Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c86.3

v2.c86.3

on whose capacity of enjoyment it depends, and that the dominant feeling becomes a sentiment when it is so enjoyed. The *rasa*, being a mental state, a subjective experience of the reader, in which enjoyment (*āsvāda, carvaṇā, rasanā* or *bhoga*) is essential and in which the enjoyer and the object of enjoyment become identical, the reader receives the represented feeling into his own soul and thereby enjoys it¹. The locus of the *rasa* is not in the represented hero who belongs to the past; nor is it in the poem itself, the task of which is merely to exhibit the excitants etc., by which the dominant emotion is brought into expression, and the *rasa*, on its part, become revealed to the reader. Nor does the *rasa* consist of the reader's mere apprehension (*pratīti*) of the emotions exhibited in the poem or enacted by the actor; for the reader would then apprehend not the *rasa* but a feeling varying in different individuals, just as in real life the spectacle of a pair of lovers in union gives different spectators who witness it the varying emotions, according to their individual nature, of shame, envy, desire or aversion². The *vibhāvas* etc., therefore, bring the *sthāyi-bhāva* to the enjoyment of the *rasika*, the aesthetically receptive reader or spectator, and thereby convert it to *rasa*; but they must be generalised and have no specific relation to a particular individual (*parityakta-viśeṣa*). Thus the *vibhāva* Sītā, Dhanika explains, must refer to woman in general, and not to the particular individual who was the daughter of Janaka. Hence things, which are the exciting, ensuing or accessory circumstances in ordinary life, act as *vibhāvas* etc., in poetry, and generalise the dominant feeling into *rasa*. The spectator, say, of the deeds of Arjuna on the stage may be compared, therefore, to the child who, in playing with clay elephants, experiences the sensation of its own energy as pleasant. The enjoyment in the spectator’s mind is a manifestation of that joy which is innate as the blissful nature of self, a circumstance which gives us the frequent comparison of *rasāsvāda* with *brahmāsvāda*.