This objection was built against Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa. But we do not hold Lollaṭa's view in the first place, so the objection never even arises for us. And an objection that never arises needs no refuting; it is already defeated by its own failure to appear.

And what 'enjoyment' (bhoga) could there be anywhere in ordinary life that is anything other than a cognition (pratīti)? We know of none. So Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka's separate faculty of 'enjoyment' has no work left that plain cognition is not already doing.

Suppose you reply, 'It is not bare cognition but rasanā, relishing.' Even so, rasanā is still a kind of cognition. It merely earns a new name because it arises by a different instrument, exactly as one and the same knowing is called 'perception,' 'inference,' 'verbal testimony,' 'comparison,' or 'intuition' depending on how it comes about. A new label for a new means, not a new thing beyond cognition.

There are only two ways rasa can come to be: it is either produced (niṣpādana) or manifested (abhivyakti). Deny both, and rasa is left either eternal or simply non-existent — there is no third route. And whatever is never cognized cannot even be called 'existent.' So rasa's very being is tied to its being cognized, which once more puts cognition at the center.

Now the objector regroups: 'When we say cognition, we do not mean plain knowing. We mean bhogīkaraṇa — the act by which rasa is turned into something relished.' This is Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka's special enjoyment-function speaking.

And this enjoyment, they say, takes the form of 'melting' (druti), and the like. Fine — grant it. Even so, rasa is not merely that. The melting is real, but it does not exhaust what rasa is.

For there are exactly as many relishing-cognitions as there are rasas — one for each. Each is a cognition whose very nature is rasanā and bhogīkaraṇa. So 'enjoyment' is not one flat generic state; it is as differentiated as the rasas themselves, which is why a single fixed set of melting-and-so-on cannot be the whole account.

Two points. First, the three guṇas (sattva, rajas, tamas) blend as dominant and subordinate in endless ways, so there is no reason to freeze the enjoyment-states at just three. Second, take the slogan that 'poetry makes rasas be' (bhāvanā). If all that 'bhāvanā' means is this — bringing rasa within a cognition that is the savoring (carvaṇā) raised by the vibhāvas and the rest — then we accept it wholeheartedly. That much is exactly our own manifestation view under another name.

Now consider a definition offered in verse. Line one: rasa is the object of a 'higher awareness' — an awareness that is suggested (vyaṅgya), not stated, and that arises when the bhāvas are joined together.

Line two: rasa is an experience (anubhava) whose whole nature is relishing, and it is called the very meaning of poetry. So the verse defines rasa as a suggested, relish-natured experience that is what a poem finally means.

A second verse gives an analogy. Grammarians hold that a sentence's meaning is a 'relation' woven among the word-meanings — one unified sense, aimed at one result. The verse sets this up to compare rasa with the sentence-meaning.

Line two completes the comparison: exactly as the word-meanings yield one sentence-meaning, so the assembled bhāvas yield śṛṅgāra and the other rasas as the play's single 'sentence-meaning.' Now Abhinava reads the earlier word 'vyaṅgya': it calls rasa 'suggestible' precisely because rasa is something being manifested (vyajyamāna) — not produced, but brought to light.

And the verse's word 'anubhava' should be taken to mean that rasa is the object of that experience. Objection: 'But if rasa is only the object of a cognition, what becomes of rasa's own reality?' Abhinava's blunt reply: 'What can we do?' — that is simply how it is; the reality of rasa just is its being savored in awareness.

That rasa is an unfolding of consciousness is already settled by sacred tradition. So the claim that this understanding rests on scripture — what is 'new' (apūrva) about it? Nothing. Abhinava is not announcing a discovery; he is pointing to what the tradition already holds.

Armed like this — with two reasons that anyone can grasp and that carry real weight — a merely novel claim would be open to fault-finding by the world at large. The point: because this position rests on self-evidence and on tradition, it is not the untethered novelty that any critic could knock down.

The intellect climbs higher and higher and, tireless, catches sight of the truth of the thing. The image is of an ascent, step by step, up to the real nature of rasa.

And that clear sight is the fruit of the staircase of discernment that the earlier teachers built, step upon step. The analogy is explicit: the predecessors' theories (Lollaṭa's, Śaṅkuka's, Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka's) are the stairs; the tireless climb is the reasoning that mounts them; and the truth of rasa seen at the top is the fruit. Their views are not thrown away — they are the very steps by which one rises to the truth.

The first plunge into establishing a truth I find wondrous — and wondrous precisely because it is unsupported, like a painting with no wall behind it. The śleṣa on citra carries both senses at once: 'a marvel' and 'a picture,' with nirālambana meaning both 'unsupported' and (of a painting) 'without a ground.' To be the first to venture toward the real nature of rasa, with nothing already laid down to lean on, is the astonishing thing.

Once the right road has been opened, throwing a bridge across it or planting a city along it is no marvel. The analogy completes the previous verse: finding the path (the first true grasp of rasa's nature) is the astonishing feat; the elaborations built afterward — the refinements, the systematizing — are comparatively easy, no wonder at all. So the pioneers deserve the awe; those who build on the opened road merely follow.

So then: the views of the worthy teachers have not been demolished here. Those very views have been purified. This is Abhinava's signature stance — he does not tear down Lollaṭa, Śaṅkuka, or Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka; he refines each until it yields the truth.

And it is in the predecessors' already-standing constructions that one sees the fruit of laying the true foundation. Put plainly: securing the real base of the doctrine pays off precisely by making the earlier teachers' frameworks stand firm. The foundation completes their building rather than replacing it.

Then, says the questioner, out with it — state the fully cleaned-up truth about rasa. You claim to have only purified the earlier views, not discarded them; so give us that purified doctrine itself.

Abhinava's answer: Bharata already stated it — there is nothing new to invent. For in the bhāva chapter Bharata unpacks the word bhāva itself: the bhāvas are so called because they make the meanings of the poem be felt, cause them to pervade the listener. And what is that meaning of the poem, once it is felt? It is rasa. So 'the poem's meaning is rasa' — the doctrine stood there already in Bharata's own words.

Take a Vedic line like 'they sat through the night' or 'he offered that omentum in the fire.' For the qualified performer there is first the plain understanding of what the words report. But right after that first response — one the narrative itself has whetted — something more arises. The stated past tense drops away; 'sat', 'offered' turn into 'he is sitting', 'he is offering', happening now, and the hearer is carried across into the scene. The mapping: the performer is the adhikārin; the Vedic sentence is the poem; the crossing-over into a present scene is just what the poetic word will do for the sahṛdaya. The analogy proves that even ordinary śāstric language yields a further, immersive engagement beyond bare fact.

Each school has its own name for this 'something more' that a word produces: some call it pratibhā (poetic intuition), the Mīmāṃsakas bhāvanā or vidhi, others udyoga, and so on. Whatever the label, the thing is one and the same — and it holds for the poetic word as well, not only the Vedic one. For the qualified reader, out of the poetic word there arises a further cognition, over and above merely grasping what the sentence says.

And who is this 'qualified one' in the poetic case? Not the ritual performer marked by desire, but the sahṛdaya — the sensitive-hearted reader whose heart is graced with clear, unclouded intuition (pratibhāna). He is the one in whom the further cognition arises.

