________________
What did Bharat mean by Rasa?
199
system of rules about Natya. He wanted to show us how to transform the content that was in a poet's mind into the stage language. It was this language or at least a part of it that, I hold, was called Rasa by Bharata. I shall try to explain in the following paragraphs my reasons for thinking so.
In almost all the systems of Indian Philosophy, the words Sabda, Sparsa, Rūpa, Rasa, and Gandha occur; in the Vedas and Upanishads too. But, I think, the earliest technical use of these words can be found in the Samkhya system. Unfortunately almost all the literature on Samkhya is lost and the only commentaries on the Karika of Isvarakṛṣṇa that exist are written from the Vedantic point of view. In spite of these difficulties, it is possible to discuss the place of the concepts of sabda etc, in Samkhya. I have, of course, to base my view on the scanty material that is available to me in the Karikas of Išvarakṛṣṇa, with the commentaries thereon by Gauḍapāda and Vacaspati Misra and Yuktidīpikā, an anonymous commentary on it and exposition of Samkhya in other systems such as Buddhism and Vedānta. From the information Sabda, that is available, it can be safely asserted that for Samkhya, Sparsa, Rupa, Rasa and Gandha are 'Tanmatra', and that 'tanmatra is a word that is indigenous to Samkhya system." 'Tanmatra' means 'that itself': Tadeva iti tanmatram'. The concept is something like Kant's cancept of the thing in-itself. The world as it is known to us is a product of the mind and the Tanmatras together (not the product of mind alone). This world, therefore, consists of five gross elements or Pañca Mahā. bhūta. Mahābhūtas are, thus the knowable or epistemic objects, and Tanmātras are the ontological objects which reach us as Mahabhūtas. It is in this sense then that we can say that Mahābhūtas are born out of Tanmātras. But the language of Samkhya should not be literally understood. It is on account of the difficulty of expressing the thought the Samkhya has to use such a language. The Tanmatras can not be known to us, their existence is postulated in order to distinguish real knowledge from false. Thus a knowledge process would
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
