamāna) and not some substantial thing tasted, thereby attempting to address (or so it seems to a nonprofessional philosopher) what Wilfrid Sellars called "the notorious 'ing/ed' ambiguity of 'experience,' " between acts of experiencing and the contents experienced.65 Abhinava also powerfully (if complexly) reengages with the old question, first mooted by Udbhata, challenged by Shri Shankuka, grappled with by Anandavardhana, and ridiculed by Kuntaka, on the role of words for affective states in generating rasa. For Udbhata, the use in a literary text of the "proper term" or actual word for a rasa was a core factor in engendering it, a notion Shri Shankuka contested by distinguishing expressive from referential uses of language: the erotic rasa cannot be produced simply by way of direct reference, by use of the word "erotic"; it must find expressive realization (using the actual word would become an artistic flaw for Mammata). Anandavardhana made this distinction a cornerstone of his theory: rasa cannot be directly denoted, especially not by the actual word for it; it can only be implied by the aesthetic elements. In the important, if difficult passage given below, Abhinava appears, improbably, to be arguing against Ananda, or perhaps more credibly, against someone who offered a stronger formulation of Ananda's position that excluded the entire range of technical emotion words, not just the words for the rasas themselves.66 Abhinava's position here may have been partly adopted by Mammata,67 and the problem raised is central: how

can you possibly create aesthetic emotion if you are prohibited from using any of the vocables in the lexicon of affective states, as a strong reading of the "flaw of using the actual words" for emotions would entail? On one key question Abhinava does part company with Bhatta Nayaka: the degree to which drama or literature in general can be said to offer social and moral "instruction." Bhatta Nayaka explicitly opposed the idea that the purpose of literature can be anything other than pleasure: although literature and scripture might share similar communicative-conceptual capacities in prompting the viewer/reader to "apply" the text to himself, their modalities were entirely different. Scripture commands us like a master, we are told in an analogy almost certainly originating with Bhatta Nayaka, whereas literature seduces us like a beloved. For Abhinava, by contrast, sharpening his position on the relationship of pleasure and moral instruction in The Eye,68 the focus of aesthetic experience is on those emotions that "pertain to the ends of man," the four life goals of love, wealth, morality, and liberation. It may be that "drama is rasa," but "the end result of drama is instruction," something he took from his teacher Bhatta Tota (fragment #3), along with a belief in the primacy of drama both for the rasa experience and for the theorization of rasa (for Abhinava, "rasa exists only in drama-and literature as a whole is nothing but drama," or indeed, just a "mimicry" of drama): "The end result of the savoring is instruction in morality and the other ends of man, expertise in them, and so on." The viewer of drama "comes to possess a certain form of consciousness of the sort conveyed by the deontic language of scripture-that those who do such and such a thing receive such and such a reward ... so much so that, since his behavior is now interpenetrated by the desire to attain the good and to avoid the bad, he actually comes to do the good and to shun the bad, given that he has now gained an understanding to this end."69 His brilliant, if anachronistic exposition of Bharata's idea of the four generative rasas is founded squarely on the homology he draws between them and the ends of man ("The most essential aesthetic components are those several forms of consciousness that pertain to the ends of man," etc.).70 Literature's capacity to refine our moral imagination was thus a central, and newly central, tenet of his aesthetic understanding.71 The selections that follow are taken entirely from The New Dramatic Art. These begin with the reconstructive portion of Abhinava's account of rasa; his preceding review and critique of earlier theories-those of Bhatta Lollata, Shri Shankuka, Bhatta Nayaka, and Bhatta Tota-are presented elsewhere in the Reader. Excerpts from his reflections on other topics germane to the question of rasa follow. Although the space available here even to so important a thinker is limited, I might have included Abhinava's discussion of the peaceful rasa, although it mostly just offers detail, in a highly philosophical mode, on the nature of the stable emotion underlying this emotionless state (it is, he concludes, "true knowledge," which is what "impassivity" or "dispassion," the emotions normally ascribed to it, are taken to really mean), but a careful translation has recently been made available.72 Similarly, there was no need to translate the discussion of rasa in The Eye, since this now exists in an authoritative version.73 Two important cautions need to be offered to anyone confronting Abhinava's aesthetics for the first time. His thinking is subtle, sometimes even counterintuitive, and he expresses his thoughts in a style virtually unique among Sanskrit authors for its Hegelian syntactical complexity and Heideggerian semantic idiosyncrasy. Frequently this style is refreshing; sometimes it is turbid as well as turgid; occasionally it is maddening. Added to this (and possibly a result of it), his major work on aesthetics suffered terribly in the course of transmission.74 In a real sense, it is far too early in the history of Abhinavagupta studies for anyone to presume to describe his theory with any precision, let alone completeness. What follows is an attempt merely to capture in as intelligible a manner as I can some important themes, drawn from Abhinava's principal exposition of his aesthetic doctrine and from more peripheral but still illuminating discussions. I have sometimes left material standing that I do not always fully grasp myself, in the hope of contributing to a better understanding in the fullness of time.

FROM THE NEW DRAMATIC ART, OF ABHINAVAGUPTA

(1.272)75 What, then, is the truth about rasa as purified by critique? It is simply what the sage

himself has said and nothing new at all. And what he said is this: "Emotions (bhava) are so called because they bring into being (bhavayanti) the aims of the literary work."76 Rasa, accordingly, is this "aim of the literary work."77 Consider the following analogy: on hearing a sentence of scripture such as "They held a sacrificial session through the night," or "He offered up the oblation into the fire,"78 a qualified individual-that is, someone who desires a particular reward and meets the other requirements for ritual action-has at first a bare comprehension of the meaning of the sentence, enhanced by the persuasive power of the historical eventfulness79 it references. But thereupon a certain surplus comprehension arises, of the nature of a transference and the like,80 whereby the verb tense and person originally used in the sentence are suppressed and the reader thinks, "Let me hold a session,"81 or "Let me offer up." This sort of comprehension is identified by various terms of art depending on the philosophical school, such as "understanding," "actualization," "commandment," "undertaking,"82 and the like. In precisely the same way, from literary language there arises for the qualified individual a surplus comprehension. [273] Here the qualified individual is the person whose heart is filled with uncontaminated sensibility.83 When such a person hears verses like the one beginning "The fawn, its neck bent back beautifully,"84 or "Uma with flowers falling from her long black hair," or "But Shiva, his calmness just barely disturbed,"85 he first comprehends the literal meaning. There then arises another comprehension in the mind,86 a kind of direct visualization, in which all the distinctions employed in this or that verse-distinctions of tense, for example-are eliminated. In the case of the fawn and king who appear in the first of the verses as being involved in a state of terror, they are devoid of particularity and ultimately unreal; what appears in the second form of comprehension here is, accordingly, a kind of pure fear-the cognition "afraid"-untouched by time and place.87 Directly thereafter the fear is grasped88 in an apprehension free from all "hindrances," differing radically from our usual hindrance-encumbered notions (since those are delimited, giving rise to thoughts of avoidance, acquisition, or indifference caused by pain and pleasure, such thoughts as "I am afraid," or "He-friend, enemy, neutral-is afraid"). And this stable emotion of fear, when it penetrates the heart almost visibly and becomes present before one's very eyes,89 just is the fearful rasa. In this state of fear the viewer's self is neither completely displaced nor prominently referenced, and the same holds for every other person. For this reason, the "commonization" should be seen as not restricted to a single person but as extending beyond him, like the grasping of the invariable concomitance between smoke and fire, or fear and trembling.90 The whole assemblage of theatrical components, from the actor onward, conduces to this process of visualization. In this assemblage, all sources of delimitation-time, place, perceiving subjects, both those that really exist and those made available through the literary work-are expunged by canceling each other out;91 and thereby the commonization just mentioned is enhanced all the more. For this reason, the audience members all share a homogeneous comprehension thanks to the concurrence of their predispositions-everyone's mind being studded with an infinite array of such predispositions-and this supplies even greater enhancement to the rasa. This unhindered awareness is called aesthetic rapture. The transformations such as trembling, horripilation, and frissons produced from it are called rapture too, as in the following poem:92

Even today Hari is overcome with rapturous wonder that Mount Mandara caused not the least harm to Lakshmi's limbs,93 softer though they are than the beams of the crescent moon.94

"Rapture" is said to be an experience in which one is immersed without interruption, given the absence of any feeling of dissatisfaction: "'Rapture' (camat-kara) is the 'action' (karana) of someone 'enjoying' (camatah)," that is, when one is immersed in a pulsation of a fantastical experience.95 It may be of the nature of a visualization, a conviction, an imagination, or a memory-though this is memory of a sort that does not emerge as normal memory does.9 To quote:

That you can be overcome with yearning, however happy you are, when seeing beautiful things or hearing sweet music, surely means some memory must be at work, something in your unconscious, attachments from former lives enduring in their emotion.97

[274] (The memory spoken of in this verse is not the sort described by the logicians, because the subject has never actually experienced the thing he is remembering; it has instead the character of a visualization or pure sensibility.)98 At all events, this rapture99 is an apprehension-or, in other words, a savoring-in which pleasure alone appears. Precisely because it is not qualified by any other internal differentiation of time, place, and so on, this apprehension, qua tasting, is not of a normal everyday sort, but at the same time it is neither illusory nor ineffable, neither similar to an everyday apprehension nor a metaphorical or other rhetorical representation of it. You may (with Bhatta Lollata) consider it a state of the enhanced stable emotion,100 in the sense of its being unconstrained by the spatial or other particularities of the original; you may (with Shri Shankuka) consider it an imitation (anu-kāra), since it "produces" (karana) its effects by "following after" (anu) the stable emotions, that is, by being in conformity with them; you may also regard it as an assemblage of imaginary objects in the way of the Buddhist idealist school.101 At all events, what is grasped by this apprehension-which is freed from all hindrances, and is essentially the process of tasting-is the stable emotion, and thus grasped, the stable emotion is rasa. What removes the hindrances mentioned here are the aesthetic elements, that is, the foundational factor and so on. The consciousness thus freed from all hindrances is designated by a range of terms found in everyday life-rapture, engagement, tasting, savoring, experience, engrossment, ecstasy, absorption. As for the hindrances to this consciousness, there are seven: [1] "unfitness for comprehension," i.e., lack of plausibility; [2] preoccupation with time-space particularities that comes about by limitations related either to oneself or to another; [3] fixation on one's own states of mind, whether pleasurable or other; [4] deficiency in the means of apprehension; [5] absence of perspicuity; [6] nonessentiality; [7] doubtfulness. To explain in detail: [1] A person who finds what is being narrated to be implausible cannot fix his consciousness upon it, let alone become absorbed in it. This is the first hindrance, and in the case of narratives familiar from everyday life, it is removed by the heart's natural concurrence with the action. But in the case of exploits entirely unfamiliar in everyday life, the means of removing the hindrance is the use of characters with well-known names (such as Rama), which amplifies a will to believe on our part that is already deeply entrenched, coming as it does from unbroken tradition.102 For the same reason, in the genre called epic drama, whose purpose is a didactic one-the teaching of the

highest moral principles-the use of subject matter consisting of such well-known narratives is a necessity, as we will explain.103 This is something that should never occur, however, in other genres such as farces. We will address this topic at its appropriate place, so let this suffice for now. [2] The greatest hindrance is the intrusion of some other state of awareness that might arise when we are savoring the consciousness of pleasurable or painful aesthetic experiences as something pertaining exclusively to ourselves. These other states include a fear that the experience will end, a preoccupation with preserving it, a desire to have (or to avoid) a similar experience, an urge to reveal or conceal it, or some other impulse, as the case may be. By the same token, if one were to have an awareness of the pleasure and pain as being experienced exclusively by some other person, one would at the same time necessarily have an awareness of some corresponding emotion in oneself-pleasure, pain, confusion, mere indifference-which inevitably produces a hindrance. The means of eliminating this hindrance is the mode of concealment effected by the actor's costume, his headdress and so on, after the viewer had previously been made aware of the actor's actual presence by seeing him during the prologue (per the dramaturgical convention, "The actress, the actor who plays the fool ... chat with the director"),104 and the occultation effected by the theatrical preliminaries ("The preliminaries should be carried out according to prescription, but not drawn out too long"),105 in combination with the theatrical conventions, zones or scenic arrangements within the theater [275], the stage, the preliminary dance, the varieties of unfamiliar languages, and all the rest. When this elimination is effected, there is no particularizing awareness of the pleasure or pain, no thought that the pleasure or pain pertains specifically to this particular person, in this particular place, for this particular reason. This is both because the actor's own person has been concealed and because our awareness does not come to rest on the character's, since in the case of an appearance of an assumed form our awareness can do so only imperfectly. And this is so because the upshot of assuming the character is merely to conceal the real form of the actor. All such preparations, accordingly, have been required by the sage for their usefulness in promoting the relishing of rasa, by way of achieving the commonization of the aesthetic elements.16 They will be clarified on the appropriate occasions, and no further attention need be given them here. But this explains the method for removing the hindrance coming from limitations related to oneself or to another. [3] By the same token, how can the awareness of a person preoccupied with his own states of mind, whether pleasurable or otherwise, ever become absorbed in some other matter? To remove this obstacle, use is made of various modes of "coloration."107 These reside in all the different components of the drama108 and are capable of ensuring the "experience" of the whole, thanks to the power of "commonality."109 These entities consist of words and other properties, and include instrumental music, singing, the enchanting theater itself, and the skilled actresses.110 To quote: 'Drama is something to be both seen and heard."111 Thereby, the sensibilities of even an insensitive man, by virtue of his acquiring mental clarity, can be rendered completely receptive, so that he becomes a sensitive viewer. [4-5] Moreover, how can there be any apprehension if the means for apprehension are absent? And when words and inferential signs112 produce only something unclear, whatever the apprehension, it cannot attain the state of absorption; for that, what is required are ideas as close