For that sensitive reader, take sentences like the fleeing-deer verse of Śākuntala Act 1, or 'Umā too, with her dark curls' (Kumārasambhava 3.62), or 'but Hara, a little…' (3.67). The moment after he grasps what the sentence says, a further cognition arises in him. It is mental, yet it has the character of direct seeing — as if the scene stood before his eyes. And in it the particular time-and-place slots those very sentences carried are pushed aside; the scene is simply present.

Now look at what appears within that perception-like cognition — the frightened fawn of the Śākuntala scene. It is not this one fawn at some fixed spot and hour; it has no specific individuating form. The frightened one is likewise no particular person, and the terrifier is not real at all — it is a stage-fiction. What is left, then, is fear, sheer fear, pinned to no place or time or person. And just because of that it is wholly unlike our everyday fear-thoughts — 'I am afraid', 'this enemy is afraid', 'this friend, this bystander is afraid.' Those are choked with obstacles: the moment they arise the practical mind rushes in — dodge this danger, save that person — and pure relish is blocked. This generalized fear is grasped only by an obstacle-free cognition. It is as if set straight into the heart, as if turning right before the eyes. That is bhayānaka-rasa, the rasa of fear.

For in this kind of fear the 'I' is not wholly shut out — I am not simply absent from it — but neither is it sharply pinned as this particular me. It hovers between. And the same goes for the other person in the scene: neither wholly excluded nor fixed as one definite individual. This in-between is exactly what lets the fear be shared rather than private.

And because both the 'I' and the 'other' are left unfixed, the generalization is not something small and hemmed in. It spreads wide — the fear belongs to no one in particular, and so it can be everyone's at once.

Think of how you grasp that smoke always goes with fire. You hold it in general — not 'this smoke, this fire', but the tie as such. Better still, take the tie of fear and trembling. Just so here: the fear is held in a generalized, universal way, yet it takes on the vividness of something actually seen. And what feeds that vividness is the whole theatrical apparatus — the actor and the rest. In the mapping: the smoke-fire (or fear-trembling) tie is the generalized grasp; the actor's ensemble is what makes the generalized fear feel present. The analogy shows the fear is general — it does not show that it stays a bare abstraction.

The poem itself throws in determinants — this place, this time, this subject who feels. But it throws in several at once, and they get in each other's way and cancel out. Once these determinants withdraw completely, the generalization is not weakened but thrives all the more: with no fixed place, time, or person left standing, the feeling is free to be everyone's.

And for this reason the whole audience's cognition fuses into a single mass — everyone relishing the one generalized feeling together — and that very oneness feeds the rasa all the more. A feeling shared, held by all at once, swells greater than any private one.

Why can they all fuse into one? Because every mind is painted over, from beginningless time, with the same stock of latent impressions (vāsanā). When the play strikes that common chord, everyone's impressions resonate together — and so the many relishers become, for the moment, one.

That obstacle-free consciousness has a name: camatkāra, the flush of aesthetic wonder. It is no bare inner state — from it break out the body's own signs: trembling, gooseflesh, the sudden thrill that lifts the hairs. These are the proof that the relish is really happening.

Here is camatkāra caught in a verse. Even now, the gāthā says, Hari is struck with wonder: how on earth were they not crushed by Mount Mandara at the churning of the ocean? — 'they' being the limbs of Lakṣmī, named in the line that follows.

The verse finishes: Lakṣmī's limbs, delicate as the sprouts of the crescent moon's ray. Now the definition. Camatkāra is an unbroken absorption in enjoyment that never runs to satiety — the relish stays as fresh as Hari's wonder is 'even today' fresh. And camatkāra is precisely the mind's own relishing-act in one who is savouring, caught up in the throb of a wondrous enjoyment. Wonder here is not a passing surprise; it is enjoyment that keeps renewing itself.

And this relishing cognition has the character of direct seeing. Is it, in psychological terms, a mental determination? a volition? a memory? Abhinava does not decide. Let it be whichever — let it simply shine forth in its perception-like way. The three names are left standing side by side; the label does not matter, the vivid relish does.

Kālidāsa is quoted: seeing lovely things and hearing sweet sounds, even a creature who is perfectly happy grows suddenly wistful, aching with a longing he cannot place.

The verse finishes: what he is really doing, surely, is remembering — though with no conscious knowing — loves from earlier births, affections lodged deep as lasting dispositions. The beauty before him wakes a bond older than this life.

Here Abhinava reads the verse closely. The 'memory' that the word 'remembers' points to is not memory as the logicians define it. For them you can remember only what you once experienced — and this object, a love from another birth, was never experienced in this present life at all. So ordinary memory cannot be what is meant. (The parenthesis breaks off here; the next line will say what this 'memory' really is.)

First he closes the aside about Kālidāsa's verse: the 'remembering' there is not the logicians' memory at all — it is direct seeing, which also goes by the name pratibhāna, poetic vision. Then the main point: whatever label you attach, this much is settled — there is a cognition here whose very nature is relishing, and in it rati, love, is what shines. That relishing cognition is the thing Abhinava will now build his whole account of rasa upon.

Because this relishing cognition carries no extra tag of 'here', 'now', 'mine' or 'his', it escapes every rival label. Take the theories one by one. It is not an ordinary real cognition — so it is not Lollaṭa's sthāyī literally present in the actor. It is not a false cognition — so not the 'that is a horse in the picture' mistake. It is not inexpressible. It is not merely like an ordinary inference — so not Śaṅkuka's inference of Rāma's love the way fire is inferred from smoke. And it is not a superimposition of one thing on another. Abhinava clears the ground by denial: relishable, yes, but none of the categories the earlier ācāryas reached for.

Now a concession to Śaṅkuka's imitation theory. At full pitch this same relishing cognition is tied down to no particular place or time; and the acting does track the underlying mood. So — fine, call it anukāra, 'imitation', if you wish. Abhinava does not fight the word; he grants it and folds it in, since on his own account the cognition simply follows the bhāva. The concession costs him nothing, because he has already denied that any real 'copying' of a literal Rāma is going on.

A second concession, to whoever wants to speak of a full 'material outfit of objects' at work. If you lean on the Vijñānavāda, where objects are nothing but forms within cognition itself, then let that phrase stand too. Again Abhinava grants the rival's vocabulary rather than disputing it, because on the idealist footing the 'objects' collapse back into the cognition — which is exactly where his own account already puts them.

Here is the definition, and it is the heart of Abhinava's siddhānta. Whatever labels you granted a moment ago, this stands: the bhāva that is caught by a cognition which is free of every obstacle and is itself relishing in nature — that very bhāva is rasa. Rasa is not a new substance produced alongside the mood; it is the mood itself, once it is savoured in an obstacle-free seeing. The whole next stretch is just an unpacking of 'obstacle-free'.

Now the role of the dramatic apparatus. In making the seeing obstacle-free, the ones that clear the obstacles away are the vibhāvas and their companions — the anubhāvas and the vyabhicāri-bhāvas. Note the job Abhinava assigns them: they do not produce rasa and they do not prove it; they simply remove what would block the relishing. Everything about the vibhāvas from here on is stated as obstacle-removal.

