Books / A Rasa Reader Classical Indian Aesthetics Sheldon Pollock

16. 113. DhĀL pp. 335-36.

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  1. DhĀL pp. 335-36.

  2. ABh 1.261;1.36, below.

  3. ABh. 1.292.20; ABh 1.276, below.

  4. Rorty 1989: xvi; 141.

  5. As in Aristotle; see Cohen 2004.

  6. SD 3.3, 3.8cd, below. Two centuries earlier Ruyyaka offered a similar if less developed rationale; see his comment on KP p.

577, below.

  1. ABh 1.281, 285, below. Other thinkers like Bhoja make the same argument on the basis of a Samkhya psychology where sattva, or sensitivity, is a personality variable.

  2. The long list of vanished masterpieces includes, besides all the commentators on the Treatise on Drama before Abhinava (Udbhata, Bhatta Lollata, Shri Shankuka), Udbhata's Exegesis of Bhamaha (Bhāmahavivaraņa), Bhatta Lollata's Exegesis of Rasa (Rasavivaraņa), Bhatta Nayaka's Mirror of the Heart, Dhanika's Analysis of Literature (Kāvyanirņaya), Bhatta Tota's Literary Investigations and Abhinava's commentary on it, Kashishvaramishra's Inquiry Into Rasa (Rasamīmāmsā), Naraharisuri's Exposition of Rasa (Rasanirūpaņa), Dharmadatta's work (its title is unknown), and the authors (whose names are not even known) cited in VV, Avaloka, Ekāvali.

  3. ND (four mss.); ŚP (three); ABh (possibly just two, with seven fragmentary parts); VK (only partly preserved); ABh in many places is deeply corrupt; NS mss. in their profusion and disagreement defy synthesis.

  4. SP, ABh, and ND are prominent instances.

  5. Anandavardhana wrote on Buddhist logic, Abhinavagupta on Shaiva theology, as did Bhoja in addition to his work on yoga philosophy; Hemachandra on epistemology, logic, and yoga; Ramachandra on logic; Mallinatha on logic and Mimamsa; Rajacudamani Dikshita on a wide variety of systems.

  6. There is little doubt that Vijnanavadins participated in rasa discourse; see ABh 1.274.6, and ABh 1.37.21, below (four positions on aesthetic experience belonging apparently to Buddhists, logicians, Prabhakara Mimamsakas, and Vedantins).

  7. ŚP p. 374.

  8. For Jagannatha's affiliation to Pustimarg Vaishnavism see Pollock 2001a: 409.

  9. There is an apparent misrepresentation in the case of Bhatta Nayaka's core idea of the four "mental planes" of reader response; see ABh 1. 271.4, DhĀL p. 183.3 (Mallinatha on Ekāvalī p. 96 also misunderstands). DR 4.43 and Dhanika ad loc., below, offer the correct analysis.

  10. Jayaratha on AS p. 12. Ruyyaka's own father, Tilaka, shows a less committed attitude toward chronology, indifferent as he is to the fact that Udbhata could have known nothing of a theory of implicature in aesthetics formulated at least a half-century after he lived (on KASS 4.2).

  11. Elsewhere Jagannatha does show some interest in historical distinctions (Tubb and Bronner 2008: 623-24).

  12. Hemachandra, his students Ramachandra and Gunachandra, and an anonymous commentator on a lost treatise on rhetoric (KLV) knew the ABh, but none of their works circulated outside of Gujarat. A commentator on DhAL (Krishnamoorthy 1988) may represent a fifth case, but his time and place are unknown. I have been unable to confirm Kavi's claims about an ABh "epitome" by Purnasarasvati (c. 1400) and two other echoes (NŚ, ed. Kavi 1926: 10).

  13. See e.g., ABh 1.36.21; 37.11, 18, 24; 173.15.

  14. Note that anuvyavasaya is not used in the DhAL at all; in Abhinava's philosophical writings it has the sense familiar from epistemology (see, e.g., IPVV v. 1, p. 39).

  15. Though see SD 5.5 (p. 271 ed. NSP), and Pollock 2012: 248-49.

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  1. Of a piece with this oversight is Jayaratha's assessment of Bhatta Nayaka; see n. 128 above.

  2. See ABh 1.275.6 (sāmānya in NŚ 1. 342 has an unrelated meaning), 1.270. Similarly Dhanika (on DR 4.2, see n. 100 there).

  3. Pollock 2006.

  4. Pollock 1998a: 141 (citing also Eagleton 1990). More generally, literary fiction is currently being studied for its contribution to Theory of Mind (identifying and understanding others' mental states); see for example Kidd and Castano 2013.

  5. Narayana Rao et al. 1992. His "logicization" of rasa's intellectual history leads to numerous errors: there is no evidence Bhatta Lollata was aware of the application of rasa theory to narrative poetry (KD p. 140); nowhere in our extant materials does Shri Shankuka ascribe the "relishing of rasa" to the audience (p. 145, the very phrase carvyamāno rasaḥ is Abhinavagupta's); "the notion that rasa is 'revealed' in the audience's self" is not the Anandavardhana doctrine of "manifestation" against which Bhatta Nayaka argued-he saw that doctrine as pertaining to a verbal process, not the psychological one Abhinava later proffered in its stead (p. 146).

  6. I am thinking of Rasacandrikā of Vishveshvara (c. 1700) and Rasamīmāmsā of Gangarama Jade (c. 1800). The Rasamahārņava of the celebrated logician Gokulanatha Upadhyaya (c. 1700) has in fact to do not with rasa at all but rather with dhvani.

  7. Venidatta's Rasakaustubha (c. 1700) is a good example of poetry without analysis, despite the intellectual brilliance Venidatta shows in his commentary on Bhanu himself (RT, ed. Pollock 2009: xl). The same is even truer of Vishveshvara, and to some extent, Gangarama; see ibid. pp. xxxix-xl.

  8. Ollett 2012; Behl 2012; Busch 2014.

  9. From the portions available to me, the Rasasindhu of Paundarika Ramesvara (post-Bhanudatta, probably seventeenth century, pace Gode 1934), for example, seems like a primer for an elementary rasa exam-which may be exactly what it was.

  10. RT 6.1; DhĀ pp. 24-26, for example.

  11. pārșadaprasiddhi.

  12. RG p. 56, below.

  13. See for example Narayana Rao and Shulman 2013: 70. Note that the Naisadhiyacarita itself is adduced by Vidyadhara in his discussion of the "erotic thwarted" (see Ekavalī p. 104), and read by commentators on the poem accordingly (see, e.g., Narayana on 18.3). The rise of the phenomenally popular nāyikābheda genre in Brajbhasha and other languages-where poets read rasa theory and wrote along its lines-offers even more persuasive counterevidence.

  14. Although little studied, plays in Sanskrit continued to be written and performed at royal courts in both north and south India well into the seventeenth century.

  15. Hume cited in Cohen 2004: 168.

  16. Paramananda Cakravartin, on KP p. 793, below.

  17. Gadamer 2004: 35.

  18. Danto 1981: 96.

  19. Korsmeyer 2001; 2008: 128-29.

  20. ABh 1.283, below.

  21. Gadamer 2004: 31 (I thank A. Ollett for the reference).

  22. Specific questions could of course provoke disagreement. There were continued debates about the principal rasa of a literary work, even in the case of the Rāmāyana (see Bhatta Nrisimha p. 223.1, below).

  23. "Of the Standard of Taste"; "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion." 157. ABh 1.36, below.