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Indian aesthetic terminology
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‘Dhvani' does full justice to the pivotal place of rasa and allows the entry of alarkāra as well as vastu in its sweep of vyangyartha or primarily suggested content, hence it can be termed the fiferentia or sine qua non of literature as a whole. Since dhvani is defined only as the soul (aiman ), the referential use of alarkāras as well as qualites associated with the soul can be accommodated as the body of kāvya. Rasa will now become the raison de etre of ritis and vịttis too. No wonder the theory of dhvani was applauded by posterity as the most adequate and acceptable aesthetic principle.
But to Anandavardhana's immediate contemporaries and successors it did not appear so. It posited a power of lang. uage exclusive to puetry in order to explain rasa; and in the same breath allowed almost an equal status to suggested ideas and figures of speech Its new explanation of guņas as properties of rasa was riddled with difficulty because rasa as soul is no concrete object according to Advaita Vedānta and should really be nirguna. More than all, the very plea of Anandavardhana for accommodating all recognised literature under two heads-viz. dhvani of first-grade and guņibhūtavyangya or second-grade, depending npon the primacy or otherwise of suggested sense, contained the seeds of a selfcontradiction in his admission of a category like rasavadalarkāra. If by definition rasa is that which is wholly and solely suggested, how can it be even functionally equated with a stated alarkāra ? As literary critics know only too well, wide differences in literary taste do exist and how can a definition summarily prescribe that 'x' category is the best and 'y' category is the next best? A really valid definition should only distinguish poetry from non-poetry. It cannot speak of degrees of beauty. Last, but not least important is the need for a new linguistic function like vyañjanā or dhvāni. If all meaning other than referential can be explained by logicians and semanticists either as a kind of inference (anumāna) or as a kind of presumption (arthāpatti) or as a metaphorical function (laksaņā), why should one be so particular about an exclusively poetic function of language like vyañjanā ?
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