He grounds the point in everyday speech. Even in ordinary life, when we reach for words like camatkāra (wonder), rasanā and āsvādana (savouring, relishing), bhoga (enjoyment), samāpatti (absorption), laya (dissolving into it), or viśrānti (resting in it) — what every one of these words is really naming is a cognition that has been freed of all obstruction. So the terms he uses for rasa are not exotic; they are the ordinary vocabulary of undistracted, resting awareness. The whole family of words points to one thing: obstacle-free saṁvitti.

He now lists the seven things that can obstruct the relishing cognition. One: the matter fails to seem believable, so the mind cannot settle on it. Two: fixing the feeling as 'mine' or 'someone else's' drags in a definite place and time. Three: being swept up in one's own private pleasure or pain. Four: the means of cognition falling short. Five: the matter not coming through vividly. Six: the feeling being only a subordinate item, not what awareness rests on. Seven: being tangled in doubt. The rest of the passage takes these up and shows, one by one, how the theatre removes each.

The first obstacle, worked out. If a spectator cannot grant that the thing before him is even believable, he cannot get his awareness to settle on it at all — not for a moment. Implausibility stops the process at the very start: with nothing to rest on, there is no relishing to speak of.

Where the matter is not even believable, what repose of awareness could there be? None. That failure of viśrānti, repose, is the first obstacle. Notice that Abhinava measures each obstacle by the same yardstick — whether awareness can come to rest.

How is the first obstacle cleared? By hṛdaya-saṁvāda, the heart's assent — the spectator's spontaneous 'yes, this is how it is'. This works when the content is something common to everyone: love, fear, grief that any heart recognizes. Shared human matter carries its own plausibility, so the awareness settles and the implausibility-obstacle falls away.

But some deeds are not common to ordinary people — the superhuman feats of a hero. There, 'everyone shares this' cannot supply the plausibility. So the poet reaches for a celebrated name: 'Rāma'. An unbroken fame carries a rock-solid conviction with it, and that conviction spreads to whatever the play shows him doing. The famous name does for the extraordinary deed what shared humanity does for the ordinary feeling — it makes the awareness willing to rest on the matter.

This is why, later on, he will lay it down as a firm rule: a nāṭaka and its kin, whose whole point is to school the audience in unmatched greatness, must take a well-known story as their subject. A farce and the low genres, having no such lofty aim, are under no such rule. But that is a matter for its proper section — Abhinava flags it and sets it aside, returning to the vighna at hand.

Take the case where the pleasure or pain is felt as belonging to me alone. The moment I relish it as mine, a second awareness leaps up alongside it — and it can come from any direction: fear of losing the joy, anxiety to protect it, craving to get more like it, eagerness to be rid of the pain, an urge to broadcast it, a wish to hide it, or something else again. However it is triggered, that rival awareness crowding in is the supreme obstacle. Fixing a feeling as 'mine' never leaves awareness free to simply rest in it.

Pinning the feeling as someone else's does not fix the trouble either. When I watch a joy or grief that is stamped 'his', a second awareness inevitably rises in me — I feel my own pleasure at his good fortune, my own pain at his loss, or blank indifference, or bewilderment. That reactive feeling is bound to come, and it blocks the pure relish just as surely. So both routes fail: whether the feeling is fixed as 'mine' (s55) or as 'his', a rival awareness intrudes. The cure will be to loosen the 'mine/his' fixing altogether.

The remedy for the place-and-time obstacle is a two-step theatrical trick. First the theatre openly shows that these are actors: the pūrvaraṅga, the opening stage-rite, is not concealed (Bharata's rule 'let there be no over-extension here', NŚ 5-158), and the prologue, defined by 'the actress, or else the jester...', is played in full view. So the audience clearly grasps: this is a troupe of players. Then, having established that, the theatre masks the very actor-identity with the stage headdress and the rest. The upshot is that neither 'this is the actor so-and-so' nor 'this is the literal Rāma of a definite place and time' can fully take hold. All the machinery of stage-convention — the artificial dramatic speech, the lāsyāṅgas, the marked-off zones of the stage-platform and pavilion — pulls the scene out of any real here-and-now. With no definite place or time to fasten 'mine/his' onto, obstacle two dissolves.

Here is what the masking achieves. Once the actor's real identity is veiled, the thought never forms: 'this pleasure or pain belongs to THIS particular man, right HERE, right NOW.' The three eva's — this one, here, now — are exactly the anchors that would drag in a definite place and time, and they find nothing to grip. The actor's own identity is hidden, so 'this very man' cannot be affirmed; and the Rāma-identity laid over him is only superimposed, with no settled standing of its own in the appearance, so awareness cannot come fully to rest on 'Rāma' either. Both anchors fail — and that is precisely why the place-time obstacle drops away.

And the reason the imposed Rāma-form has no resting-point of its own: all it actually accomplishes is to hide the actor's true identity. It works only as a veil, not as a second solid thing for awareness to settle on. So neither identity offers a place to rest — which is just what is needed to keep any definite here-and-now from re-forming.

An example of that non-worldly stage-convention. Things like recitation delivered seated, or the lāsyāṅga called puṣpagandhikā, are never met with in ordinary life. Precisely because they have no everyday counterpart, they cannot tie the scene to any real place or time — they keep the performance in its own conventional register. (The next sentence adds that they are still not simply nothing, since they remain somehow possible.)

Do not think the stage-apparatus — seated recitation, the flower-scented gestures, and all the rest that has no counterpart in ordinary life — is therefore empty or pointless. It is, in its own way, quite intelligible. Bharata built up this whole set of stage-devices precisely to secure sādhāraṇī-bhāva, the generalizing that pries a feeling loose from any one man's here-and-now, and so to serve the relishing of rasa. All of this will be spelled out where it properly belongs. So there is no need to press the matter here.

That completes the account of the second obstacle. The way to clear away the obstacle of a feeling's being pinned to one owner — 'this is mine', 'that is his' — has now been explained.

Now the third obstacle. A man overwhelmed by his own pleasure or pain — how is he ever going to rest his mind on anything else? His own feeling crowds everything out. To sweep that obstruction aside, the theatre lays on a whole 'coloring' of the senses. It works through things made of sense-objects — sound and the rest — that fasten on the object right in front of you: instrumental music, singing, the beautifully built hall, skilled courtesans, and so on. And because generalization has stripped these of any private ownership, every single spectator can enjoy them alike. That sensuous enchantment loosens the private grip and frees the mind to attend.

The 'coloring' does more than distract. Even a spectator with no answering heart at all is, by being brought to this clearness of heart, made into a sahṛdaya — one whose heart now resonates with what is shown. The sensuous enchantment polishes the mind's mirror until even the unresponsive begin to respond.

And there is Bharata's own warrant for the two-fold sensuous appeal. He has already said that drama is 'both a thing to be seen and a thing to be heard'. The visible enchantments — the hall, the dancers, the courtesans — and the audible ones — music and song — are both provided for.

Now the fourth obstacle. If the means of grasping the object are missing, how is the object to be grasped? Grant that there are words and inferential signs on hand — but these give only a blurred, second-hand apprehension. On that the mind will not come to rest. It wants something sharper.

Why will words and inference not satisfy it? Because the mind is still reaching for the kind of cognition that only direct perception gives — a sharp, vivid grasp. Until it gets that perceptual clarity, it stays expectant and unsettled.

