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APPENDIX-II
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presuppositions of our moral life we shall realize the importance of universalization in our everyday life. Universalizability of principles of human action is often regarded as the very condition of the possibility of moral experience.
The preceding discussion shows that (a) universalization in literature in the sense in which we have taken the term admits of degrees, (b) it is not always the highest degree of universalization that is expected either of characters or of the spectator, nor is it desirable to achieve it; (c) universalization is not peculiar to literary experience; (d) if universalization explains how the rasa experience becomes shareable, it also explains how any experience is rendered shareable.
Two further claims are made on behalf of the rasa experience. It is said to be (a) necessarily pleasurable, and (b) in a class by itself (alaukika). Both these claims are, in Abhinavagupta's system, ultimately based on sādhāraṇīkarana. We have examined the second claim and seen that it cannot be maintained because sädharanikarana is not peculiar to the rasa experience alone. We shall now briefly examine the first claim. If sädhäranikarana of experience means rendering it universally shareable it is obvious that sädhäranikaranaby itself cannot make an experience pleasurable; this is particularly true of experiences which are indifferent in their affective tone and those which are decidedly unpleasant. The following example of the repulsive (the bibhatsa) will make this amply clear. Bhartặhari says in his vairāgyaśataka "A woman's breasts really are only protruberances of flesh, but the poets have likened them to golden pitchers; her face is a place filled with saliva and.mucus, but the poets have compared it to the moon; her hips and loins are made wet by urine, but the poets have compared them with the frontal globe on the forehead of an elephant. That which is repulsive in reality has been shown to be great by the poets.” The description is universalized and made applicable to all women. The feeling of disgust, thus universalized and transformed into the bibhatsa rasa cannot be said to have become in any way pleasurable. It is indeed doubtful whether the bibhatsa rasa can ever be pleasurable if experienced by itself. It might become bearable, and perhaps even pleasurable only if it gives rise to the feeling of indifference to worldly objects (nirveda) and leads to the creation of śānta rasa. It therefore appears that at least some rasa are not pleasurable by themselves; they can, however, become pleasurable by being subordinated to other rasas or to ends which are not peculiar to literature, for example, moral or religious values.
Another way of making the rasa experience pleasurable is to raise it to a qualitatively higher level, where it acquires a universal significance. Here universalization does take place, but not in the limited sense of making something universally shareable. Some problems are universally shareable but they are not called universal problems. Losing a job is an example of a universally shareable problem. But "What is the place of human goodness in the ultimate scheme of the world?" is a universal problem, a problem with a