to perception as possible in the form of clear and distinct apprehensions. To quote: "All valid knowledge ultimately resolves to perception."113 This is so because, for one thing, it is self-evident that neither inference nor testimony114 by the cartload can alter something we have seen with our own eyes; and because, for another, a second, stronger perception can displace a first, false one115 (an everyday example would be the displacement of the notion of a fiery circle upon seeing that it is produced by the swinging of a flaming torch). Thus, the consecrated way of eliminating both kinds of hindrance, that is, deficiency in the means of apprehension and absence of perspicuity, are the various types of dramatic acting, supplemented by social conventions, the theatrical modes, and the costumes. For the process of acting is something completely different from the operations of words and inferential signs;116 as we shall make clear, it is nearly equal to the operation of perception. [6] No one's awareness can come to rest upon something that is nonessential, since the moment that the inessential thing is cognized it hastens after something more essential, and cannot come to rest in itself. The inessential pertains to insensate things-the whole class of factors117 and the physical reactions-but also to the category of the transitory emotions. This is so because these emotions, though conscious processes in themselves, are of necessity always directed toward something else. Accordingly, what stand apart from all that, namely, the stable emotions, is the only object worthy of an aesthetic relishing where awareness can come to rest. To examine this in greater detail:118 [276] The most essential aesthetic components are those several forms of consciousness119 that pertain to the ends of man: love, wealth, 120 morality, and liberation. Thus, the stable emotion of desire pertains to love121 as well as to forms of wealth and morality that are necessarily related to love; the stable emotion of anger pertains to wealth in those dramatic forms where anger is predominant,122 and can even eventuate in love or morality; the stable emotion of determination can eventuate in any of the ends of man, morality and the rest; and last, impassivity, when it is the stable emotion and consisting largely in dispassion brought about by true knowledge, is the means of liberation. Hence, these four stable emotions are the most essential.123 And while they have a certain hierarchy among themselves,124 any one of these stable emotions can have primacy in the dramatic genre that prioritizes them, and hence, in the succession of dramatic forms all of them can come to have primacy. For one who examines the matter closely, in one and the same dramatic form at different points, a different emotion can have primacy. Now, all these emotions are predominantly pleasurable, insofar as the pure homogeneous illumination that takes the form of the relishing of one's own consciousness is in essence blissful. To explain: in everyday life, when women relish the consciousness even of pure homogeneous grief, their heart finds repose because such grief itself embodies a repose free from any discontinuities. The absence of repose is the very definition of pain, which is why the followers of Kapila,125 when describing volatility's mode of existence, state that instability is the life force of pain. All rasas, accordingly, are essentially blissful, though some, depending on the factors coloring them, can have a certain harshness126 about them. Such is the case with contact with the heroic rasa, whose life force, after all, is, among other things, the capacity to tolerate suffering. Thus, the most essential components are the four stable emotions: desire, anger, determination, and impassivity. The remaining five, amusement and the others, are essential insofar as they add coloration, with their aesthetic elements being so easily accessible to everyone

everywhere-which is the reason the comic and the other four rasas typically pertain to characters other than those of high status. Every unsophisticated person will laugh, grieve, fear, recoil at another's censure, and everywhere be amazed at the slightest well-turned phrase. But these five rasas can also supplement the other four and thereby subserve the ends of man. As we shall argue later, it is precisely this hierarchical relationship among the stable emotions that accounts for the differentiation into the ten dramatic and other literary forms. These nine emotions, moreover, are the only stable ones.127 They are the forms of consciousness that encompass a creature from the moment of his birth. In accordance with the maxim that people are "averse to contact with pain and eager to savor pleasure,"128 every being is pervaded with desire for sex; laughs at others out of a misplaced sense of his own superiority; burns at separation from a loved one; becomes speechless with anger at those responsible, and then, because of his own powerlessness, becomes fearful; is keen for some acquisition but then is overcome with repugnance if the object is unsuitable,129 thinking it undesirable;130 feels amazement well up in him at beholding the various things he is about to do;131 and, last, is prepared to give up something or other. There is no living being devoid of the predispositions latent in such mental states. It is merely the case that in a given person at a given moment this or that mental state predominates, whereas [277] another is diminished; a given person will be constrained by a thing's propriety and another will do just the opposite. Accordingly, only four of the stable emotions- desire, anger, determination, and impassivity-can be taught as subserving the ends of man; and it is this basic division among the stable emotions that leads us to speak in terms of a character's status, whether high, middling, or low.132 As for the more particularized mental states, such as those transitory emotions known as fatigue, disquiet, and the like, it is possible for them not to come into existence at all in the course of one's life, when their pertinent foundational or stimulant factor is absent.133 A sage who uses an elixir, for example, may never be affected by fatigue, torpor, exhaustion, and so on. And even when the power of a foundational or stimulant factor is present and a person is overcome by such emotions, he will find that they diminish in direct relation to the diminution of their cause, and do not for all that necessarily comprise any residue of an innate disposition. By contrast, the stable emotions such as determination, even when they are virtually dissipated after having accomplished their tasks, do not fail to leave the residue of an innate disposition, for the simple reason that they can still have other tasks to accomplish and so cannot be depleted.134 As Patanjali says, "Just because Chaitra's passion is directed toward one woman does not mean it cannot be directed toward others."135 Therefore, the transitory emotions, their existence marked by a myriad of varied stages of coming into being and going out of being, are strung on the thread of those mental states that are the stable emotions. They are like precious stones threaded on a red or blue string136-stones of crystal, glass, mica, ruby, emerald, sapphire, and the like, with their thousands of different properties-which can be individually perceived thanks to their interstices. Although these transitory emotions leave no latent impression of their own on the string of the stable emotion, they derive embellishment from the string itself; moreover, themselves dappled,137 they dapple the string of the stable emotion; and they bring the string, pure though it remains on the very inside of the stones, to the point of manifestation and even while doing so, show themselves to be producing a certain variegation from the luster of the stones-the transitory emotions-that precede and

follow. And that is why they are called transitory emotions. Indeed, their very instability is suggested by the simple fact that, whereas we may ask the reason a particular person feels fatigue (a transitory emotion), we do not ask the reason when someone says, "Rama is prompted by the stable emotion determination." Accordingly, the foundational and stimulant factors that awaken138 a stable emotion are merely communicating the propriety or impropriety of the emotion, desire or determination or whatever it may be, coloring the emotion with their own particular character.139 By no means is it the case that in the absence of such factors those stable emotions are nonexistent, since, as we have stated, they are constitutive of living creatures, being in essence their fundamental predispositions. By contrast, a transitory emotion, when the foundational and stimulant factors for it are absent, ceases to exist even in name-something we shall elaborate on where appropriate in the course of our commentary. Thus, the elimination of the hindrance called "nonessentiality"140 is achieved by a twofold account141 of the stable emotion: first, the one that supplements the general definition of rasa, when the sage says, "We shall show how a stable emotion becomes rasa,"142 and second, the one that pertains to the particular definitions of the individual rasas.143 [278] [7] Last, there is no necessary correlation between a given physical reaction, foundational factor, or transitory emotion and a given stable emotion. Weeping, as we see for ourselves, can result from bliss as well as from eye disease; a tiger can cause anger, fear, and so on, whereas exhaustion, anxiety, and the other transitory emotions are observed to accompany any number of stable emotions: determination, fear, and so on. The totality of aesthetic elements, however, does indeed establish an invariable concomitance. In other words, where the foundational factor is the death of some loved one; the reactions lamentation, shedding tears, and the like; and the transitory emotions anxiety, despondency, and so on, the stable emotion in question must of necessity be grief and that alone. And hence, wherever there may be uncertainty, the means to resolve the doubt and hence to remove the hindrance is use of the proper conjunction of aesthetic elements. With respect to this process: in everyday life we develop through repeated practice the skill of inferring the mental states of others-that is, their stable emotions-by seeing signs betokening causes, effects, and auxiliaries. Now, in the theater, these very elements-a garden, a sidelong glance, the feeling of satisfaction,144 and the like-transcend the worldly plane where "cause," "effect," and "auxiliary" have their proper significations, and consist solely in the processes of "factoring," "reactionizing," and "colorizing." For that very reason they receive these new, supermundane designations "factor" (whether foundational or stimulant), "reaction," and "transitory emotion," respectively, whose different natures we shall examine in the chapter on emotions.145 (They are designated by such names in order to call attention to the fact that they derive their existence from the primordial dispositions of cause, effect, and auxiliary to which they are related.) As these aesthetic elements take on their dominant or subordinate status in turn, they attain a "conjunction" (in the Sutra on Rasa)-etymologically146 a correct ("con-") relationship or concentration ("junction")-in the minds of the audience. They thereby bring the aesthetic entity147 into the domain of relishing, a state of awareness that is supermundane and freed from the seven hindrances. And that entity-which is not some already existent thing but in essence simply this very process of relishing, which exists only as long as the relishing itself exists and does not last beyond it, and which must be something other than the stable emotion itself-is rasa. Shankuka and others, however, are mistaken to argue that it is the stable emotion itself,

apprehended by means of the factors and the rest, that is rasa, and is so called because it is tasted.148 For not only would rasa then exist in the real world, but also there would be no emotion that would not be rasa: if something nonexistent149 can be tasted, then why should something that really exists not be tasted? Hence it is only the apprehension of the stable emotion in the form of an inference that is being postulated, not rasa itself. It was for precisely this reason that the sage did not use the term "stable emotion" in the Sutra on Rasa itself-indeed, that would have been a red herring.150 And when the sage states that the "stable emotion turns into rasa," it is merely because of a formal congruity lying in the fact that those things familiar to us as causes when pertaining to a real-world stable emotion take on the designation of "factors" and so on when enabling the act of aesthetic relishing.151 That is to say, what kind of rasa can be held to exist in an inference of a real-world mental state? On the contrary, the savoring of rasa is in essence a supermundane rapture, completely different from the real-world awareness deriving from inference and memory. To explain:152 a person predisposed toward an aesthetic event by the practice of drawing real-world inferences does not apprehend a female character on the stage in some neutral manner. On the contrary, without in the least ascending the ladder of inference, memory, and the like but rather on the strength of his aesthetic receptivity (in essence, his heart's concurrence), he apprehends her as the life breath of aesthetic relishing-something congruent with an act of identification-indeed, as the shoot of aesthetic savoring that is about to blossom into fullness. Such relishing does not arise from any other prior act of cognition, [279] whereby some memory might come into play during the aesthetic event; nor is any real-world act of cognition, such as perception, in operation here. On the contrary, the relishing is presented solely by virtue of the conjunction of the supermundane aesthetic elements. Accordingly, it is radically different from [1] awareness of a stable emotion produced by a real-world act of cognition, whether perception, inference, testimony, analogy, or other source of valid cognition; [2] knowledge of another's mental state produced by yogic perception, which remains entirely indifferent; [3] the completely homogeneous experience of his own bliss on the part of a supreme spiritual adept, which is pure because it is free from all coloration of objective reality. The difference lies in the fact that those three forms of consciousness are all devoid of beauty: the first because of the presence of this or that hindrance (such as the desire to actually possess the woman one sees);153 the second because of the indistinctness that accompanies the indifference; the third because one is possessed by the blissful object and thereby overpowered.154 In the theater, however, because the aesthetic event cannot possibly be restricted to oneself alone, such overpowering cannot take place; because the event cannot be restricted to someone else alone, given one's own participation, that imprecision cannot arise; and because one's congruent predispositions of desire (or other stable emotion) take possession of one when activated by force of the "commonization" of the aesthetic elements, none of the hindrances can come into play-this is something we have stated repeatedly. In view of this radical difference, the aesthetic elements cannot be viewed as normal phenomena. They cannot be causes for an actual "arising" of rasa,155 for that would lead to the absurdity that rasa could exist even after cognition of the aesthetic elements has ceased. But neither can they be causes of "knowing" rasa-which would entail their being numbered among the valid means of cognition-since rasa is not a cognizable object given that it is not a concrete entity.156 What, then, do we mean by "aesthetic elements"? It is a term we use to refer to something