The logicians said as much: all valid knowing finds its final court in perception. Once you have seen a thing for yourself, no pile of scriptural or inferential arguments — a hundred of them — can dislodge it, because you feel in your own experience that it simply cannot be otherwise. Perception carries a certainty that words and inference never match. That is why, for rasa too, the mind holds out for perceptual vividness.

Consider the firebrand swung in a circle: you see a solid wheel of fire, which is not there. What corrects that false seeing? Not an argument, but only a second and stronger perception — the felt heat, 'this thing is burning-hot' — the direct sensation of the single brand. Here is the mapping: the illusory fire-wheel is the blurred, mistaken cognition; the felt heat is the stronger perception that dispels it. And the lesson: in ordinary life a cognition is set at rest only by a perception. This is the worldly sequence — named here only so the theatre's un-worldly sequence can be marked off against it.

So, since only a perception-grade grasp will settle the mind, to strike down both obstacles at once — the missing means of apprehension and the lack of vividness — the four modes of acting are called in and, so to speak, crowned for the task. Backed by the realistic lokadharmī style of presentation, the acting supplies exactly the perceptual vividness that bare words and inference could not.

And here is why acting can do the job. Acting is nothing like the work of words and inferential signs; it works, rather, almost the way direct perception works — it puts the thing before your eyes. That is what supplies the vividness the mind was holding out for. We will make good on this claim in its proper place.

Now the sixth obstacle. Suppose the object before you is a merely subordinate one — then on what is awareness supposed to settle? A subordinate thing, by its nature, keeps pointing past itself to the primary thing it serves; it never stands still in its own right. And awareness cannot rest on what will not stand still. So a non-primary object is no resting-place for relishing.

Apply that to the machinery of rasa. Non-primacy attaches to the inert set of vibhāvas and anubhāvas — the stimulant-causes shown on stage and the visible signs of feeling — and also to the swarm of passing moods, the vyabhicārins; and this holds even though those moods are themselves made of awareness. Why are they all subordinate? Because every one of them, without exception, looks to another's face — it waits on a principal, it points beyond itself. Therefore the one thing that stands apart from all of them, the abiding emotion, the sthāyin, is the only fit vessel for relishing. That is Abhinava's settled position: rasa is the relished sthāyin, and nothing subordinate.

Which of the abiding emotions, then, are the primary ones? Those that are anchored to the four human goals — dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa. An emotion that carries a person toward one of life's ends stands on its own as primary; that is what qualifies it to be a sthāyin worthy of relish.

Take them one by one. Rati, love, is the goal kāma, and it rests as well on the dharma and artha that come along with it. Krodha, anger, rests on artha, in the affairs where artha is at stake. Utsāha, heroic drive, comes out at kāma and dharma. And śama, quietude, comes out at the whole of dharma and the rest: being largely that world-weariness (nirveda) that is born of seeing things as they really are, it is a means to mokṣa, release. Each of these four abiding emotions, then, carries a person toward one of life's ends — and that is exactly what makes it primary.

True, even these four can trade places — in a given work one of them may serve another and become the subordinate. But that does not undo their primacy. In whatever play a particular emotion is featured, that emotion is the principal one there. So if you run through the different types of drama in turn, you find that each of the four gets its turn at being primary. None is permanently the servant of another.

There is a second, finer way to look at it. Take the eye that fastens not on the play as a whole but on the stretch right in front of it. Seen that way, even within a single play each emotion can hold its own primacy — in this scene one is principal, in that scene another. So besides the play-by-play primacy of the previous point, there is a scene-by-scene primacy within one play; the two viewings are set side by side, neither cancelling the other.

And here is a decisive point about all of them together: every one of these rasas is, at bottom, a thing of pleasure — even the grim ones. Why? Because what actually gets relished is a single, undivided light of consciousness, the savouring of one's own awareness, and the very core of that self-luminous awareness is bliss. So whatever the emotion staged, the relishing of it is blissful.

Here is the everyday proof. Take pure, unmixed grief — the hardest case. Out in ordinary life, when women give themselves fully to weeping, their hearts actually come to rest; the grief, wept through, brings a strange relief. That happens because even this savoured grief is, in its very substance, a repose with nothing blocking it. And an unobstructed repose is at bottom a pleasure. So even grief, relished, turns out to have ease at its core.

Press it one step further: what is pain, really? Nothing but restlessness, the failure to come to rest. That is precisely why the Sāṁkhyas, when they classed pain as a working of rajas, said its very life-breath is instability, cāñcalya. But relishing, as we saw, is a coming-to-rest. So if pain just is restlessness, then a settled relishing cannot be pain — and every rasa, at its core, is bliss.

All the same, do not flatten them all into one bland sweetness. Because of the particular content that flavours each rasa, some of them carry a distinctly pungent edge — why pretend otherwise? Think of the bracing, astringent 'touch' of the heroic rasa, vīra. It is still blissful to relish, but its taste is sharp, not sweet.

Why is the heroic rasa pungent rather than sweet? Because its very life is the capacity to endure hardship and the like — and endurance has a stern, bracing taste. That completes the account of why rati, krodha, utsāha and śama are the primary abiding emotions. Their primacy has now been shown.

The four emotions just discussed (rati, krodha, utsāha, śama) count as primary because they aim at the goals of life. But the remaining sthāyins — hāsa (mirth), śoka, bhaya, jugupsā, vismaya — have their own kind of primacy on a different ground. Their excitants lie ready to hand for everyone, anywhere, so they color the mind to an exceptional degree. That easy universality is what makes them primary.

And that is exactly why hāsa and its companions crowd the lower sort of characters. Since anyone can find the excitants for laughter, grief, fear, disgust, and wonder, these emotions run thick in the middling and base natures on the stage.

Look at the near-boor — which is nearly everybody. He laughs, he grieves, he takes fright, he loves to run other people down, and because even a small clever remark is over his head, he gapes in wonder at anything. Right there you see hāsa, śoka, bhaya, jugupsā (his fault-finding), and vismaya all ready in the common man — no cultivation needed.

That said, hāsa and its companions need not stay mere coloring. When they attach as limbs to rati, utsāha, and the other goal-serving emotions, they too can lend a hand toward the aims of life. On their own they only color; in service to the primary emotions they can also do useful work.

And which emotion stands primary and which runs as a subordinate is the very thing that sorts drama into its ten types and their subdivisions. Abhinava flags this now and promises the full account in its proper place.

Now, why is only this set called the abiding emotions (sthāyins)? Because from the moment any creature is born it is already ringed round by exactly these mental states — no more, no fewer. They are its native equipment, present without being aroused. That inborn permanence is what makes them 'abiding'.

Here is the proof, one emotion at a time. By the old maxim 'everyone hates the touch of pain and is greedy for the taste of pleasure,' every being comes wanting to enjoy — there is rati. Puffed up with his own worth, he laughs down others — hāsa. Cut off from what he loves, he burns — śoka. He rages at whatever caused the loss — krodha. Too weak to face those causes, he takes fright — bhaya. He is out to win something — utsāha. Yet he shrinks from the unfamiliar and writes things off as distasteful — jugupsā. He gawps in wonder at the tasks before him — vismaya. And he is born already half-wanting to let some things go — nirveda, the root of śama. All nine abiding emotions, present in a person from day one.

