________________
193
"It is of course true that finally the sahrdaya, the intelligent and responsive reader, is the final criterion. But generally, sahrdayas tend to agree amongst themselves to an astonishing degree. One has only to look at the interpretations of poems advanced in Sanskrit commentaries. They are usually very similar to one another. (This is surely why plagiarism in such matters was never considered to be a serious matter. Witness Hemacandra, who uses Abhinava's explanations of innumerable stanzas. He is not "cheating", he is "agreeing."). When a modern commentary like the Balapriya follows Uttungodaya's Kaumudt on the Locana, Ramasaraka is not being lazy or dishonest. This simply points to shared values in Sanskrit literary criticism." -Santarasa And Abhinavagupta's
Philosophy of Aesthetics, Introduction, pp, IV-V, f.n. 2, BOR Institute, Poona, 1969 PP 162-179 The rest of the verses in skandhaka metre, which are not covered in this paper, are being studied and will soon appear in the form of a separate paper.
Appendix In regard to the topic dealt with here it would be very interesting and instructive to compare Aristotle's reply to Plato's charge of unreality levelled against creative literature: "The pictures of life given by creative literature are not unreal in the sense of being inconsistent with the facts of life; but that their truth is of a different order from the truth of science. .... The business of the poet is to tell, not what has happened, but what could happen, and what is possible, either from its probability, or from its necessary connection with what has gone before....the difference (between the historian and the poet) lies in this fact, that the one tells what has happened and the other what could happen. And therefore poetry has a wider truth....; for poetry deals rather with the universal, history with the particular." -Judgment in Literature (pp 24-25) by W. Basil Worsfold, London, 1917
Appendix pp186-192-: With the thought of Rajasekhara-that kavya (poetry) is founded on appearance (pratibhasanibandhanam), which is only a paraphrase of Bhamaha's thought that poetry is rooted in the world of phenomena (tarra lokairayam kavyam") compare what Wordsworth says in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: "The appropriate business of poetry..., her appropriate employment, her privilege and her duty, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions."