supermundane that enables aesthetic relishing to take place. The fact that we find these elements nowhere else than in the theater actually enhances our argument for proving157 their supermundane character. It is exactly like saying that the savor of a mixed drink cannot be located in any one of its ingredients, brown sugar, black pepper, etc.158 But then, one might object, does rasa not thereby cease to be a cognizable object? This is in fact logically the case. The very essence of rasa, or "taste," is a state of being tasted; its nature is not that of a cognizable object. Then what does "arising" in the Sutra on Rasa refer to? Not to rasa itself, but to the aesthetic tasting directed toward rasa. There is no harm if, in referring to the arising of such tasting, we also speak of the arising of the rasa whose existence depends entirely on it. As for this tasting, it is a process neither of production nor of cognition, and for all that it is not itself without cognitive basis, because it is proven to exist by our reflexive consciousness. Aesthetic tasting is, to be sure, a form of awareness, but utterly different from any kind of real-world awareness, since its means, the aesthetic elements, differ utterly from real-world means. Hence, since it is from the conjunction of the aesthetic elements that aesthetic tasting arises, rasa itself, which comes under the domain of this unique kind of tasting, must be a supernormal entity. Such is the gist of the aphorism. Here is a synopsis of the whole matter: first of all, the idea that it is an actor we are seeing on stage is obscured by his costume-the crown, the headdress, and so on. But the notion that he is Rama, however much stimulated by the power of the literary text, does not come to rest on the actor because of dispositions of our consciousness that are old and deeply implanted.159 For this very reason160 the dimensions of time and space pertaining to both actor and character are eliminated. The sight of the physical reactions in the actor, the horripilation and so on, that serve to produce the convincing apprehension of desire when we observe them in the real world, gives us to understand the presence of desire in a way that is, as a result of the foregoing, unrestricted by time and space, and in which the viewer himself comes to participate thanks to his own predispositions toward desire. The understanding we have of such desire cannot, therefore, be one of indifference. Moreover, since we do not understand the desire as being brought about by a cause specific to oneself161-a particular woman, say-there is no possibility of our wanting to possess her, embrace her, or the like; and since we do not understand it as exclusively concerning someone else, there is no possibility of hatred arising toward that person, or sorrow, or any other emotion.162 [280] The desire is thus "commonized" and, when brought within our consciousness (whether consciousness is conceived of as a sequence of moments or as a unity),163 is the erotic rasa. This "commonizing actualization," for its part, comes about through the aesthetic elements.164

[281] The ultimate savoring of rasa, however, occurs only when there is equal prominence of the aesthetic elements, something that takes place only in an extended narrative,165 though in actual fact only in one of the ten forms of drama. As Vamana states, "Among all the varieties of literary composition the best is drama in any of its ten forms. For the drama, like a painted canvas, is multifaceted, by virtue of the full complement of its particular components."166 In the case of an extended narrative, one or another such dramatic form is being transferred, thanks to the reader's capacity for imagining the proper speech, costume, regional customs, and the like. In the case of an isolate verse, it comes to be understood only by being ultimately enlivened by such narrative-

that is to say, by receptive readers' ability to imagine what is appropriate in view of the sequence of events, and to establish a contextual foundation by conjecturing for the verse the appropriate speaker on the given occasion.167 Thus, for those who are receptive readers thanks to, among other things, their study of literature and their good karma from past lives, the "aim of a literary text"168 manifests itself with absolute clarity, as if before their very eyes, even when only a limited number of aesthetic elements is disclosed. And hence for them, literature alone, without any reference to dramatic spectacle, can bring at once pleasure and instruction. Drama can be an additional source of mental clarity for such people too, of course, on the analogy of radiant moonbeams falling.169 But for those lacking in receptivity, drama alone can produce such clarity, because it is only there that the apprehension of singing, music, and the courtesan actresses does not lead to vicious behavior, since they are simply features of drama.170 In this connection we may note that the actor is an object of meditation analogous to that used by meditators. In the latter case we do not of course have the apprehension that it is the very Vasudeva Krishna before us, painted with vermillion, whom we are to call to mind; the apprehension is rather that the particular deity, when come within the ambit of a conceptualization made especially vivid thanks to the physical medium, will reward those who meditate on him. In the same way, the content of a drama can become the object of an identification made especially vivid thanks to the actor's procedures, while remaining completely untouched by any particularization of time or space pertaining to actor or character. The content is thus comparable to a Vedic commandment in providing moral instruction to the effect that such and such a reward comes from such and such an act; and comparable as well in view of the fact that in neither case does a subsequent perception ever arise to negate it, whether with respect to the law that something must be either what we are seeing or something else, or in the spectator's subsequent mental state.171 Quite the contrary, the apprehension is veridical and complete. Accordingly, we have the bare apprehension "Rama," and never later the idea, "This person before my eyes was not Rama but someone else." We will clarify this in due course.

On the Homology of Physical Tasting and Rasa

(1.283) The author of the Treatise on Drama shows that there is a homology between tasting and rasa with respect to the object and agent of the experience and the end result. Just as there is something being savored in the food prepared with condiments; an agent of savoring in the agent of the gustatory experience when he is single-minded (since a person who has the experience when his mind is elsewhere will have no sense of savoring anything); an end result of the savoring, namely, pleasure, weight gain, vitality, nourishment, strength, health, and the like, so it is in the case of rasa: there is something being savored when rasa in the form we refer to as the stable emotion is manifested by the various forms of acting; there is an agent of savoring in the audience when they are single-minded, that is, when they identify with the drama; and there is an end result of the savoring, namely, instruction in morality and the other ends of man, expertise in them, and so on, in a way that is predominantly pleasurable. Thus, because of the similarity of act, agent, and outcome, we can refer to the specific kind of apprehension produced by the aesthetic elements as an act of tasting. Such is the gist of the matter ....

When Bharata speaks of "joy and the like,"172 some scholars believe that "and the like" includes grief and other such emotions. That is unreasonable. The outcome of drama for spectators is joy and that alone, not grief or other such feeling. This is so, first, because there is nothing to cause such grief, and second, because if there were, people would simply avoid the theater. With this in mind, some scholars actually believe the text should read, instead of "joy and the like," the plural "joys."

[284.15]173 With the words "they savor," the author shows that "savoring" is a mental process far superior to eating, the process of physical tasting. The basic idea here is that "savoring" is not the physical process of tasting but a mental process. And in this case it is a complete, or whole, process. The usage here is figurative, since it is well known that in everyday life the mental follows immediately upon the physical process of tasting .... The stable emotions, which are beyond the reach of thought as such, are "conjoined" with the aesthetic factors. Here "con-joined" means properly joined, that is, becoming identically grounded in the viewers who all enter gradually into a state of identification174 through the heart's concurrence. When this occurs, the "learned" "fully savor" them. Here "fully" indicates that this happens by virtue of an apprehension free from all "hindrances" thanks to total commonization. "In their heart" means free from the possibility of being hindered through any of the senses; "savor," that is, enjoying by "relishing," in other words, a state of consciousness of ultimate joy afforded by the wide variety of dispositions that punctuate it: pleasure, pain, and so on.175 Given this state of rapture-savoring to which one feels virtually subjugated owing to the absence of the self-other distinction, this consciousness is of a sort entirely different from everyday apprehension, since that is crowded with hindrances, such as acquisitiveness and the like,176 but also from yogic apprehension, since that is so to speak harsh, owing to its repudiation of any savoring of objects.

On the List and Order of Rasas

(1.261.15) Insofar as love is readily accessible to all creatures and thus entirely familiar, and thereby pleasing to all, the erotic is named first. The comic follows in the wake of the erotic. The opposite of the erotic, insofar as it is a state of hopelessness,177 is the tragic. Next comes the violent, which is the cause of the tragic, and concerned primarily with wealth.178 Then the heroic, insofar as love and wealth have their ground in morality and the heroic is concerned primarily with morality, consisting as it does essentially in providing security to those who are afraid. The fearful is next, followed by the macabre, because it can be argued that they share the same foundational and stimulant factors; both are implied by the heroic. The fantastic is mentioned next since it appears at the conclusion of the heroic. (Bharata will state that the fantastic is the rasa that must always be used at the end of a play.)179 Thereafter comes the peaceful, whose ethos is in essence the cessation of all acts in contrast to the ethos of engagement in the group of three ends of man, love, wealth, and morality; its end result is spiritual liberation.

[335.7] There are accordingly only nine rasas, for only so many have been taught either as serving the purpose of instruction or as adequately pleasurable. Thus, the argument that others

have made, that although other rasas are possible, the number is restricted by scholarly convention, is refuted .... 180 It is false to claim that affection, with tenderness as its stable emotion, can be a rasa.181 Affection is simply attachment, and attachment always resolves into desire, determination, or one or another of the standard stable emotions. To explain: the affection a child feels for his mother or father amounts to fear; that of a young man for his friends, desire; Lakshmana's affection for his brother Rama is in fact the "heroic in morality," and the same logic applies to an elder's affection for his son. This line of reasoning can be followed in rejecting a rasa of avarice with a stable emotion of greed-it resolves into amusement or desire. The same can be said of devotion too.

[The Number of Transitory Emotions]

(1.373) When Bharata states, "There are thirty-three transitory emotions," all others are meant to be included in this set: deceit in dissimulation, for example, distress in despair, hunger, thirst, and the like in fatigue. Other examples are easily supplied. Some scholars, however, wonder how anyone could possibly number182 all the various states of mind. And they ask with respect to their enumeration how any given number could capture this totality, whether the nine attributes of the self logicized by logicians; the eight properties of the intellect numbered by Samkhya numerologists, or their four types of apprehension (error and the like); or the duality "mind" and "mental activities" broadcast by Buddhists.183 If one argues that, if it was for the purpose of teaching poets and actors that these few have been described, then others could certainly have been enunciated-well, others will in fact be enunciated by the sage in his discussion of the "general style of acting"184 when describing the emotions, behavior, and ornamentation of men and women. And in the present chapter too, they have at least been intimated in the enumeration of foundational and stimulant factors and reactions, such as when hunger and thirst are mentioned as factors in fatigue. They have not been literally defined only because their definition, perfectly well known to begin with, would not be all that useful to playwrights and actors. Others argue that it is in the performance of these few emotions that beauty arises. For when the auxiliary emotional states are displayed in performance in this finite number and no more, the stable emotion becomes fit for relishing. Some believe that these are to be known first and that such knowledge allows one to extrapolate to the definition of others.

On Drama

(1.260.12) By "drama" is meant a particular species of literature that comprises the whole range of genres beginning with the epic-derived play. It constitutes a homogeneous conviction in the mind that produces a visualization on the strength of the registers of acting on the part of the actors. Although a drama consists of innumerable aesthetic elements, given the fact that all these insensate things can be reduced to the consciousness of them, and consciousness to the class of people experiencing them, and that class to the principal person experiencing them, drama can be said to consist essentially of the stable mental state of that principal person, whom we call the

protagonist. Now, this single mental state is differentiated from the countless other mental states that are understood as belonging to oneself or another; thanks to ... the employment of the power of poetry, perfected and beautified by the singing and instrumental music, the figures of speech, language qualities, adherence to the thirty-six "characteristics" of dramatic poetry, and appropriating the enlivening force of the ten components of the preliminary dance (the recitative and the rest), it is utterly disconnected from any particular locus;185 and insofar as it is "commonized," it can invest the audience members with its own presence. And precisely by reason of this identification,186 it appears as different from any mundane mental state that is felt to belong to some separate person, which is based on inference or testimony or yogic perception and where the agent and object of cognition are entirely neutral; [261] and because it is free of any appearance of being located in one's delimited self, it is incapable of producing the kind of mental state- attraction,187 for example, or repulsion-that comes into being in the case of feelings of desire or grief arising from a mundane source of knowledge. It can therefore be grasped by a "process," otherwise known as "tasting," that can be defined as repose in one's own unhindered consciousness, and thus comes to be expressed by the term "rasa," or taste. Hence, drama is rasa, whereas the end result of drama is instruction.

.... [NS 6.31+ (p. 266): "We will explain the rasas first, for no artha of drama will be achieved without attention to rasa"]188 (1.265.14) By artha is meant: [1] "aesthetic element," such as the foundational factor, which except for rasa would never be "achieved," or enter the mind, as an analytical category; [2] "purpose," that is, instruction through literary pleasure, which without rasa would never be "achieved," or take place; [3] "entity" and the like, for when the audience is absorbed in the rasa experience-a homogeneous apprehension that consists of tasting-no entity is "achieved," or is individually present189 to their minds, because the whole class of aesthetic elements, all insensate themselves, appears as subsumed under the principal mental state, namely the stable emotion, which all other mental states subserve. Hence, rasa is listed first in the contents of the Treatise on Drama and defined first, since it has primacy for all three readerships: the scholar, the actor, and the audience.