For no living creature exists without the buried impressions of these emotions. Even when none is aroused, the seed of every one lies dormant in every being.

The only variation from person to person is one of degree and aim. In one man a given emotion runs strong, another weak; in one it is trained on the proper object, in another it strays. The emotions themselves are the same stock in everyone.

So of all these emotions the teacher points to just the one that serves a human goal, and that is the one worth cultivating. The rest are present too, but only the goal-serving one is held up for instruction.

And this same sorting — which emotion is uppermost in a person — is what lets us call one character 'noble', another 'middling', another 'low'. The rank of a character just tracks the emotion that governs him.

Now contrast the transient feelings — the vyabhicārins, states like glāni (languor) and śaṅkā (apprehension). These are nowhere to be found in any creature unless their own proper excitant is present. Unlike the abiding emotions, they have no inborn footing; take away the cause and they are simply not there.

Take a sage who has drunk the rasāyana tonic. Languor, sloth, weariness and the like never rise in him at all — because the tonic has removed the very cause of them. Cut the cause and the transient feeling never appears.

And even in a person where such a feeling does flare up under a present excitant, once that cause dies down the feeling fades with it — and it need not even leave a residue behind. The transient feeling vanishes cause and all, often without a trace.

The abiding emotions behave the opposite way. Take utsāha: even after it has done its job and seems to have died away, it never sinks below the level of a lasting trace. For toward some other task still to be done, a man's utsāha is never cancelled — it merely rests, ready to rise again. That standing residue is what the vyabhicārin lacks.

Abhinava clinches it with the Yoga school. When Caitra falls for one woman, his love is not thereby extinguished toward every other — it simply lies latent, focused for now on one object. His attachment persists as a standing disposition even when unmanifest.

Here is Abhinava's great image. Picture a necklace: a colored thread (red or blue) with transparent beads strung on it — crystal, glass, mica, ruby, emerald, sapphire. The thread is the abiding emotion, the sthāyin. The clear beads are the transient feelings, the vyabhicārins, each flashing up and dying away in a thousand ways. Now trace the mapping. The beads do not permanently dye the thread — the transient feelings leave the sthāyin itself uncolored. Yet the beads hang together only because the thread runs through them — the vyabhicārins cohere only on the sthāyin. They lend the thread their sparkle — coloring the abiding emotion as it passes; and between beads the plain thread shows through — the sthāyin surfaces on its own now and then; and each bead catches the glow of the beads before and after it — each transient feeling is tinged by its neighbors, a shifting motley of reflected color. Because they run this way and that across the thread, they are called vyabhicārins, 'the ones that move variously.' The analogy stops here: it shows how the fleeting feelings are carried on, and color, the one steady emotion — not that they ever become that emotion.

There is a simple test. Say 'this man is weary' and everyone at once asks 'weary from what?' — and that reflex demand for a cause shows that weariness (glāni) is only a transient feeling, dependent on a cause. But say 'Rāma is full of valour (utsāha)' and no one asks 'valorous from what?' — because utsāha is simply Rāma's abiding nature, a sthāyin that needs no external cause. Whether people demand a cause is the mark that tells sthāyin from vyabhicārin.

So here is the upshot. The vibhāvas do not manufacture rati or utsāha. They only wake an emotion that is already innate and tint its standing nature. All they really contribute is to make that rati or utsāha fitting or unfitting to this or that situation. The abiding emotion is roused, colored, and placed by the excitant — never created by it.

Do not misread this. Saying the vibhāva only rouses the emotion does not mean that without the vibhāva the abiding emotion is simply gone. As already established, every creature is woven of these emotions as buried impressions (vāsanā). The excitant is absent, but the sthāyin still lies there latent — which is exactly what the transient vyabhicārin, by contrast, does not do.

The point contrasts with the sthāyins just discussed. A sthāyin (a standing emotion) survives even without its vibhāva, since all creatures carry it as a latent impression. A vyabhicārin (a passing state) does not: take away its own exciting cause and not even its name is left. He promises to develop this fully when he reaches the relevant chapter.

He now cashes out one of the seven obstacles. The sixth obstacle was the worry that the sthāyin is only a subordinate thing, not the main object of relish. That worry is removed, he says, in the very act of settling what the sthāyin is. Bharata's own words in chapter 6 — rasa-hood arises from the sthāyin — round off the general definition, and the rasa-by-rasa definitions do the same work for each case. So the sthāyin, not the vibhāvas or the passing states, is the principal thing that gets relished.

Taken one at a time, none of the three kinds of factor pins down a single emotion. Tears (a reaction) can come from joy or from sore eyes. A tiger (an exciting cause) can trigger fear or anger. Fatigue and worry (passing states) ride along with resolve, with fear, with many things. So no single factor, by itself, tells you which sthāyin is present. This sets up why the sūtra needs them combined.

The single factor was ambiguous; the ensemble is not. Put the three together — loss of kinsmen as the cause, wailing and tears as the reaction, worry and dejection as the passing states — and the emotion can only be grief. So this is exactly why Bharata's sūtra uses the word 'combination' (saṁyoga): the combining of the three factors stills the doubt about which emotion is present. Abhinava is reading the sūtra-term saṁyoga as the answer to the seventh obstacle.

This is the definition the whole chapter has been building to. In ordinary life, when you see a sign — an effect, a cause, something that regularly goes with an emotion — you infer what another person is feeling; the feeling at its core is a sthāyin, and you read it by long practice. On the stage the very same items appear — the garden, the sidelong glance — but they have crossed out of that worldly job. They are no longer literal causes and effects. Their whole life now is to color and deepen the relish, to make the emotion felt. That is why they earn new, extraordinary names: 'vibhāva', 'anubhāva'. The names also announce that these things still carry, as impressions, the causal force they had in their former worldly shape. Their exact kinds will come in the Bhāva chapter. Ranged among themselves as major and minor, they bring the spectator's mind to a right conjunction — a fusion, a one-pointed focus. And through them the object is carried into a relishing that is extraordinary and free of every obstacle. That object has one essence only: its being-savored right now. It is not a thing with a nature already fixed and standing on its own. It belongs to that moment alone; it does not rest on any time before or after the savoring. And that — wholly unlike the standing emotion, the sthāyin — is what rasa is.

Having given his own definition, Abhinava now sets it off against the rival view he rejects. Śaṅkuka and those with him said: rasa is nothing but the sthāyin itself, inferred through the vibhāvas and the other factors, and it gets the name 'rasa' simply because it is being relished. Abhinava's 'not, however, as Śaṅkuka held' flags that his own account (the object caught up in carvaṇā) is precisely not this — for him rasa is unlike the sthāyin, not identical to it.

Here is the break in Śaṅkuka's view. If 'being relished' is all it takes to make the sthāyin rasa, then the emotions of ordinary life should be rasa too. Indeed, if even a merely staged, unreal emotion can be relishable, a genuinely real emotion in the world would be all the more so — yet nobody calls that rasa. So on Śaṅkuka's own terms the thing he points to is just an inferred cognition of the sthāyin, an anumiti, and should be named that. It is not rasa. What makes rasa is the extraordinary obstacle-free relishing, not the bare fact of being relished.

