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APPENDIX-I
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3. The third great idea is that of sadharanikarana'— the generalized or universal apprehension of the poetic feeling and the poet's world.
These ideas have survived and contributed effectively to a clearer understanding of the aesthetic object due to the astute and vigorous presentation by a master-synthesizer of the stature of Ācārya Abhinavagupta, who is the greatest single name in Sanskrit Poetics. He eagerly seized upon the reconciliatory approach of Anandavardhana bringing rasa again into the focus. Instead of attempting a new work of his own, he chose to write commentaries Abhinava-Bhārati on Bharata's Nāțyaśāstra and Locana on Anandavardhana's Dhvanyaloka and used both texts for highlighting his own special predilection for rasa, whose secret he unravelled with the help of Bhatta Nāyaka's ideal of sadharanikarana. Abhinavagupta is one of the tallest thinkers not only of India but of the world. His apt utterances on Poetics have gone on ringing in the ears of generations after generations. It is a pity that even though during his life.time, during the eleventh century, a philosophical dialogue was possible between him and the great Muslim thinker Avicenna (Ibn Sina) of West Asia,8 a worth-while dialogue is yet to start with Western thinkers of today. (Incidentally, I took an opportunity to draw Dr. I. A. Richards' attention to Abhinavagupta's work in early 1956, at Harvard, and later wrote to him about Dr. R. Gnoli's translation of a portion of Abhinava-Bharati which was just published.)
Once the texts are critically edited and annotated, they should leave the hands of the Sanskritists and reach the experts in the various disciplines. I hate the idea of the Arthaśāstra' being studied only by the Sanskrit graduate students, and never forming a legitimate part of the curriculum for advanced studies in Political Science. So also, the more important work in Sanskrit Poetics could be better studied by advanced students of Philosophy, for, problems of Poetic Theory form a legitimate part of Philosophy and not of one language or another, nor even of literature as such.
I hope, it would be interesting to refer here to what a modern philosopher, Roman Ingarden (picking up one by random sampling), has to say about
Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object's from (as it happens) a phenomenological approach. It would remind one again and again of the observations of the Sanskrit writers on Poetics. Prof. Ingarden carefully distinguishes between the ordinary perceptful experience and aesthetic experience. He shows how a composite structure of aesthetic experience has three kinds of elements: "(a) emotional (aesthetic excitement), (b) creative (active) constitution of an aesthetic object, (c) passive- perception of the qualities already revealed and harmonized."
8. Nilla Cram Cook, The Way of the Swan, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1958, p. 18. 9. Roman Ingarden, "Aeshthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object" in 'Readings in Existential
Phenomenology "--edited by Nathiniel Lawrence, Daniel" "Connor, Prentic Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1967, pp. 318-319.