(1.284.25) When Bharata speaks of "drama rasas,"190 he may mean the "rasas that arise from" the composite artistic enterprise that is "drama." Or he may mean "rasas are drama," for drama is a composite of rasas. Or finally, he may mean that "rasas are found in drama alone," and in poetry only to the degree that it mimics drama. For as my teacher has argued, with respect to the subject matter of the literary text, rasa comes into being only when a state of awareness simulating visual perception comes into being .... 191 [285] Whereas some scholars assert that the relishing of rasa can occur in poetry no less than in drama, produced by the exceptional beauty of its language qualities and rhetorical figures, our view is as follows: first of all, "literature" is comprised chiefly of the ten dramatic forms. For it is there, thanks to the appropriate languages, cultural modes, intonations, costumes, and so on, that the presence of rasa achieves plenitude. In a poetic work like a courtly epic, by contrast, we even have female protagonists speaking in Sanskrit, one of many improprieties that find place in the narrative simply because it is not possible to do otherwise192- however much it may not seem inappropriate, in view of the maxim that you like whatever you are

given.193 This is precisely the reason it has been argued, as noted earlier, that "Among all the varieties of literary composition, the best is drama in any of its ten forms." Other poetic genres, from the courtly epic to the isolate verse, come into being by borrowing structures such as acts and scenes from the ten forms. As for the meaning of the phrase "ten forms," it simply refers to drama, as the author will later say (when speaking of language), "It constitutes the body of drama."194 Now, given the varying degree of their heart's concurrence, those who hear a reading or watch195 a play can have a highly differentiated appreciation, depending on its clarity or obscurity to them. Someone whose heart is by nature like a spotless mirror196 has, for that very reason, a mind no longer subjected to the anger, confusion, craving, and so on typical of this phenomenal world; for such a person, on the occasion of hearing a play with its various appropriate components, the cluster of rasas-the defining feature of drama-will be entirely clear and cognized by a relishing that is essentially a tasting of their commonality.197 Someone else, by contrast, who lacks these traits will require the procedures of actors and the rest of stagecraft in order to attain that sort of perception-like relishing; for such a person the sage-on the maxim that a work of systematic thought must seek to fulfill everyone's needs-has made further provision in the procedures of singing and so on, to loosen the knot of the viewer's heart, hardened as it is by the anger, grief, and so on he bears inside. Thus, rasa exists only in drama-and not in the world-and poetry as a whole is nothing but drama. For the same reason, rasa is not in the actor.198 And if you were still to demand, Where then is it? I would say in reply: What199 a forgetful reader in need of constant reminding! I have already explained that rasa is something completely unconstrained by time, space, and perceiver in any way, shape, or form-why then this question? If you were then to ask, What then is there in the actor? I would answer: a means of savoring. That is why the word used to refer to an actor etymologically signifies "vessel": there is no savoring of liquor that remains in the vessel; the vessel is the means of savoring. When we therefore use the term "actor" it is in the sense of "chief vessel"200 for our savoring rasa. But enough digression. I would only add that from the drama, again-that is, from its meaning portion-are painting, sculpture and the like distilled, just as courtly epics and so on are distilled from its wording portion. We will address this at length in our commentary on NŚ 7.10.201 Others have explained the term "dramatic rasas" as "rasas that come from drama," where the word "drama" (nātya) is taken to mean "a property of an actor" (nata), namely his action,202 drama being an externally visible aggregation of the various registers of acting .... [285.26] Those who hold rasa to be an imitation of desire or other stable emotion respond to the critique of the view that something like grief can be a source of pleasure by arguing that the emotions of the theater are unique. But the critique itself is unfounded. Since when did it become a hard and fast rule that the perception of grief always produces pain in the perceiver's heart? When the pain you are perceiving is that of your enemy, the perception produces joy, and in the case of someone who is neither friend nor foe, mere indifference. And their answer is a sheer postulate on the nature of the theatrical emotions. None of this has an ounce of truth. [286] In our view, what is being savored is simply one's own awareness, which is uniformly blissful, so why would we have any worries about its comprising pain? The fact that one and the same awareness can appear emotionally multiform is simply a result of the operation of latent predispositions of desire, grief,

and so on-which are themselves awakened by the operation of the various registers of acting.

The Causal Relationship of Rasa and Emotion

(1.286.8) The rasas in the actors would seem to be the source of the emotions in the audience, such as their feeling grief from seeing the tragic rasa. Yet the tragic rasa comes to exist in the audience only when it is enhanced by the emotions and other aesthetic elements.203 Hence the doubt arises whether emotion comes from rasa or rasa from emotion. A third position is accordingly also on offer, namely that rasas and emotions are mutually generative at different moments in the process. Then again, one could analyze the three positions as follows: first, the emotion is in the actor alone, or in the character alone, Rama for example; second, when this is enhanced, it becomes rasa; third, when it is diminished, it becomes emotion. But actually, that analysis would be false, since we have already refuted the suggestion that such can be the proper assessment of rasa's nature. There is yet another view of the matter, that of Shri Shankuka.204 It, however, is falsified by the simple fact that the viewer actually perceives no distinction whatever between character and actor. And in any case, the doctrine of imitation itself has already been refuted.205 Therefore, the correct analysis is that there are three questions: Do the emotions derive from the rasas, or rasas from the emotions, or are they mutually generative ?... Now, first of all, the author has stated206 that rasa arises from the emotions and other aesthetic elements, and hence the second view has already been vindicated. But how is this possible? In the real world there exist no aesthetic elements-no "foundational causes" or "stimulant causes," no "reactions," no "transitory emotions"; there, such things have the status simply of real causes and effects. But these are the very things that become aesthetic elements so as to make aesthetic tasting possible. It can therefore be said that the "emotions"-that is, the aesthetic elements-arise by virtue of rasa.207 But then it might well be objected that if the author has already stated that rasa arises by virtue of the aesthetic elements, whereas it is now being claimed that it is by virtue of rasa that the aesthetic elements become such, we have a circularity, and as the Great Commentary on Grammar declares, "Operations based on a circularity do not work."208 Bharata's conclusion is as follows. Upon being apprehended, an aesthetic element-a foundational cause, as for example the female object of desire-affords a savoring of rasa, as previously stated. Hence the emotions here cannot be said to derive from the rasas. And from an examination of the etymological meaning of the word "emotion" itself this makes perfectly good sense [287], as the sage states: they are called emotions (bhava) because they "bring into being (bhavaya-)," or produce, the rasas "when they are fully," i.e., properly, "configured with the various registers of acting," in other words, when the emotions209 come to be lodged in the heart.210 [ ... ] Hence, the author summarizes the position he adopts by saying, "There is no rasa devoid of an antecedent emotion." Given that the opponent would argue that the reverse is also true, that there is no "emotion devoid of an antecedent rasa"-in view of the fact that the aesthetic elements are not part of everyday life211-the author responds by saying, "Their production is mutually effected in the course of acting." In other words, it is only with the presence of acting, or full aesthetic visualization, that aesthetic elements can be referred to as such, insofar as they only then function in support of acting. When they are conceived of in this way, their mutual causality becomes

reasonable, and there is nothing vicious about this sort of circularity. Here the author provides the analogy of the "conjunction of condiments and spices." Just as condiments and food make each other savory, so emotions and rasas bring each other into being-emotions "bring the rasas into being," that is, produce them, and rasas "bring the emotions into being," that is, make them "emotions" in the first place-in other words, make them identifiable as aesthetic elements. The point is that circularity becomes vicious when two things are simultaneously produced in one and the same action, not when there are two actions. For example, food is only made tasty when conjoined with condiments and spices, whereas condiments and spices only become pleasant to eat when they are incorporated into food. Similarly, it is thanks to the emotions that the experience of rasa arises, whereas it is the rasas that enable the causes [288] to be identified as aesthetic elements. To draw an analogy: threads can only be referred to as a cause in reference to a piece of cloth; the cloth, however, can be considered an effect only in reference to the threads. There is no more circularity than this in the case at hand. One might object that, if rasa arises from emotion, why did Bharata state, "We will explain the rasas first, for no aim will be achieved without attention to rasa"?212 Surely it is emotion that should have been addressed first. In response to such an objection, the author uses the analogy of the seed.213 Rasa is just like a seed functioning as the source of a tree. [1] From its source in rasa, instruction arises mediated by pleasure, and it is for this reason that the rasas principally merit comment first.214 [2] The actions of the actor, for his part, because they depend upon the literary text, have their ultimate source in the consciousness of the author that has been commonized-a consciousness that in the final analysis is rasa. [3] The audience members too are captivated first by the apprehension of rasa, and only afterward, by an act of analytical understanding, come to apprehend the various aesthetic elements. Thus the same source, namely rasa, pertains to the work itself,215 to the performance of a drama, and to the audience's awareness.216 It can also be the rasa in the author that corresponds to the seed in the simile, the author being in this identical with the audience; this is why Anandavardhana has said, "If a poet is filled with passion, the whole world of his poem will consist of rasa";217 the literary work would then correspond to the tree, with the various actions of the actor, his registers of acting, corresponding to the flowers and the like, and the savoring of rasa on the part of the audience to the fruit. Thereby the whole world consists of rasa.218 ... 219 Hence, the gist of this discourse is that all three positions can somehow be accommodated, depending on the particular perspective one adopts. [289] [The Treatise on Drama states: "Among the rasas four are generative causes .... "]220 (1.289.13) There are four "causes"-that is to say, indicators-of the engendering of a rasa. In other words, the full range of causal relationships among the rasas can be indicated by reference to just four of them. To explain the four relationships: [1] When we are told that the imitation of the erotic rasa is the comic, the erotic in the form of an imitation is meant to indicate that any rasa presented as a "semblance" is a cause of the comic.221 When we have a semblance of all the aesthetic elements-the foundational and stimulant factors, the reactions, and the transitory emotions-we apprehend a semblance of desire; when this happens, we have a semblance of the erotic rasa that leads in turn to what is essentially a semblance of relishing. Here desire functions not as a stable emotion but only as a transitory one in the form of mere lascivious craving, even though it will seem in the man's own eyes (i.e., the eyes of the antagonist) as if it were indeed stable;222 as a consequence, all the aesthetic elements here become semblances. As a result, desire

becomes a semblance of a stable emotion.223 After all, the idea never enters Ravana's mind224 that Sita must either hate him or be completely indifferent to him, and were it in fact to do so, Ravana's illusion225 would vanish utterly. Instead, he never has done with226 the certainty that she loves him, since his feelings are in essence a delusion produced by sexual passion-exactly like the semblance of silver that can appear where only mother-of-pearl is actually present. Now, it is true that in all of Ravana's utterances,227 as for example,

Hearing her name is like a magnet or a bewitching spell. My heart cannot bear her absence a fraction of a second. These limbs of mine are tortured by love, my desire itself is tormented ... and I see no clear way to ever have the joy of having her.

[290] we find only the semblance of desire; the comic rasa does not manifest itself. Nonetheless, a foundational factor in the shape of Sita;228 a host of transitory emotions (anxiety, despondency, confusion, and the like) that are at odds with Ravana's character and his maturity; the array of reactions, weeping, lamenting, and the like-all this, since it is entirely out of character in him, becomes a semblance of the erotic and thus a foundational factor for the comic (Bharata will define this later, in the passage beginning "Wearing incongruous clothing and jewelry that belong to someone else").229 The erotic rasa is referred to above only to indicate this type of semblancing; we should understand that the semblances of all other rasas, the semblance of the tragic and so forth, also lead to the comic. For to be a foundational factor of the comic amounts to nothing more than such "improper" or out-of-character usage (and this can be extended to the foundational and stimulant factors and the reactions of all the rasas; the same holds true for the transitory emotions). This is why the ancients, who were well versed in the true nature of human consciousness, spoke here and there of "the rasas, the emotions, and the semblances of both."230 We similarly have a semblance of the peaceful rasa leading to the comic when something is not actually a source of liberation but a mere semblance of one. The dramatic form of the farce in particular provides the instruction that impropriety with respect to all the ends of man must be avoided- something that will be enunciated in the definitions of the individual rasas. Among these eight semblances of rasas, the following is an illustration of the semblance of the comic, a poem of Vamanagupta, my father's brother:

His deeds are otherworldly, and if this world does not honor them, well then, what to say? But the fact that the world is raucous with laughter at him ... who wouldn't burst into sidesplitting laughter at that?231

Similarly, the tragic rasa that arises when someone grieves for a person with whom they do not have a kinship bond is itself comic.232 The same reasoning applies to the other rasas. The above can suffice as an example, and others can be inferred from it (I have simply followed here the sage's formulation).233 [2] A second rasa inevitably follows upon the end result of a first. Bharata offers as an example the violent rasa with the tragic as its result. The end result of violence is killing someone, taking

him captive, and so on, and with this foundational factor the tragic rasa will inevitably come about. Here is an example from the Tying Up the Braid:234

This very day the two of us went to the battlefield after seeing our father and mother. They kissed me on the head as I bowed, and did the same to Duhshasana. Now that his enemy has reduced their child to this state, how I can approach our parents, cruel man that I am? What am I to say?

