192. ABHINAVAGUPTA'S THEORY OF MEANING 215

ABHINAVAGUPTA'S THEORY OF MEANING 215

contemporary or immediate successor of Abhinava, wrote the Vyakti Viveka, in which he does not accept Abhinava's view. But nobody has taken him seriously. The reason why Abhinava's theory of the spiritual meaning of the poetic language found general acceptance,is that it is based upon acute psychological analysis of the different types of mental images, which the poetic language arouses. The mental presentation of the spiritul meaning, as we understand, according to its psychological analysis by Abhinava, is so different in its essential nature from those of the conventional and the secondary meanings, techni- cally called the Vācyārtha and Lākșaņikārtha respectively, that it is impossible to identify the former with either of the latter. Thus we find that the history of Dhvani covers a period of about three hundred years, i.e. from about the first half of the 8th century A.D. when some predecessor of Udbhata discovered the suggested or spiritual meaning for the first time, to the middle of the 11th Century A.D. when Mahima Bhatta made a futile attempt to demolish the Dhvani theory. It was during this period that Ananda Vardhana wrote his famous Dhvani Karika and a commentary on it. He was the first to give a systematic form to the theory of Dhvani. Abhinava's contribution to this theory consists in offering psycho-philosophical explanation. We are attempting the problem of æsthetics primarily from the philosophical and psychological points of view. We have, therefore, to refer to Abhinavagupta more often than to Ananda Vardhana. We find the material for our work almost exclusively in the Locana, we have accordingly represented Abhinava, as the chief exponent of the theory of Dhvani. We do not. however, mean to minimise the