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One who is plunged in sorrow cannot create. The act of poetic creation täkes place later when the experience has been fully assimilated and is then contemplated.9 Bhagyanāyakā who preceded Abhinavagupta held an identical view; he says in his Hşdayadarpana : "The poet does not back rasa until he is completely filled with it.”10 To put it in modern terminology, "it is when the poet is fully under the spell of such unique form of rasa-experience that he spontaneously expresses himself in the form of poetry.''11" Abhinavagupta's own teacher, Bhatta Tota, held a similar view; "The aesthetic experience is the same in the case of the hero of a poem (or a play), the poet himself, and the reader of the poem or spectator of a play when recited or enacted respectively."12.
These passages inform us that the location of rasa differs, according to Abhinavagupta, depending upon our different points of view : (i) Rasa is not found in our everyday world; it is found only in drama-in the sense that it has the capacity to arouse rasa in a reader or specrator. (ii) Rasa is primarily located in the poet or playwright for it is only when he is fully filled with it that he spontaneously expresses it in his poem or play. (iii) It is however located, in its real sens: in the sensitive reader or spectator.
Incidentally, it may be noted, that Dhananjaya and Dhanika, the authors of Dasarūpaka and the commentary Avaloka on it respectively assert :
"Aesthetic experience is possible in the actor”,3
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In his commentary on NS. VI.10 Abhinavagupta quotes Bhatta Lollata's view : "Aesthetic experience is possible in the actor, through his vāsanās (for he has himself experienced such feelings in his previous existences); and through concentrated attention he can continue to follow the laya (tempo) and other dramatic conventions."'14
Regarding Bhoja's view Dr. Raghavan observes : "To Bhoja, rasa, as ordinarily understood, means what is meant to Daņdin and Lollata, the prakarsa of the sthayibhäva. It is in the character, in the poet, in the actor, and in the composition. To him rasa does not mean primarily only the acsthetic subjective şanvāda of the sahrdaya and thus to him the sahrdaya is not the only primary seat of rasa. Of his main concept of rasa as the one principle of ahamkāra underlying all feelings and activities, by which characters come into various moods, the poet is enabled to portray them, the actor is enabled to enact them, and the rasika is enabled to enjoy them, the seat is the soul of all cultured men.''15