Similarly, the fearful will necessarily follow upon the violent, and the tragic upon the erotic.235 Of course, no effect of the erotic leads necessarily to the tragic, but the erotic can contribute as a subordinate factor to engendering the tragic. This is so in the case of Udayana, king of Vatsa, as a result of the supposed immolation of his queen, Vasavadatta, in the play The Ascetic King of Vatsa. It would be wrong to argue that what we have here has nothing to do with the erotic but is simply grief occasioned by a loved one's death after desire has been interrupted. For we find instances where anger is interrupted even at the moment that the tragic is arising,236 as the author of the other play says: "Let Pandu's sons rejoice, the fires of enmity be quenched by their quelling their foes."237 Nor in fact is the cause of the tragic rasa simply Udayana's being married to Vasavadatta, with desire for her no longer present. Were that the case, in the following verse [291],238

You were trembling, with your garment slipping off in terror, casting those two eyes of yours distressed in every direction, as the cruel fire burned you without pity-was it so engulfed by smoke that it could not see who you were?

the word "those," which bears the life force of the verse, would serve no purpose whatever. In the "Mourning of Rati" a similar sort of memory of the erotic gives life to the tragic:239

I now see those intimacies-"You dwell in my heart"-were tricks, mere figures of speech. How otherwise could your body be gone,240 and your Rati survive?

In the same sense, the fearful can be said to arise from the heroic, as in the verse, "The whole world stood in fear of Arjuna as he killed Karna's son before his very eyes."241 Shri Shankuka, by the way, is wrong to assert that determination, the stable emotion of the heroic, is not at work in the above verse.242 Determination has no scope anywhere if it is not present here, since its prerequisite requires no deep searching: in "the heroic in war," which is at issue in the verse, this prerequisite is what is known as martial ardor, which produces243 the enemy's defeat and brings burning pain to their hearts. And what this ardor gives life to is the fearful rasa, among their wives and so on, as in the following verse:

May he protect you who slaughtered the demons, the few survivors being overcome with terror just to look into their wives' eyes, lovely eyes though they were, that were darkened by kohl as dark as him.244

That there is a necessary relationship between the one and the other rasa is expressed in Bharata's text by the word "and" used directly after the ablative case ("of violence"), intimating immediate consequentiality. [3] Every rasa can aim toward another as its end result. Bharata offers as an example the heroic rasa, with the fantastic as its result. For a great man's determination is exercised with the aim of amazing245 the world as its end result, as for example in the verse, "He was set on breaking the bow of Shiva as he spanned it in his iron-rodlike arms .... "246 The case is different from [2]: the violent rasa does not aim toward the tragic as its end result, but only aims toward destroying the enemy. As for the laughter of the jester in a drama, it has no other aim than provoking the laughter of the leading lady.247 4] One rasa will as a rule strongly imply another because the aesthetic elements248 are common to both. Bharata offers as an example the macabre rasa implying the fearful, for its foundational factors-streams of blood and the like-are necessarily causes of fear;249 so too its transitory emotions, dying, confusion, possession; and its physical reactions, the leering mouth and so on. An example from the Tying Up the Braid:250 "Call back the armies breaking in retreat from the battlefield, dropping their weapons in terror at the macabre sight of Bhimasena spattered with the blood left from what he had drunk from the chest of the dead Duhshasana."251 .. [292.20] These four rasas (the erotic, violent, heroic, and macabre) as generative causes are furthermore intimately related, through their specific properties,252 to the four ends of man: love, wealth, morality, and liberation, respectively.253 The reason is their capacity to produce extraordinary beauty. The other rasas, the comic and so on, insofar as they provide coloration for these, should be presented in dramatic genres as complements to the four. As we stated earlier, this is the total number of rasas. To claim, as Bhatta Lollata does, that rasas are in fact numberless but that only this many should be used, in conformity with the norms of scholarly assemblies, is simply unthinking arrogance.254 [294.5] [The Treatise on Drama states: "Now ... we shall show how a stable emotion becomes rasa."] In everyday life the stable emotions are the states of mind that are the sources of all manner of cares, and bespeak the unbroken series of obligations to which we are subject. And it is these, to be sure, that "we shall show becoming rasa" by becoming the sole basis for the state of absorption, as the teachings declare.255 And they become rasas when poets or actors introduce the aesthetic elements as appropriate. (To quote: "The poet's new vision, preoccupied with enabling the rasas to be tasted"256-here the word "new" is used of poets alone because actors are dependent on poets and have no "new vision" themselves that sees and makes the tasting possible.) Thus, when the author states that, by teaching the proprieties of the aesthetic elements and how they make tasting possible, he will show how the stable emotions become rasa, he is making clear the goal of the account of definitions he is about to offer. Since desire is the goal of aesthetic experience and is something with which everyone's heart concurs, and the erotic is predominantly desire, the author defines the erotic first .... 257 [296.4] He now clarifies the portion of the aphorism "The erotic ... has its origin in the stable emotion of desire" by the following exegesis: "Its cause is a woman and a man .... " With the words "a woman and a man" he means to suggest that the desire that takes the form of a stable emotion and becomes the cause of the erotic rasa is entirely different both from such everyday notions as "This man possesses this woman," which is marked by the experience of mutual craving, and also,

accordingly, from the transitory emotion that persists only during the stage of passion and is essentially nothing more than craving.258 For this stable emotion perdures from the beginning of their relationship to the attainment of the final goal, i.e., the plenitude of pleasure. Predispositions of real-world desire pervade the poet, but when he deploys the aesthetic elements-and the actor the physical reactions-he does so in such a way that the savoring of desire turns into the erotic rasa. And for the person who experiences the savoring too, some experience of real desire in the stage prior to the aesthetic experience is of service to it, as we have already stated. Here is the main point: desire is a game that is fundamentally possible only for two lovers, for it is only with lovers that the stream of pleasure comes to its resting point.259 Everything else, the beauty of physical objects, flower garlands and so on, is manufactured by the poet and merely imaginary. The supreme experience of desire is a fusion that consists in a mutual interpenetration and is accompanied by awareness, for consciousness is the all-important element; everything else260 is only an insensate thing that forms the object of an experience. To quote:

It is merely the vexatious effort of respiration that goes on in my body. My true life breath is Janaki.261

This is why the objection raised by some-that, since there are different kinds of desire depending on the object of desire, the erotic rasa cannot be a single, self-same thing-is based on ignorance. No matter how many forms it takes, desire remains one and the same wherever there is no possibility of separation, thanks precisely262 to this mutual consciousness. And that is why the author specifies that in the erotic rasa "the characters are a young couple of high status."263 ... "High" refers to consciousness, not bodily properties, for it is to sentience that the attributes "high" and "young" actually apply .... 264 And it is this awareness that, as a result of its being fit for savoring, turns into the erotic rasa. In the case of characters who are not of high status or who are not young,265 we do not find the element of persistent stability, and so we do not have this awareness of desire, precisely because there is an expectation of separation, whereas the very life breath of the erotic rasa is awareness of inseparability.266 [297.7] When the author speaks of the two "states" of the erotic rasa, he means two conditions ... not two different species of the erotic, as the dappled and the black form two species of cow. Rather, in both situations desire is continuously present as a bond of mutual care, and the erotic consists of savoring this267 form of desire. To quote:

They say absence makes the heart grow less fond-but in fact the rasa for the beloved grows from enjoyment's lack, and it turns into a mass of love.268

This is why even in the state of the erotic enjoyed we can imagine the state of the erotic thwarted and become fearful, whereas the latter can be permeated with dreams of enjoyment-out of such things is the body of the erotic rasa formed.269 Craving, jealousy, absence from home, and other situations are subsumed under these two, so long as desire in the form of that bond of mutual care is present. Thus the term "the erotic enjoyed" can be figuratively applied even in the absence of enjoyment, whereas we have the highest form of beauty when the two situations are combined, as in the following verse:

They lay upon the bed, each turned aside and suffering in silence; though love still dwelt within their hearts each feared a loss of pride. But then from out the corner of their eyes the sidelong glances met and the quarrel broke in laughter as they turned and clasped each other's neck.270

Here the rasa experience consists precisely of a combination of the erotic enjoyed and the erotic thwarted (of the subtype "jealousy"); it breathes one and the same spirit. It is brought about by the foundational factors, reactions, and transient emotions being mutually shared-all of which make this the highest aesthetic experience possible.

On the Nature of Dramatic Acting

(1.35.12) The idea we come to have about the characters in a dramatic performance is not of some real thing; nor of a similarity, as one twin is similar to another; nor of a cognitive error, like the silver for which we mistake mother-of-pearl as a result of a memory of silver when we see the shell; nor of a superimposition, like the silver brought about by a cognition eventually known to be false once it has been negated by a correct cognition;271 nor of an identification of two things, as in the case of a metaphorical statement like "The man from Balkh is an ox"; nor of a "poetic fantasy" about two things, as in the trope of a woman's face being the moon; nor of their being a copy, as is the case in a painting or clay sculpture; nor of their being an imitation, like the natural desire of a student to imitate the exposition272 of the teacher; nor of a momentary fabrication, as in the case of a magic act; nor of an illusion produced by a stratagem, as in the case of sleights of hand. In all those instances, viewers would remain indifferent because they have no commonality with such objects, and hence they would never be able to savor rasa; or273 they would wind up being subject to mundane feelings of lust, anger, and the like, just as if in the presence of a couple making love in real life, and because of this, whether they thought they were beholding the main character or the performer (since those feelings could be grounded in either), they could never experience the "repose of consciousness" necessary for rasa. Moreover, with respect to the poet, if he were set on describing that sort of particularized being, he could never successfully produce poetry, because he would be rendered incapable of avoiding the kind of impropriety just mentioned.274 What then is drama?275 The answer is as follows: Rama and other such characters are never brought into any such cognitive sphere as those produced by the processes mentioned above.276 Although a sense of their particularity may well issue from a received text-an extended work277 along the lines of the Ramayana-such particularities amount to real individuality, in the sense of the capacity for causal efficacy for the purported deeds, only where they are actually present, and from such texts we do not have a [36] notion of particularity based on actual presence.278 In literary works generally speaking, first of all, the aesthetic elements do come to be generalized in the heart; but among these, with respect to the bare story, although indeed it makes such generalization possible, one's mental state, because of the absence of any deep pleasure, never experiences true conviction, any more than from the bald statement, "Whoever commits such and such an act suffers such and such a consequence."279 With poetic works, whose body consists of stylistic features, figures of speech, and beautiful

words and meanings, and whose life breath is supermundane rasa, it is true that one can have this kind of mental absorption by virtue of the heart's concurrence. But in poetry not everyone can experience the awareness that everything is, as it were, happening before one's very eyes. With respect to drama, however, that is the true state of things.280 The viewer is never predisposed to believe that some quotidian task awaits him; he is only predisposed to believe that he is about to hear and see something supermundane and precious because of its boundless rasa, a pure pleasure he shares in common with all the other audience members. This state renders everyone's heart as spotless as a mirror, and as he relishes the apposite vocal and instrumental music he forgets all phenomenal reality. He begins to identify with the joy or grief that emerges from watching the various registers of acting, from the simple gesticulation281 onward. As other actors enter or their recitations reach his hearing, he gains a kind of "ascertainment" regarding Rama, say, or Ravana, one not penetrated by any particularities of time and space and free from any assessment of the normal cognitive categories of truth, falsehood, doubt, or conjecture. He thereby becomes282 predisposed toward the aforementioned ascertainment about Rama, one accompanied by predispositions activated by the experience of the many beautiful accompanying things-the vocal and instrumental music, the beautiful actresses-which are the causes of the continuity of those earlier predispositions.283 So that for five or six moments284 each spectator is filled with rapture285 and has the idea that he himself has entered into the life story of Rama, and thereby beholds the universe as such while still in his own form; and he comes to possess a form of consciousness of the sort conveyed by the deontic language of scripture-namely, that those who do such and such a thing receive such and such a reward-but without any assessment of the specifics of time and space; a consciousness that is of a general sort but that delights as if particular to him alone,26 which is like the love of one's life,287 and where one's predispositions are activated by the beautiful vocal and instrumental music accompanied by the savoring of rasa; a consciousness implanted into one's very heart in such a way that a hundred cleansings288 could not cause it to fade away; so much so that, since the viewer is now suffused with the desire to attain the good and avoid the bad, he actually comes to do the one and shun the other, given that he has now gained an understanding to this end. Another name for drama is thus, as the text puts it, "re-narration,"289 in other words, a particular kind of reflexive consciousness. There should be no confusion about this being an imitation, since we do not have any sense that the prince or whoever has been "imitated" by a process of mimicry.290 For in fact, imitation is parody and for that reason a source of mere amusement for onlookers. As the sage later says: "The comic arises from imitating someone else's actions."291 [37] One might wonder why, although drama may not, for all that, be an imitation of a particular individual, it cannot still be imitation as such. No reason-aside from the fact that it is impossible. "Imitation" means "making similar," but in our case similar to what? Not Rama, first of all, since technically he cannot be imitated.292 And the same reasoning disqualifies the imitation of all the other foundational factors, the heroine and so on. Nor can it be an imitation of mental states, grief, anger, and so on; the actor does not make his own grief similar to Rama's for the simple reason that he has no grief at all to begin with-and if he did, he would not be producing an imitation. Nor is there anything else he could produce that would be similar to grief. It is true that he produces physical reactions; these are not similar to the others, however, but, precisely, homogeneous with