This explains a fact about the wording of Bharata's rasa-sūtra. The sūtra lists the exciting causes, the reactions, and the passing states, and says rasa arises from their combination — but it never names the sthāyin. And that omission is deliberate. Precisely because rasa is not the sthāyin itself (as Śaṅkuka wrongly thought), Bharata kept the word 'sthāyin' out of the definition.

Not only was leaving the sthāyin out no loss — putting it in would have been a positive flaw, a thorn lodged in the definition, since it would have identified rasa with the sthāyin. The familiar saying 'the sthāyin turns into rasa' is therefore only a loose, fitting way of talking. It is licensed by aucitya, appropriateness, not by strict truth: rasa is not literally the sthāyin.

Here is why saying 'the sthāyin becomes rasa' is apt, even though it is loose. The very items that, in the world, were known as the sthāyin's own causes, effects, and companions now take on a new status: they become vibhāvas and the rest, because now their worth lies in serving the relish. Since the same material that belonged to the sthāyin is what gets relished as rasa, it is fitting — though not literally true — to say the sthāyin has turned into rasa.

Reading another's mind by ordinary inference carries no rasa at all — there is nothing wondrous in it. So the relish of rasa, whose very nature is extraordinary wonder (camatkāra), must be a thing apart. It is unlike memory, unlike inference, unlike any ordinary awareness. This drives home the break with Śaṅkuka: his inference of the sthāyin, being just inference, could never be the wondering relish that rasa is.

Take the sensitive spectator. His long practice at reading emotions in ordinary life has prepared him. When the heroine is shown on stage, he does not take her in coldly, as a neutral onlooker standing apart. The worldly skill primes him, but the taking-in that follows is not the detached inference of a bystander. What it is instead comes in the next sentence.

Instead of the bystander's cognition, this is what happens. Because the spectator is a sahṛdaya — a 'same-hearted' one whose heart vibrates in tune with what is shown — the relish of rasa is already sprouting in him, a seed about to open into fullness. And it comes without his climbing any staircase of inference, then memory, then conclusion. It skips those steps, because its very life is a savoring meant for tanmayībhāva — becoming one with the emotion. He does not deduce the feeling; he is drawn into it.

One might object that the relish is really just a memory. Abhinava blocks it. The relishing did not arise from some earlier, separate act of knowing the object — as it would have to, if the present relish were to count as remembering something already cognized. There was no prior grasp to be recalled. So the carvaṇā is fresh, not a memory of a past cognition.

And there is no ordinary knowing at work here either. No everyday perception, no inference, none of the standard means of knowledge is operating in the relish. The savoring is not the output of any laukika pramāṇa. Having ruled out memory, he now rules out perception and its fellows.

So where does the relish come from, if not from memory or ordinary knowing? From this alone: the force of the combination of the extraordinary vibhāvas, anubhāvas, and passing states. That conjunction — the saṁyoga of the rasa-sūtra, now understood as extraordinary — is the sole thing that brings the savoring about. This is the positive answer that matches the sūtra's own word.

Now the relish is marked off from three cognitions it might be confused with. First, it is not the ordinary awareness of rati and the other emotions that comes through worldly means of knowledge — perception, inference, scripture, comparison. Second, it is not the yogin's perception of another person's mind, which knows that mind but as a detached bystander. Third, it is not even the highest yogin's experience of pure self-bliss — a single, massed bliss with no object at all to color it. The rasa-relish is a fourth thing, distinct from every one of these: it has an object, yet it is not detached; it is blissful, yet not objectless.

Why is none of these three the tasting of rasa? Because not one of them has beauty (saundarya), and each fails for its own reason. Worldly love is forever broken into by obstacles — above all the craving to get and hold its object. The yogin's neutral knowing of someone else's feeling is too detached to be vivid. And ordinary feeling helplessly loses itself in its object, swept along with no footing of its own. Craving, or coldness, or being dragged under — each spoils the charm. Rasa, as the next line shows, escapes all three.

Rasa is free of all three flaws, and here is why. It is not locked into 'my own self' alone — so you are not helplessly dragged into an object as your private possession. Yet your own self does enter the feeling — it is not fenced off as merely someone else's — so there is no cold, dim detachment either. And because the vibhāvas, made common to all by universalization (sādhāraṇya), wake up the love that already sleeps as a latent impression (vāsanā) in every heart, that love floods in fully — leaving no gap for craving or any other obstacle to creep in. Not just mine, not just his, but shared: that is what lets rasa be tasted. He notes he has made this point many times.

It follows at once that the vibhāvas do not produce rasa the way a potter produces a pot. If they did — if rasa were a made thing standing on its own once caused — then rasa would go on existing even after you stopped attending to the vibhāvas, just as the pot survives the potter. But rasa lasts only as long as the vibhāvas are being savored; drop the savoring and it is gone. So the vibhāvas are not the productive cause of rasa. This is the strike against Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa's 'rasa is produced' (utpatti).

And they are not causes of knowing either — not evidence that reveals an already-standing rasa. If they were, they would have to be listed among the pramāṇas, the recognized means of valid knowledge, the way smoke is evidence that reveals fire. This is the strike against Śaṅkuka, who made the vibhāvas the inferential marks (liṅga) from which rasa is inferred. The next line says why even that will not stand.

Here is why the vibhāvas cannot be evidence for rasa: evidence reveals something that is already there to be found — smoke reveals a fire that exists whether or not you see it. But there is no ready-made rasa sitting out there as an object waiting to be known. Rasa has no such standing existence prior to the tasting. With no pre-given object, there is nothing for a pramāṇa to point to — so the vibhāvas cannot be knowledge-causes.

So the objector presses: if the vibhāvas neither make rasa nor prove it, what on earth are they? The answer: they belong to an order of their own, not the everyday one. The very vocabulary — 'vibhāva', 'anubhāva', 'vyabhicārin' — is a special language for the elements that feed the relishing (carvaṇā). In ordinary life we would call the same things 'causes' and 'effects' and 'signs'; on the stage they are renamed, because their job here is not to cause or to prove but to be savored. The word 'vibhāva' is a term of aesthetic art, not of worldly causation.

The objector tries once more: 'but where else in all experience do you find a cause that neither produces nor reveals? Nowhere — so your account is groundless.' Abhinava turns it around: that it is found nowhere else is not an embarrassment but a decoration for his case. He is claiming rasa is alaukika, out of the ordinary; and the surest sign of the extraordinary is precisely that it has no parallel in the ordinary. The objection, meant to sink the thesis, confirms it.

And there is a homely precedent after all. Take the taste of a pānaka, a spiced sweet drink. Where does that single, unified flavour live? Not in the molasses by itself, not in the pepper by itself, not in any one ingredient — it arises only from the blend, and belongs to none of the parts. The mapping is exact: the drink's emergent taste is rasa; the separate ingredients are the individual vibhāvas, anubhāvas and vyabhicārins; and just as you will never find the drink's flavour in any lone ingredient, you will never find rasa in any single element. So the case of rasa is not unexampled — the sherbet on your own tongue works the same way. The analogy shows emergence; it does not make rasa a worldly flavour, since the drink's taste is still laukika while rasa is alaukika.

The objector recoils: 'if rasa is no object of knowledge, then it is aprameya, unknowable — surely absurd!' Abhinava simply agrees. Yes, and it should be so. Rasa's one and only life-breath is being-relished (rasyatā). Its whole being is to be tasted, not to be known as an object standing over against a knower. So to say 'rasa is not a prameya' is not to insult it but to state precisely what it is. It is not unknowable in the sense of hidden; it is beyond the knower-known frame altogether, because it lives only in the tasting.

