A History of Sanskrit Literature c25.s1.5

c25.s1.5

This, however, is not the side of the *Nāṭyaçāstra* which was fated to elicit the chief attention of writers on poetics as opposed to dramaturgy. Poetics developed, if it did not originate, in distinction from dramaturgy, and writers on it were long content to refer merely to that science. The topics which were to engage writers on poetics, however, appear in elementary, though not undeveloped, form in the *Nāṭyaçāstra*. It recognizes four figures of speech, the simile, Upamā, the metaphor, Rūpaka, the Dīpaka, in essence the use of one predicate to many subjects or one subject to many predicates, and the Yamaka, repetition of syllables or alliteration. There is no distinction of figures as those of sound, Çabdālaṁkāra, and of sense, Arthālaṁkāra, and it is significant of early poetry that there are given ten kinds of Yamakas, but only five of Upamās. The Yamakas remain prominent in the older school of poetics, including Bhaṭṭi, Daṇḍin, Vāmana, Rudraṭa, and the *Agni Purāṇa* section on poetics, but Bhāmaha already admits but five kinds and Ānandavardhana and Mammaṭa make it clear that the figure has no real aesthetic importance, though in later as well as older poetry, for instance, the *Ghaṭakarpara*, it is freely used, serving in lieu of rhyme. Further, serving like the figures to bring out the sentiment, are given the ten qualities and the ten defects; it is characteristic of the beginnings of the science that the defects are given positively and the qualities given as the negation of the defects, while in fact it is impossible thus to connect the two lists. Moreover, the details of the lists are obscure, and differently interpreted both by the later writers on poetics and by the commentators on the Çāstra. On one view¹ the defects are: absence of a complete meaning; incongruity with the context; tautology; ambiguity; violation of syntactical regularity; grammatical errors; break of metrical rules as to pause; misuse of long or short syllables in metre; breach of euphonic rules; and inconsistency as to place, time, artistic usage, popular belief, logic, or science. The qualities are: Çleṣa, possibly in the sense of suggested sense; Prasāda, clearness; Samatā, evenness implying ease of comprehension; Samādhi, superimposition of something special in the sense; Mādhurya, sweetness; Ojas, strength arising from the use of compounds with respect to suitable concatenations of letters; Saukumārya, smoothness arising from happy metres and conjunctions; Arthavyakti, explicitness of sense; Udāra, elevation of subject and sentiment; and Kānti, loveliness, delighting the mind.