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Hemachandra also stresses the point made earlier that these (new) Gunas or poetic excellences in reality belong to the Rasas and only secondarily to the word and sense in which they are embodied. This means, we should not expect Hemachandra to fall in with the view that Gunas are ten and that they are either independent elements or are constituents of any style of composition, i.e., Marga or Riti, because the one fact common to all the early theories of Guna was that they treated of the concept of Guna as a means of external embellishment of poetry. This is what is called as Vācyavācaka-cārutvahetu by the Dhvanikāra (II. 4). Since Hemachandra follows the Dhvani theorists, he considers Rasadhvani to be the most prominent factor in poetry; hence he considers the other poetic elements as subserving the Rasa. He, therefore, maintains that Gunas concern directly the inner nature of poetry while the Alamkaras constitute such factors as are more or less external. As we know, Vamana has quoted a pair of verses where the Guņas were likened to the youth or the natural grace of a lady and the Alamkaras to the artificial ornaments of her body. This analogy of human virtues and ornaments is the most common sense interpretation of the terms Guna and Alaṁkāra and which, as P. C. Lahiri (Concepts of Riti and Guna p. 201) remarks, "partially struck the earlier theorists". "But", says P. C. Lahiri, "they brought in this analogy 135 simply to demonstrate the essentiality of the element Guna in poetry, and they failed to explain the elements in relation to the underlying sentiment of a poem which, however, they totally ignored."
But, for the protagonists of the Rasadhvani theory of Literature, the Gunas belong to and are properties of Rasa. The Gunas belong to the Angi-artha but the Alamkaras are related to the Sabda and Artha (angāśritāḥ), as Anandavardhana clearly states in Dhvanyaloka II. 6. We have taken note of this fundamental conception of Guṇa and Alaṁkāra, as fully explained by Hemachandra, while dealing with the Samanya Lakṣaṇa of the Gunas. We, therefore, pass on to understand
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