But Bharata's own sūtra says 'rasa-niṣpatti', the production of rasa. If rasa is not produced, what do we do with the word? Abhinava reads it carefully: the 'production' spoken of is not the production of rasa. It is the production of the rasanā — the relishing — which takes rasa as its object. From the coming-together of vibhāvas, anubhāvas and vyabhicārins, what arises is the act of tasting; rasa itself is what that tasting savours. So the sūtra's niṣpatti is honoured, but placed on the relishing, not on rasa.

And there is an easy second way to keep the sūtra's word. Rasa's whole existence hangs on the relishing and on nothing else — no tasting, no rasa. So once the relishing is produced, one may loosely say rasa too is 'produced', borrowing the word from the act it wholly depends on. Taken that way — rasa 'produced' only because its life is the relishing that was produced — the sūtra's niṣpatti is perfectly fine. Either reading works; neither makes rasa an independently manufactured thing.

What sort of act is this relishing, then? Neither of the two ordinary kinds. It is not the working of a pramāṇa, a means of knowledge — so it is not a cognizing that reveals a pre-given object, which was Śaṅkuka's inference. And it is not the working of a kāraka, a causal factor in an action — so it is not a making or producing, which was Lollaṭa's line. The relishing is its own kind of activity, falling under neither knowing nor doing as usually understood.

One might worry: if the relishing is not the working of any means-of-knowledge, is it then unattested, a claim floating with no support? No. Though it is not itself a pramāṇa, the relishing is not thereby groundless — it stands on its own by direct self-awareness (svasaṁvedana). Everyone knows, immediately and without argument, that they are relishing; the tasting is self-lit. It needs no external proof precisely because it is self-evident in the having of it.

So is the relishing a kind of knowing after all? Yes — it really is a form of awareness (bodha); it is not blind or non-conscious. But it is an awareness utterly unlike every ordinary one. And the reason is simple: its instruments are extraordinary. The means by which it arises — the vibhāvas and their companions — are themselves alaukika, out of the ordinary world; and an awareness that works through extraordinary means is itself extraordinary. Same genus, awareness; but a species all its own.

Now the whole sūtra can be read cleanly. From the conjunction of vibhāvas, anubhāvas and vyabhicārins, what is produced is the relishing (rasanā). And the object that such a relishing savours — a content that transcends the ordinary world (lokottara) — is what we call rasa. So 'production' belongs to the tasting, and rasa is the transcendent thing tasted. That, says Abhinava, is exactly what Bharata meant by 'from the conjunction of vibhāva, anubhāva and vyabhicārin, the niṣpatti of rasa.' This is the settled construal, the siddhānta.

Having settled the doctrine, Abhinava now gathers it into a short recap. In brief, here is how the whole thing works — and the next lines walk once more through the stage, the costume, the spectator's mind, and how a particular love becomes everyone's.

Step one. The costume — the crown, the character's headdress, and the rest — does its first work by hiding the thought 'this is just so-and-so the actor.' As long as you can see the player as the player, no rasa can flow; the recognition of the mere man is an obstacle. The get-up screens it off. You no longer take what is before you as this particular actor.

Step two, the mirror image. The poetry does rouse the thought 'this is Rāma' — the words have that power. But that thought does not come to rest on this particular actor either. Why not? Because our minds are stamped with deep, old impressions of the real Rāma of tradition — and against those, this man here cannot be fixed as actually being Rāma. So neither pole locks in: the costume blocks 'this is the actor', and our saṁskāras block 'this is [truly] Rāma'. The figure hovers, identified with neither.

And so, with neither the actor's own here-and-now nor Rāma's distant there-and-then able to fix the scene, both space-time frames simply fall away. Now the bodily signs — horripilation, the thrill on the skin, and the rest — which in everyday life we regularly read as marks of love, are read the same way here. But cut loose from any particular place and time, they no longer point to this man's love now or that hero's love then. They convey love (rati) plainly, but unanchored — love as such, belonging to no fixed person or moment. That unanchoring is universalization (sādhāraṇya).

And this universalized love is not something you watch from outside. Your own self has entered right into it — because you too carry love as a latent impression (vāsanā) sleeping within. The shared rati on stage wakes the rati already in you, so the feeling is not merely the character's; it is yours as well. This is the 'entry of the self' (sva-anupraveśa) named earlier as exactly what keeps the tasting from going cold and detached.

Two of the old flaws now fall away by name. First: since your own self has entered the feeling, you do not apprehend this love coldly, as a detached onlooker — so the yogin's un-vivid detachment is gone. Second: you do not apprehend it as fastened to some determinate object you could go after — so there is no opening for the craving-to-get (arjana) or clinging (abhiṣaṅga) that beset ordinary love. Universalized, the love has no particular object to seize, and no distance to chill it.

And the third and last flaw goes too. The love is not apprehended as locked into one specific other person, the way we register some particular stranger's feeling. If it were so confined, then — as with any fixed other — our own grief (duḥkha) or aversion (dveṣa) might well rise up in response. But universalized, belonging to no single self, the love breeds no such reactions. So all three defects are cleared: not swept into an object as one's own, not chilled by detachment, not fenced into another that stirs pain or recoil. Neither mine alone nor his alone but shared — and that shared, savoured rati just is śṛṅgāra, the rasa of love.

Here is the upshot of everything he has been saying. Take rati, erotic love, and strip it of every private tag — not Rāma's love for Sītā, not fenced to this place, this time, this person. When that generalized love becomes the object of the audience's awareness — and it makes no difference whether that awareness runs on as a continuous stream or is one single flash of awareness — that generalized love is śṛṅgāra, the erotic rasa.

The generalizing is done by the vibhāvas and the rest — and each of the three (vibhāva, anubhāva, vyabhicārin) can take the lead. He gives three sample verses in turn. First, one where the vibhāva leads. A lover speaks to his beloved: your whole body brims with amorous grace; the arch of your eyes is Kāma's own bent bow; your eyebrows are his string of teasing play. Every line dwells on her — her beauty, the ālambana-vibhāva, is what fills the verse.

He finishes the verse: even the first taste of her sets everything astir — the very nectar poured from the lotus of her face; O beautiful one, you alone are the Creator's masterpiece, the whole essence of the three worlds distilled. Then Abhinava points to what carries it: in this verse the beauty, and beauty is made by the vibhāva, is what stands in front. So this is his sample of vibhāva-predominance.

Even though the vibhāva leads, the other two are not missing. Riding along behind the beauty, the anubhāvas are lit up by words like kelī, vibhrama, bhaṅgura, narma, and the vyabhicārins by words like bhaṅgī, krama, vikāra. So one must not object that a subordinated element has gone dim: in this śṛṅgāra, which is nothing but the relishing of rati, all three are plainly there.

Now a verse where the anubhāva leads — a verse by Indurāja, praised as the great poet who fills the whole ocean of literature with the pure flow of Sarasvatī. The verse: her eyes, after glancing again and again, go heavy and still; her limbs waste a little more each day, like a lotus-stalk cut from the water. These are all bodily symptoms — anubhāvas — of a woman in love.

