Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c83.83

v2.c83.83

The attempt, therefore, to estimate the worth of a poem by analysing two kinds of meaning, the one explicit and the other implicit, and judging it by a reference to the latter rather than to the former, explains in a new light the nature and function of the guṇas and doṣas, as well as of the alaṃkāras, which were admitted by previous speculation, but over which there had been so much controversy. The explicit, or expressed word and sense, in which poetry is clothed constitutes its mere vesture, but this external or accidental feature alone appealed to earlier thinkers, whose attention was practically confined to the expressed śabda and artha. The guṇas and doṣas (along with the so-called riti), as well as the alaṃkāras, are only certain forms of these, being merely turns given to śabda and artha in expression, and are justified as such. They cannot, therefore, be taken as essential, for they do not touch the essence of poetry which consists of the implicit or unexpressed meaning. But at the same time, they cannot be ignored because they are the means by which the unexpressed is suggested, the expressed word and sense being the vyañjaka of the deeper vyaṅgya sense. In classifying the implicit or the unexpressed, again, into the communication of a fact (vastu-dhvani), or the suggestion of an imaginative mood (alaṃkāra-dhvani), or the manifestation of an emotional state (rasa-dhvani), the theorists recognised the truth that the essence of poetry may consist of fact, imagination or feeling as the predominant implicit factor, the outward expression being important as a means of pointing to this implicit significance. But it is also perceived that the emotional mood, which the poet succeeds in communicating to us, is of the highest importance in poetry; and stress came to be laid on this emotional mood to the extent even of ignoring the imaginative or the realistic, and poetry came to have a deeper significance as a means of emotional realisation. This the *dhvani*-theorists did by emphasising the *rasa-dhvani* in poetry.