them. And what sense would it make to say one thing is "similar" to another when the two things have the same properties? As for a universal property, it cannot simultaneously be "similar" to a particular instance; only a discrete thing can be imitated, and then, only in stages. What, in short, would be the meaning of imitation with respect to a thing that exists as a generality? Hence, no one should be confused into concluding that drama is an imitation of things that are not particulars. This is what we should understand as the intention behind my teacher's Literary Investigations, not that drama may indeed be an imitation of nonparticulars.293 Hence, drama is a rendering of something as an object of a particular kind of reflexive consciousness. To explain:294 the costumes and other theatrical props neutralize belief that one is actually perceiving particular actors, Chaitra, say, or Maitra, who exist in a given time and place. But since it would be impossible for perception to function without any trace whatsoever of particularity, a name like "Rama" has its special functionality in this context, communicating as it does a reputed tale as connected with this celebrated name, and thanks to its capacity for thereby eliminating our basic sense of implausibility,295 the viewer's reflexive consciousness takes on the character of a direct perception.296 The play, because it is a site of aesthetic rapture, becomes an appropriate locus for emotional absorption insofar as it is permeated by pleasing vocal music and the rest. The actors' identities are concealed by means of the four registers of acting; the prologue and the other theatrical preliminaries assist the viewer's predispositions produced by knowledge about the actors. Thereby, as he comes before our eyes, the performer enters into the center of the complex of enchanting aesthetic elements, his own identity being concealed; armed with predispositions produced by earlier mundane perceptions and inferences, he is assisted by other predispositions derived from his knowledge of actors and receptive viewers, and he can thereby function as an auxiliary to the process of aesthetic identification through the heart's concurrence. Through him there comes into being this special kind of reflexive consciousness that consists of the light of the bliss that is one's own pure consciousness; it is "laden"297 with this or that mental state, pleasurable or painful, as the case may be and hence multifarious; something that is given many different names-tasting, savoring, rapture, relishing, enjoyment, experience. The thing that reveals itself in this reflexive consciousness is what we call "drama." It hardly matters whether this "thing," as I call it, is a mere mental construct, a superimposition,298 a generality, a temporary artifact, or whatever.299 We have no desire to impose upon the sensitive reader by impeding the analysis of the matter at hand with irrelevant disquisitions that only serve to put on display the author's intimacy with discourses from other philosophical traditions. Hence, drama is a "narration"300 that consists of a reflexive consciousness "laden" with conceptual sense experience of the sort earlier described; for drama is made known by this kind of awareness. What drama is not is an imitation. There is no harm, of course, in saying that it is "imitation" (anu-karana) in the sense that it "accords with" (anu-sari-) the "doings" (karana) of the real-world characters, since the use of such terminology is not a source of controversy so long as the actual distinction is kept securely in mind.

On "Verbal Acting"

(2.221)301 Some scholars have argued that the actual words for the aesthetic-emotional elements302

are themselves external to the creation of the mental state of rasa,303 but this is erroneous. To explain: they argue that rasa cannot be communicated by the words because the negative concomitance304 is invalid. But the invalidity of the negative concomitance is itself unproven to apply to any and all such words. For305 as we explained in the seventh chapter, the fourfold form of general acting must indeed be involved where any clear apprehension of rasa is present.306 But then, they retort, we actually do apprehend the erotic and other rasas even in the absence of such words as "the erotic" that directly express them, as in the following poem:

Your cheek is pale as a ripened śara reed; like a lotus folding its petals in wintertime is your eye; and your lips, wilted with hot breath lingering, slender girl, bring the god of love to life.307

And that, they say, is surely an instance of the "absence of the negative concomitance." But their argument here too is flawed, since it would be easy to identify some other cause for the apprehension of rasa here.308 The same reasoning applies in this case as in that of, say, scorpions: those born of dung are of one sort, those born of other scorpions are of another.309 And if that is acceptable, as it should be, our situation would be analogous. We may not have precisely the same kind of apprehension of rasa when the word "erotic" is used as we do under other circumstances; that said, it is not true that we do not have some apprehension of rasa from the word "erotic," for if that were the case it would turn out that a statement like "The erotic, comic ... are the eight dramatic rasas"310 would be as meaningless as the cawing of crows. When words are used in their conventional meaning, what is to stop them from denoting things, whether substantive or verbal? And hence the fact of something's being a verbal form is no source of discomfort for our theory: what are we to say about the semantic capacity on the part of such forms as "one eroticizes," or "one is amused," "one tragicizes"? It is essential that such words be expressive of rasa, for otherwise, if your argument were valid, in poems like the following,

When Krishna left for Dvaravati the pining Radha embraced the reeds on the bank of the Kalindi bent over from his footfall, and the song she sang-shrill and broken by deep convulsive sobs- made even the creatures in the water start to moan with yearning.311

[222] the restatement of the transitory emotions by the emotion words "pining" and "yearning" would be completely useless: they would have no capacity for enhancing the physical reactions because they could never actually convey those bodily forms.312 And when we apprehend the variety of transitory emotions pertaining to a given stable emotion, as in the following poem,

As she receded, she kept turning her face toward me, bending round like a lotus upon the stalk of her neck, her long-lashed eyes implanting in the depths of my heart a glance that was barbed at once with nectar and with poison.313

it would be virtually impossible to comprehend the physical reactions, to say nothing of the rasa

itself, since we would have no understanding of the actions of those things that enliven the woman's glance-"turning," "bending," "implanting," "barbed." The same arguments apply to a verse like "Absorbed, or mirrored she seems, or painted."314 Indeed, they apply to a whole host of poems: "With a laugh they flung themselves into a close embrace"; "Lakshmi's body, her arms slack with torpor"; "Only for a few days did she show some torpor in her eyes";

When you see something beautiful or hear sweet sounds and grow melancholy even though you are happy, it's because you are remembering unknowingly attachments from a former life lodged in your being.

[223] "Her eyes closed in sleep, languid with passion"; "The Mountain's daughter too was revealing her emotions with her limbs":315 in all these poems-themselves the very image of the full moon rising over the ocean that is the hearts of sensitive readers-if the laughter, torpor, longing, sleepiness, intoxication, craving, and so on,316 the very things that enliven them, were not able to be conveyed by the words themselves, the poems would be as stolid as men whose natures cannot be swayed by any foundational cause,317 and resemble nothing so much as the meaningless play of crows and cranes ....

4.3 POTENTIAL FLAWS OF RASA

Light on Poetry of Mammata (c. 1050) with the Commentaries of Shridhara (c. 1225), Chandidasa (c. 1300), Vishvanatha (c. 1350), and Paramananda Chakravartin (c. 1500)

The analysis of literary aesthetics in general and rasa in particular had from the beginning been provided in one or another specialized treatise: works on dramaturgy in general (such as the Treatise on Drama), or on figures of speech (such as the Looking Glass of Poetry), or linguistic modalities (such as Light on Implicature), or general literary criticism (such as the Vital Force of Literary Language). There was clearly a need for a more comprehensive assessment of literary art, and it was provided by Mammata in his Light on Poetry. I find no compelling reason to think that Mammata did not write both the memorial verses and the exegesis (his reference in the latter to himself as "the author" is typical of the genre), though others have raised doubts. Mammata begins with a definition of literature, one that would be repeated, and contested, down the centuries, and goes on to investigate its linguistic modalities, the nature of rasa, language qualities, literary flaws, figures of sound and of sense-the whole range of literary topics outside of dramaturgy. No other work on the subject has been remotely as popular or influential. The Light has been preserved in thousands of manuscripts all across India, and has attracted scores of commentators beginning as early as the mid-twelfth century, one of whom, as late as the eighteenth, refers to Mammata in all sincerity as an "incarnation of Sarasvati, goddess of language."318 We know next to nothing about Mammata. Given whom he mentions (including Bhoja, unexpectedly in a northern work such as this) and the date and place of appearance of the earliest commentaries, he must be placed in the second half of the eleventh century and in Kashmir. We have only one other work of his, the brief Introduction to Linguistic Modalities (Sabdavyāpāraparicaya). It is clear that Mammata studied Abhinavagupta's Eye for Light on Implicature with great care. His analysis of rasa is the quasi- chronological one borrowed from Abhinava, and he has nothing of his own to add; direct access to the works treated there had by his time clearly become difficult, if not impossible. Mammata's analysis ends triumphantly with Abhinava and the theory he developed in The Eye-and not, significantly, the more mature one in The New Dramatic Art, which Mammata appears not to know. And that earlier theory, given the extraordinary impact of the Light, would henceforth dominate the discourse.

If Mammata has nothing of his own to add to the concept of rasa, he does provide an innovative and systematic analysis of one aspect that had previously been treated in a piecemeal fashion: the range of flaws to which rasa is liable. Much is borrowed from Ananda's Light on Implicature-in terms of both argument and illustration-though Mammata introduces greater order into this material and, on occasion, addresses it with greater insight. What obstructs the creation of the aesthetic experience obviously at the same time tells us a great deal about what makes such experience possible. If we are given insufficient information in the literary text, for example, something especially important in short works as the isolate poem; if we are given misleading information; if a rasa is introduced at the wrong moment (the erotic in the context of the horrors of war, for example), the aesthetic experience will be defective. We already learned from the Treatise on Drama that affective states and social states (and gender) are related: male characters of high status feel erotic desire, but not fear, whereas amusement is felt by characters of low status and women. Misaligning emotional and social state, accordingly, also disrupts the rasa. An overriding concern of Mammata is "propriety," which comprises both verisimilitude (with respect to "time, place, age, gender, and caste") and moral correctness-the two in fact being coextensive. These had been concerns of Sanskrit criticism for centuries, but Mammata again adds systematicity to the discussion. And he reexamines, in a concentrated and insightful way, the thesis on the use in literature of the "proper terms" of rasa (employing the word "erotic" in an erotic passage, for example) put forward by Udbhata three centuries earlier, restated by Pratiharenduraja, critiqued by Shri Shankuka and Anandavardhana, and defended by Abhinava:319 there is a domain, he argues, where the words for certain emotional states must in fact be used, since they give an apprehension of the emotion that no description suffices to do. And last, Mammata reengages with the question of conflict of rasa, already introduced by Ananda and Dhanika, where like his two predecessors he is able to demonstrate how acutely perceptive "practical criticism" could be. I preface this selection with Mammata's account (and later interpretations of his account) of the peaceful rasa and "emotion poetry," early and influential discussions of two important issues in aesthetic response: how one responds emotionally to a (supposed) absence of emotion, and why an emotional response to poetry about love for God cannot be rasa-and indeed, what "emotion poetry," introduced by Udbhata in the early ninth century and largely ignored afterward, actually is. A selection from the long tradition of interpretation is added, including remarks by Ruyyaka (c. 1150), Shridhara (c. 1225), Chandidasa (c. 1300), Vishvanatha (c. 1350), and the genial Paramananda Chakravartin (c. 1500). While some commentators question the very possibility of emotion poetry on theoretical grounds, strikingly, none of them observes that it renders the idea of the "devotional rasa" a pure contradiction in terms. The imminent arrival of a full defense of that rasa (chapter 6.3) would radically challenge the whole discourse.

FROM LIGHT ON POETRY OF MAMMATA (M), AND SELECTIONS FROM COMMENTARIES

Chapter 4: The Peaceful Rasa and "Emotion Poetry"

(M) (35ab): An additional rasa is the peaceful, its stable emotion being dispassion.

