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Sanskrit Aesthetics
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fear, wonder and the like. Rasa is, however, in its intrinsic nature, but one and its so called varieties are only different forms of it due to a difference in their respective psychological determinants. In its fundamental character rasa signif:s an emotion, experienced by itself, transcending the subject-object relation. Rasa experience consists in an ideal revival, kindling up or wakiog to life in the reader's mind of an emotion like the one depicted in the poem which lies latent in the sahțdaya. Being a revival it necessarily goes back to his past experience. This past experience serves merely as the centre round which the reconstruction takes place. He ipaginatively reproduces or reconstructs in his mind the whole situation as it has been depicted by the poet and enjoys it. In this aesthetic experience the reader or speciator forgets himself altogether; and he will be aware then of nothing beyond the object or the situation portrayed by the poet; and he rises above the duality of pain ard plea. sure and experiences 'higher pleasure', pure joy or delight.
Abhinavagupta provides a philbsophical foundation for this theory of rasa. “Reduced to its bare essentials the theory is as follows : watching a play or reading a poem for the sensitive reader (sahțdaya) entails a loss of the sense of present time and space. All worldly considerations for the time being cease. Since we are not indifferent (tațastha) to what is taking place, our involvement must be of a purer variety than we nor. mally experience. We are not directly and personally involved, to the usual medley of desires and anxieties dissolve. Our hearts respond sympathetically (hrdayasamvāda) but not selfishly. Fically the response becomes total, all-engrossing, and we identify with the situation depicted (tanmayıbhavana). The ego is transcended, and for the duration of the aesthetic experience, the normal waking “I” (aham) is suspended. Once this actually happens, we suddenly find that our responses are not like anything we have hiterto experienced, for now that all normal emotions are gone, now that the hard knot of "self-pess" has been untied, we find ourselves in an unprecedented state of mental and emotional calm. The purity of our emotion and the intensity of it take us to a higher level of pleasure than we could know before-we experience sheer undifferentiated bliss (ānandaikaghana).” (6)
And this absorption results in the aesthetic rapture of rasa.
Emotions : The Content of Kävya :
"Anandavardhana says in the third Uddyota : (6) Santarasa and Abhinayagupta's philosophy of Aesthetics, Introduction
(p vii), by J. L. Masson and M. V. Patwardhana, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona, 1969.
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