He finishes the verse: her cheeks' pallor outdoes the pale dūrvā-shoot — such is simply the state of every young woman when Kṛṣṇa is the beloved youth. Then he shows the mechanism. The words 'pausing' (viśramya), 'again and again' (bahuśaḥ), 'day by day' (pratidinam) quietly deliver the whole crowd of vyabhicārins — longing, worry, eagerness, sleeplessness, and so on. The word 'Kṛṣṇa' delivers the vibhāva, the beloved. But both of these enter only in a subordinate role; the symptoms are what lead.

By contrast, the anubhāvas are the whole heap that dominates the verse: the stillness of 'resting' eyes, the shifting play of her glances, the step-by-step wasting of her body, the horripilation, the pallor — all the outward symptoms. This is why the verse counts as a case of anubhāva-predominance.

Now the third case: when it is the vyabhicārins, the transient feelings, that lead. And that lead is itself brought about by the predominance of the vibhāvas and anubhāvas that belong to those transient feelings. He gives the first illustration.

The verse: again and again she scoops up water in her hands to sprinkle over her dearest one; but, being timid and suddenly afraid of a tiny fish darting in it, she lets the water slip away. The picture is built on her fright and hesitation — the transient feelings.

The verse closes: with her eyes unsteady she lets the water — which even carries the reflection of her own eyes — slip from her cupped palms. Now Abhinava names what leads. It is the crowd of transient feelings — her reasoning, her fright, her doubt — that stand in front here; they are the very ornament of this tender, guileless girl. And they lead for the reason he gave: their vibhāvas, made vivid by her overflowing beauty, are themselves what predominate.

And the outward symptoms here — the anubhāvas delivered by words like 'āttam' (the repeated scooping) — do not lead; they only tag along behind the transient feelings. So in this third verse the vyabhicārins are on top and the anubhāvas below, the reverse of the previous case.

He has shown one factor leading three ways over. The remaining combinations — two of them leading together, or all three leading equally — should be illustrated on the same pattern; he leaves those examples to the reader.

But of all these arrangements, the finest is the last. When the vibhāva, anubhāva, and vyabhicārin all stand equally in the foreground, none subordinated, that is where the relishing of rasa rises to its peak.

And this equal predominance of all three is possible only in a full-length composition; strictly speaking, only in a drama, a daśarūpaka. A single verse cannot hold all three in equal balance — there is not room enough.

He backs the point with Vāmana: of all forms of composition, the drama is the highest.

The quotation finishes: the drama is as richly variegated as a completed painting, precisely because it carries the full complement of particulars — every character, mood, and detail in place. That completeness is why the drama alone can hold all three factors in equal balance.

Why does the drama manage what the lyric cannot? Because the drama hands the audience the whole thing directly — the right speech, the right costume, the right stage-action, all fitted in place before their eyes. Nothing has to be imagined; it is all supplied.

In a single lyric verse, rasa still arises — but by borrowing that fullness. The connoisseurs supply for themselves what the drama would have staged: they imagine the fitting lead-up and aftermath — 'here is the sort of speaker, and here the sort of occasion' — and so build a whole pedestal (pīṭhabandha) under the bare verse to stand it up.

The result: a true connoisseur — made so by long practice with poetry and by merit carried over from former lives — needs very little. Even when a verse lays out only a handful of vibhāvas, for him the meaning of the poem still flashes up in full clarity, as vivid as if he were seeing it with his own eyes.

So for such connoisseurs, poetry on its own delivers both aims — the delight (prīti) and the schooling (vyutpatti) that literature is for — with no need of staged drama at all. The page alone is enough for them.

And yet even for these connoisseurs, who need no stage, drama still adds something. By the old saying 'the moonbeams, once fallen, sparkled all the more,' the drama polishes their relish to a far higher brightness. Poetry suffices them; drama perfects them.

That same drama gives inner cleansing even to those with no cultivated heart. In it the song, the music, the courtesans on stage do not lead the viewer into vice — because they are held within the frame of the play, not taken as real objects of craving.

And on stage the actor works the way a sacred image works for a meditator: he is the support the mind rests on to hold the character before it.

For the meditator does not really think, 'this lump of red-lead and paint is the Vāsudeva I am to contemplate.' That is not the cognition he has.

Rather, the image is only the doorway. Through it a particular deity becomes the object of a vivid inner resolve, and it is that deity, so held, that yields the meditator his fruit — not the paint and clay.

In the same way, the actor's performance raises a vivid determination whose object — the depicted matter — is untouched by any fixed here-and-now. That object works like a scriptural injunction, 'act thus and this is the fruit', and so the play imparts refinement. The mapping: the icon is the actor, the deity vividly resolved is the character, the meditator's fruit is the viewer's instruction. The analogy holds on the one point — the material support is only a doorway; it is not pressed to make the actor an object of worship.

In this cognition no cancelling thought comes up — neither 'but this really belongs to some other place or person' about the scene, nor a doubt about the states of mind shown. For it stands as a complete cognition, true knowledge as it is.

So the audience's cognition is simply 'Rāma' — not 'this is not really Rāma, this is some other man [the actor] standing in for him'.

This point will be developed further on. Since so extraordinary a matter would not carry conviction to the heart without an illustration, Bharata himself raises the question: 'What is the example?'

The question means: where else do we ever see that combining many separate things gives rise to a wholly new rasa?

To this question Bharata answers in his own prose — the passage that begins 'just as (yathā)…' and ends '…they attain (āpnuvanti)' rasa-hood.

'Vyañjana' means the condiment or seasoning poured over the food. By its varieties — bitter, sweet, sour and so on — it goes by names like adhikāñjika.

'Herbs' means tamarind, wheat-leaf, turmeric and so on; 'substance' means jaggery and the like.

From the combination of these — a proper joining carried out step by step in cooking, something only a skilled cook can bring off —

'Ṣāḍava and the rest' names a flavour distinct both from the six familiar separate tastes — sweet, bitter, sour, salty, pungent, astringent — and from any mere mixture of them. It is a genuinely new taste, and that is exactly what the word ṣāḍava picks out. This carries the apūrva point: the combining yields something present in none of the parts.

Very many dishes, each with that new flavour predominant, are in this way made fit to be savoured.

In just that way, the abiding emotions — brought by the many vibhāvas and the rest to a vividness close to direct perception, far past anything in ordinary life — there attain rasa-hood, whose whole life is simply being relished.

The upshot is this: by a proper joining — which here is the cooking — a rasa is first born that was in none of the ingredients on its own.

And in the dish it is mainly the water of the broth that brings the taste out. So the condiment answers to the vibhāva — the exciting cause that manifests the mood.

The tamarind and turmeric answer mostly to the anubhāvas, the outward signs. The added substances — jaggery and the like — answer to the vyabhicāris, the passing feelings, because they bring in a sweetness of their own, unlike the dish's basic sour taste.

They count as vyabhicāri-like because they add variety in two directions: in themselves they lean on the main taste, and into that main taste they pass their own flavour, colouring it. Just so a passing feeling both draws on the abiding mood and tints it.

On the food side, what answers to rasa is a particular taste — like the sthāyī, arising just when the ingredients are mixed, produced by the condiment that stands for the vibhāva. But that taste is only a worldly one.