(Shridhara) (p. 780):320 By "dispassion" is meant true knowledge. The view that the stable emotion of the peaceful rasa is "impassivity," or the cessation of all mental states, is quite mistaken. To quote:321 "If absence meant absolute negation, there would be an absence of all mental states and hence no emotion at all. Our view, accordingly, assumes specific negation .... "322 ... "322 [781.4] The argument has been made that while everyone can apprehend the peaceful rasa, not everyone will appreciate it, and hence it cannot be a real rasa.323 But if that were true, other rasas that are not appreciated by everyone would also cease to be rasas. The erotic, for example, is not appreciated by the lower social orders, the miserably dressed villagers, who are gripped only by the brute feelings of desire common to all creatures;324 nor the heroic by the cowardly .... As for the "heroic in compassion," it differs

markedly from the peaceful. It is characterized by a developed sense of self, since its stable emotion is determination of the sort that blazes forth with energy, satisfied with nothing less than conquest of the three worlds. That sense of self finds expression in such thoughts as "It is I who am doing such and such," or "By doing such and such I will gain such and such a reward." Where, by contrast, one performs an act required by scripture with no expectation of reward, and with all sense of self eliminated, we have the peaceful rasa. The author, however, understands the heroic in compassion as another name for the peaceful ... but the fact is that it is only where the sense of self is utterly extinguished, whether in the heroic in compassion or the heroic in munificence, that they may be counted subspecies of the peaceful rasa.

(M) An example:

A snake or necklace, a flower-strewn bed or stone, a jewel or clod, strong enemy or friend, straw or women-may I regard them as all the same and pass my days in a holy forest chanting "Shiva, Shiva, Shiva."325

(Ruyyaka) (p. 779): Here the highest truth (expressed in the chanting of Shiva's name) constitutes the foundational factor; the holy forest the stimulant factor; the unchanging views the reaction; the anxiety detectable in the prayer the transitory emotion, with constancy and others also implicit. These "manifest" the peaceful rasa. (This procedure of analyzing the various aesthetic elements, here shown for the first time, will be used again elsewhere for the purposes of instruction; sensitive readers should consider it carefully.)

(M) (4.35cd-4.36ab): When desire is directed to a deity or comparable figure, or when what is principally manifested is a transitory emotion, we have "emotion" rather than rasa.326 "Comparable figures" include a sage, a teacher, a king, and a son. By contrast, when it is desire directed toward the beloved that comes to manifestation, we have the erotic rasa. An example of the first type of "emotion":

World-destroying poison I would take as nectar were it lodged within your throat, dear Lord, and spurn nectar within my very grasp were it separate from your body.327

(Shridhara) (p. 790): Desire and so on, when directed toward a deity and the like, as in the case of devotion or panegyric, is not a stable emotion and hence becomes specifically a transitory emotion. Thus, although the desire can be manifested by the aesthetic elements, it is not a rasa. (Chandidasa) (p. 790): It is because the desire lacks the seed of full enhancement in conformity with a situation of mutuality that it does not become rasa. Were the enhancement to be fully realized, desire for a deity would be a subspecies of the tranquil rasa, such is the basic idea .... Amusement and the other stable emotions as well, when they are not enhanced, are also understood by sensitive critics as simply "emotions." In those cases too we find both traits, the awakening of latent predispositions as well as a composite form of awareness,328 that we found to be present in rasa in accordance with our foregoing analysis; we call the one "emotion" and the other "rasa" in acknowledgment of the difference in their natures. (Vishvanatha) (791): At the moment of savoring we have no sense that some elements are dominant, others subordinate, since literary meaning is always grasped as a unity. It is only subsequently that analytical thinkers have this distinctive experience of the predominance of an "emotion." ... In some cases stable emotions remain just "emotions"329 due to the absence of full enhancement through mutual affection, once we consider the whole context. An example is "Hara, however, lost his composure .... "330 (Paramananda Chakravartin) (793): The argument has been made that any stable emotion lacking the full enhancement

produced by the aesthetic elements and simply awakened counts as "emotion"; the example given is "Hara, however, lost his composure." Since here we find desire awakened in Shiva but lacking full enhancement (given that he is about to burn the god of love and abandon the company of the woman), it is supposed to remain "emotion" and does not become rasa. But this argument is false. That there is a savoring derived from this verse, which is fully enhanced by all the aesthetic elements, can be ascertained by our actual experience. The imminent burning of the god of love and the other impediments to rasa have no effect on this, since they have yet to occur.331 And one cannot argue that the impediments are at that very minute descending upon those audience members who may indeed be familiar with the larger context [794] without at the same time admitting that a full enhancement of desire must derive from the vast empire of pleasure recounted in the poem's eighth canto detailing the joy of Shiva and Parvati's marriage. In fact, the very experience of savoring brought about and manifested by the verse in question shows that no obstacle332 to rasa is presented by reflecting on the larger context of the literary work-otherwise in a drama where the heroic, for example, is the dominant rasa, no other rasa could ever play a contributing role, since a consideration of the context would always render the heroic all-powerful .... In the above verse "World-destroying poison ... ," Shiva is the foundational factor; his infinite lordliness, signaled by the word "Lord," the stimulant factor; the eulogy itself the reaction; constancy, remembering333 the Lord's greatness and the like, the transitory emotions. The desire here, which the aesthetic elements awaken in the audience-who infer from these elements the desire in the eulogist-and which is self-manifesting and a composite form of awareness, is said to remain "emotion." Why, one might object, is there in this case no rasa? There is no evidence that the desire in question is not pleasurable; it is no different from rasa with respect to the totality of aesthetic elements; and surely in one way or another it can be savored, if only like relishing a dry coconut-though in fact, if one proceeded more thoroughly, the way sugarcane stalk is relished, one would have an experience of full homogeneous bliss.334 If one adduces as proof of this being "emotion" poetry the evidence provided by the heart of the sensitive reader,335 well, is the person making this argument the one and only sensitive reader? In actuality, it is only a result of the fact that the sage Bharata has arbitrarily established that there are nine and only nine rasas, just as Gotama established there to be five and only five logical fallacies:336 "There are only nine rasas," said the sage, "and the rest is simply 'emotion.'"

(M) (elucidation) Here is an example of when the transitory emotion is principally manifested:

I saw my love in a dream last night, turning her back in anger and crying "Don't touch me!" and starting to walk away, but I swear to you, brother, I am sure I could have taken her in my arms and calmed her with a hundred sweet nothings if wretched fate had not gone and robbed me of my sleep.

Here the transitory emotion that is principally manifested is resentment directed toward fate.

(Shridhara) (801): While it is undoubtedly the case that we have here implicature of rasa-of the erotic thwarted, made beautiful by the stable emotion of desire, which itself is stimulated by the dream vision-the real point of the poem is the resentment toward fate prompted by the man's anger.

Chapter 7: The Flaws of Rasas

(M) (7.60-62) The flaws that can afffect rasa are the following: [1] employing the proper term for a

stable emotion, a transient emotion, or a rasa, or the word "rasa" itself; [2] manifesting a reaction or foundational factor in a way grasped only with difficulty; [3] making use of an antithetical aesthetic element; [4] repeatedly arousing a rasa;337 [5a] unfolding a rasa at the wrong moment338 or [5b] terminating it at the wrong moment; [6] excessively describing a subsidiary component of the rasa; [7] ignoring a dominant component; [8] misassigning rasas to dramatic characters; [9] describing something nonessential. An example of [1]:

Parvati's glances in all their variety-ashamed before the face of her beloved, tragic before the elephant hide, frightened before the serpent, amazed before the moon flowing with nectar, jealous before Ganga, and despondent before the hollows of the skulls339 may these glances, when she first found delight in Shiva's embrace, bring you welfare.

In this verse, it is a flaw that the words "shame" and the rest are employed. The poem would have been correct, however, had "lowered" been used (for "ashamed"), "shut tight" (for "tragic"), "trembling" (for "frightened"), "unblinking" (for "amazed"), "frowning" (for "jealous"), "saddened" (for "despondent"). In the case of "rasa," the flaw occurs when the proper term itself ("rasa") is used or the terms for any of the individual rasas, such as "erotic" and so on ...; 340 and when the proper terms for the stable emotions are used, e.g., "determination." ... An example of [2]:

As the moon flooded the sky with streams of luster white as powdered camphor, the arrangement of her veil revealed to the young man's gaze her heaving breast.

Here we have a stimulant factor (the moon) and foundational factor (the woman) entirely appropriate to the erotic, but they do not lead naturally341 to the requisite physical reactions.342 In this next example,

He avoids all pleasure, stops thinking, trips over himself or wanders in circles- his wretched state overpowers his body, and there's nothing to be done for it.343

because avoiding pleasure and the other reactions can also occur in the tragic rasa, it is only with effort we come to comprehend the foundational factor here, namely, the man's beloved (and the rasa, the erotic thwarted). An example of [3]:

My love, be gracious, show your favor and put your anger away; my body is withering away, sprinkle the nectar of your words upon it; show me, if only a moment, your face, the source of all delights. My simple girl, time is a fleet deer that, once fled, never returns.344

Here in an erotic poem the poet has used a stimulant factor of the peaceful rasa-the disclosure of the transience of life-which is antithetical to the erotic, as well as an antithetical transitory

emotion disclosed by that factor, namely, dispassion. Another example:

When her paramour appeared before her in the midst of her in-laws the young wife was ready to give up everything and leave at once for the forest.

In this poem, giving up everything and leaving for the forest are reactions of the peaceful rasa. Had the poet indicated that under the guise of collecting firewood she left for the forest to make love, there would have been no flaw. An example of [4] occurs in the lamentation of Rati in the fourth chapter of the "Birth of the War God."345 An example of [5a] is found in the second act of the Tying Up the Braid, when, after countless brave warriors have been slaughtered, we have a description of the erotic rasa of Duryodhana and Bhanumati;346 an example of [5b] occurs in the second act of the Life of the Great Hero when, as the heroic rasa of Rama and Parashurama is reaching a climax, Rama announces that he is going off to untie Sita's marriage bracelet.347 An example of [6] are the descriptions of Hayagriva in the Slaying of Hayagriva.348 An example of [7] is found in the play Ratnavali when, with the arrival of Babhravya, Sagarika herself is completely forgotten.349 [8] The dramatic characters are gods, humans, and demigods, and are further subdivided into the four types of protagonist, the dignified, proud, romantic, and peaceful, that are fundamentally related to the heroic, violent, erotic, and peaceful rasas, respectively; and yet further into high, middle, and low status. With respect to these characters, desire, amusement, grief, and amazement may be ascribed to gods as well as humans of high status,350 but desire in the form of the erotic enjoyed is not to be actually described in the case of gods of high status. It would be something entirely inappropriate, like describing the lovemaking of one's own parents.351 Anger of the sort that carries immediate consequences but without there being any physical transformation in the subject, such as knitting the brows, is to be ascribed to gods alone. An example:

"Restrain, dear Lord, restrain your anger"-with the wind gods' words echoing in the sky the fire that flashed from Shiva's third eye reduced the god of love to ash.352

The same restriction to gods holds also for the stable emotion of determination when it comprises such acts as journeying to heaven or hell, or leaping over the ocean. With respect to humans, however, the literary composition should describe a great act only so far as tradition or propriety permits. Exceeding these limits in composing the narrative winds up creating false appearances that inhibit the communication of the central moral, namely, to act like the protagonist and not like the antagonist. This applies, on both counts (that is, of tradition and propriety), to demigods353 as well .... [9] The description of something "nonessential" means the description of something that does not contribute to the rasa. An example is found in Karpuramanjari, where the king discusses the description of springtime given by the court bards while ignoring his own description and that of the female protagonist.354 "Such" in the memorial verse indicates that there are other kinds of

impropriety, as, for example, describing a lover who becomes angry when spurned by his beloved. To quote the author of the Implicature: "The one thing that can impair rasa is impropriety .... "355 The author now goes on to argue that in some instances even such things do not become flaws: (63ab) In some instances356 there is no flaw when a transitory emotion is referred to by its proper term. For example, in the verse "Gauri, rushing in her longing,"357 the use of the proper term of the transitory emotion gives us an apprehension of a sort that any physical reaction associated with the emotion alone would not. Thus, in the verse358 about a mistress's eyes upon seeing her errant lover, "Filled with longing when he was at a distance, downcast when he drew near ... brimming with tears when he bowed at her feet," it is clear that we do not derive the same comprehension of longing from its physical reaction (suddenly hurrying out or the like)359 as we do of shame or attachment360 from their respective physical reactions (being downcast and weeping). And that is why the poet has used the proper term for the transitory emotion, "longing," in reference to Gauri. (63cd) The use of a transitory emotion or other aesthetic element pertaining to a conflictual rasa, when it is referred to as being negated, enriches the work. When an aesthetic element is referred to in such a manner that it is negated, it is not only not a flaw but actually enhances the rasa at issue. Take as an example the following verse:

What has the royal lunar line to do with moral lapses? When might I see her again? My education was meant to check such failings. Even in anger her face is beautiful. What will those virtuous wise men say? Not even in my dreams can I attain her .... Oh mind, get a grip on yourself! I wonder what lucky lad is sipping at her lip?361

Here, although expression is given to a range of transitory emotions such as perplexity-these are in each odd-numbered line and pertain to the peaceful rasa, which conflicts with the erotic in the even-numbered lines-our minds come to rest on anxiety ("I wonder ... "), in such a way that the primary rasa362 is enhanced. An example with respect to reactions:

Your face is wan and drawn, your heart filled with chyle [or: passion],363 your body torpid- all signs, dear friend, that in your heart some illness has come that can't be cured.

