64. 70 CHAPTER I

70 CHAPTER I

present dramas so that the audience might have the desired æsthetic experience. Srīśankuka, a younger contemporary of Bhatta Lollata, took up the study of æsthetics from the spectator's point of view. He was a follower of the Nyaya school, and therefore, did not himself have the æsthetic experience.(?) Or rather, he could not haveit, because, he approached the problem of æsthetics from the point of view of laymen, represented by the Nyaya. His theory, therefore, is very unsatisfactory, because it is not based on experience and, what is more, is against the facts of experience. This point was noticed and criticised by Bhatta Nayaka (close of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century A. D.) At this time the monistic Saiva philosophy, technically called "Trika", or Realistic Idealism, as I have called it elsewhere, had just arisen. Utpalācārya had just systema- tised the Pratyabhijna system, and Abhinava had not spoken on the subject; the Sankhya philosophy was still dominant in Kashmir. Ananda Vardhana's theory of Dhvani, the spiritual meaning of language, as different from both the conventional and the secondary, had not yet been well established. It was rather being vehemently opposed by a set of learned scholars, Bhatta Nāyaka himself probably being the leader of the opposition, as is testified by his work, the Hrdaya Darpana, which was written with the avowed object of demolishing the theory of Dhvani. Bhatta Nayaka's theory of æsthetics, therefore, could not be other than what it was. Every advance on a theory is an outcome of the pro- gress that is made by all allied branches of learning at a particular period of the literary history of a country. And every important period in the literary history develops certain characteristics, which distinguish all the literary