Here, since a wan complexion and so on are common to several rasas (the tragic and the erotic in particular), there is in fact no conflict at all.364 An example with respect to foundational factors:

Women are charming, true enough, and, true enough, riches are grand. But the only thing more unstable than a woman's glance is life itself.365

The idea in the first half of this verse (the erotic) is presented only to be negated in the second (the peaceful). It is of course universally understood that it is the woman's glance that is more

unstable than life, and hence using the glance only as a standard of comparison for instability serves to enhance the peaceful rasa and it alone: we have no apprehension here whatever of the erotic, because no other aesthetic elements (such as the glance acting as physical reaction to desire) are available to enable us to comprehend it as such. One cannot say that there is a conflict here between the two rasas and resolve it by arguing that the erotic is used to catch the attention of young students who need to understand the importance of the peaceful rasa, because the erotic and the peaceful cannot exist in immediate proximity to each other. Nor can the presence of the erotic here be justified by claiming it is a way of "beautifying" the poem, because beautification can come about by means of the other rasa alone (i.e., the peaceful), or simply through the figure of sound in the verse.366 (64) A rasa that conflicts with another by being located in one and the same substratum should be moved to a different one; a rasa that conflicts with another from immediate proximity with it should be separated by a third rasa. The heroic and the fearful are in conflict when located in the same substratum, and hence the fearful should be located in the antagonist. The peaceful and the erotic are in conflict when in immediate proximity, and so must be separated by a third rasa. Thus, in the drama How the Nagas Were Pleased, between Jimutavahana's peaceful rasa at the start and his erotic rasa directed toward Malayavati, the fantastic rasa is interposed (in the scene where he says, "What amazing singing! What amazing music!").367 This procedure applies not only at the level of the work as a whole but even in a single passage: the conflict between two rasas can be resolved by the interposition of a third, as in the following passage:

Befouled with dust from the ground-while perfumed with pollen from heavenly coral tree garlands; held tightly by jackals-while embraced by the women of the gods; fanned by the wings of carrion birds flashing crimson with blood- while refreshed by silken celestial vines scented with sandalwood essence: the heroic warriors, seated in heavenly chariots, gazed down upon their own dead bodies as beautiful goddesses pointed them out with intense curiosity.368

Here, between the macabre and the erotic rasas, the heroic is interposed. (65) There is no flaw [1] when a conflictual rasa is the object of a memory; [2] when it is intended as a comparison; or [3] when rasas that conflict with each other become subsidiaries to a third, dominant rasa. [1] Consider the following verse:

This used to loosen my belt and untie the knot holding up my skirt, and fondle my heavy breasts and touch my navel and thighs and mound-this very hand.369

The wife of Bhurishravas addresses these words to her husband, lying dead on the battlefield, when she catches sight of his severed hand. Here, the recollection of a former state of affairs, though a component of the erotic rasa, does not conflict with the tragic but enhances it. An

example of [2]:

The bites and nail wounds on your body, left by the lioness in her lust for blood [or: in her passion for you] and your hair everywhere stiffening with pleasure- even the monks observe all this with longing.370

Here, the bites and the rest on the Buddha's body are described as being as wonderful as those on a lover's; and just as a susceptible bystander might observe the lover and long for such an experience himself, so do the monks when they see the Buddha's wounds. Here a comparison is intended between the two rasas. An example of [3]:

As they wander the sharp-grass thickets, their soft toes cut and the dripping blood coloring their feet as though with lac, their faces washed with tears of fear, their hands held in their husbands' hands and circling the forest fires, today the wives of your enemies are reliving their wedding day.371

What we apprehend in this verse of flattery to a king is the poet's own desire,372 and because both the tragic and the erotic are equally subsidiary to it, there is no conflict between them. Consider this analogy:

"Come, go, sit down, stand up, speak, be quiet"-This is how the rich will play with the poor possessed as they are by the demon Hope.373

Here, each of the verbs is used only with reference to "play," so any contradiction between them in themselves-between coming and going, and so on-is only apparent. A second example of [3]

Like a husband whose betrayal is still moist, it was driven away when trying to clutch their hand, it was mercilessly struck when grasping their hem, shaken off when stroking their hair, and spurned in a panic when falling at their feet, and when attempting an embrace forcefully rebuffed by the women of the Triple City, tears brimming in their eyes: may this fire of Shiva's arrows burn away your sins.374

In this poem, the tragic is subsidiary to the dominant meaning, namely, the grandeur375 of Shiva, enemy of the Triple City, whereas the erotic in turn is subsidiary to the tragic; since our minds do not come to rest on the tragic, however, it too remains subsidiary.376 Alternatively, we can say the erotic becomes subsidiary by enhancing the tragic-with the god's fire being likened to the behavior of the women's lovers who had strayed in the past-which in turn strengthens that same principal meaning. To quote: "Once developed, a subordinate element becomes more dominant and thereby assists the true dominant all the more."377

One final point: since rasa, given our earlier description,378 cannot ultimately conflict with another rasa or exist in a principal-subsidiary relationship with it, the word "rasa" here may be taken as referring to the stable emotion.

4.4 THE PURIFIED THEORY IN ABSTRACT

Short Explanation of Light on Poetry, and Commentary on Analysis of "Manifestation" of Ruyyaka (1150)

Ruyyaka was a leading intellectual in Kashmir in the first half of the twelfth century. We have already encountered the work of his father, Tilaka, on Udbhata's treatise. Aside from Ruyyaka's commentaries excerpted below-he left one of the earliest on Mammata's treatise, and the only one on Mahima Bhatta's-he wrote an account of figures of speech, the Compendium of Tropes, that stands as one of the most penetrating in the long history of reflection on the topic, as well as a short treatise on qualities of the leading female character (The Connoisseur's Sport, Sahrdayalīlā). Ruyyaka's significance for the history of aesthetics lies in part in being an early witness of the emergent consensus on some key elements of the rasa discourse. One is the basic outline of Abhinavagupta's theory of rasa, which Ruyyaka offers in his commentary on Mammata. This outline is derived entirely from Abhinava's Eye for Light on Implicature; Ruyyaka appears to know nothing of The New Dramatic Art. Another is the recoding of the notion of "manifestation," on which Ruyyaka provides the first explicit reflection. As we saw, this concept was introduced by Anandavardhana to make sense of how literary texts produce the idea of an emotion (and other sorts of meaning, whether narrative or figurative). Abhinava transformed Ananda's manifestation of emotion in the text into a manifestation of emotion in the heart of the sensitive reader. Ruyyaka explains and defends this new signification vigorously, and, strikingly, does so in his commentary on a book, Analysis of "Manifestation," that not only seems to know nothing of this transformation but actually leveled a full-scale critique against Ananda's original conception.

FROM SHORT EXPLANATION OF LIGHT ON POETRY OF RUYYAKA

(p. 577) According to Abhinavagupta, in keeping with the doctrine of implicature, rasa is something "manifested" and the aesthetic elements are the medium of manifestation, the relation between them therefore being one of object and agent of manifestation. It is the stable emotion379 that appropriately turns into rasa.380 The relation is expressed in the Sutra on Rasa by the word "conjunction," and the word "arises" means "manifested." Rasa belongs to the audience, not to the character or the actor .... The fact that the aesthetic elements are common to both the character and the viewer/reader entails that the object of cognition too, namely, the stable emotion, should be common. And this entails a commonality of the cognition itself. Accordingly, acts such as Hanuman's leaping over the ocean, prompted by emotions common to both the character and the viewer/reader, can become objects of aesthetic experience, precisely because the latter apprehends himself as identical with the former. There would indeed be a logical problem if this were reversed and the commonality of the cognizer were predicated upon the commonality of the object cognized. But that is not the position we take, and hence our view of manifestation is perfectly sound. To explain: no one devoid of the pertinent predispositions can savor rasa. Thus, Vedic ritualists

and desiccated theologians, even when they are in the theater, sit like logs because they have no capacity for aesthetic sublimity; ascetics and religious celibates are similarly excluded from the savoring of the erotic rasa; men of deep passion are incapable of savoring the tranquil rasa, whereas men who have never experienced the touch of grief are like stones when the opportunity of savoring the tragic rasa is afforded them. Hence, [578] the very capacity to relish rasa is a sign of one's predispositions. And what becomes rasa by virtue of the aesthetic elements is that primordial predisposition, which is in fact the stable emotion (and never a transitory emotion, given the technical definition of the term "rasa"). And it is through "manifestation" alone that the stable emotion becomes rasa by means of the aesthetic elements, since there obtains between emotion and the elements a relationship of object and agent of manifestation. To explain briefly: manifestation is of two sorts. In one kind, the effect exists in subtle form in the cause, and "manifestation" signifies the acquisition of its gross form, as in the case of the white substance that exists in the milk state and then takes on the form of yogurt. This sort of manifestation is independent of any cognition and is simply inherent in the thing itself. The second kind, however, is a cognition of the thing when mediated via the cognition of the medium of manifestation, as in the case of a pot and a lamp: we cognize the pot only in association with the cognition of the lamp, because the lamp is the medium of manifestation. To quote: "Manifestation produces a cognition of something else-if that something is an already existing entity-by the cognition of itself, as in the case of a lamp. Were the situation other than this-i.e., were the object not an already existing entity-there would be no difference between manifesting a thing and actually making it."381 With respect to these two types, in the present case we accept that rasa and the aesthetic elements have a relationship of object and agent of manifestation of the second sort, because rasa is cognized in association with the cognition of the elements, on the analogy of the taste of the mixed drink. This is why the author of the Light on Implicature spoke of manifestation with reference to rasa as one where "no succession is registered," and has used the example of the pot and lamp.

FROM THE COMMENTARY ON ANALYSIS OF "MANIFESTATION" OF RUYYAKA

(p. 62) The reasoning of the advocate of "manifestation"382 ... is as follows .... [63] It is incorrect to attempt to vindicate inference instead of manifestation, or to claim that if the notion of manifestation is used it can only be in a figurative sense, by resorting to the idea that the aesthetic elements and the stable emotions are actually factitious.383 It is relishing that actually animates rasa, and it is the sensitive viewer/reader alone who relishes rasa; hence, when we characterize rasa's essence, it must be as something that exists in the viewer/reader. Rasa does not exist in the character or the actor, because we can only apprehend rasa through commonization, which requires eliminating all the character's (or actor's) particularities, those of space, time, status, and literary type. It is not of course completely incoherent to ascribe rasa to a character such as Rama or the actor portraying him, since they participate in rasa.384 But it is altogether incorrect to classify rasa as existing in them, given the authoritative statement of the sage himself that "The stable emotion itself is rasa."385 Since, accordingly, it is the stable emotion that is rasa, and since those who lack rasa themselves cannot relish it, the stable emotions really and truly exist in the form of our

predispositions, and they become rasa when they are made accessible to the act of relishing-such is our position. There is nothing factitious here about the rasas, desire and the rest, nor indeed, even about the causes, effects, and ancillary causes that come to be designated "factors" ("foundational" and "stimulant"), "reactions," and "transitory emotions" when apprehended by the viewer/reader as common to him, because these actually do exist: they are called "foundational factors" and so on in the primary sense of the terms only when apprehended by a sensitive viewer/reader; otherwise they remain "causes" and the like. (This was the intention of the sage in giving these things their supermundane designations in the Sutra on Rasa.) Therefore, the truly existing stable emotion in the form of a predisposition is manifested by the aesthetic elements without the interposition of any recollection of some connection386 among them. Given this, rasa is "manifested" in a quite literal and not figurative sense, while its being something that must be inferred is refuted. The same holds for the emotions. As for the four different kinds of manifestation that have been recognized,387 depending on whether the object of manifestation is real or not, that subject is quite irrelevant here, because we accept for our theory of manifestation the model of the lamp and the pot. It is also false to raise the specter of the absurdity that, if the manifestation were real, the rasa would have to become visible. We do not refute our opponent's view by way of his own definition of manifestation as "coming to visibility"; and in fact no one has defined the term this way. It can be defined generally (according to the statement, "Manifestation produces a cognition of something else ... ") as "coming to awareness." There is accordingly no objection whatsoever to the application of "manifestation" to rasa.