So the matter comes to this. Are the bhāvas from the rasas? Or the other way round? Or do the two generate each other? Bharata's 'kiṁ… uta… āho' gives us three questions, not two.

The little word 'āho' has to be shifted from where it sits and read with a different clause. The reason: that rasa arises from the vibhāvas and so on has already been settled earlier, so the question here is really about the remaining options.

That option — rasa producing bhāva — is the 'second position', and it was in effect already granted earlier in the discussion.

But how could that second view even get going? Here is the thought behind it: out in ordinary life there is no such thing as a 'vibhāva' or an 'anubhāva' at all. Nobody meets a bare vibhāva walking around.

In the world these things are just plain causes and effects — a woman, a glance, a tremble. They only become 'vibhāva', 'anubhāva' and so on at the moment they start serving relish (rasanā). Off the stage they are ordinary cause and effect; in the tasting they turn into vibhāvas.

But look where that leads. If things only become vibhāvas by serving rasa, then the vibhāvas depend on rasa for their very identity. Yet earlier the opposite was taught — that rasa arises out of the vibhāvas. So now we are saying both.

So: rasa needs the vibhāvas to arise, and the vibhāvas need rasa to be vibhāvas at all. Each leans wholly on the other. That is parasparāśraya — a vicious circle.

And there is a recognized rule for this, from Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya: things that mutually depend on each other can never come about. So the objection is sealed — the 'each from the other' view is a logical fault.

Now Bharata gives his settled answer with 'for it is seen'. What we actually observe is this: a lovely woman and the rest, once they register in the spectator, yield the tasting of rasa. The cognition of the bhāva-side comes first and the relish follows — exactly as taught before.

So the bhāvas are not derived from the rasas. And thinking through what the word 'bhāva' itself means confirms it — which is why the summary verses come next. Abhinava unpacks them: 'well-bound' means tightly joined to the acting; and these rasas have 'gone into the heart'. Because the bhāvas bhāvayanti — bring about, produce — those rasas, that is exactly why they are named 'bhāvas'.

One may object: fine, but all this etymology does is explain why we happen to call them 'bhāvas'. It gives the reason the word is used — it does not yet touch the real subject at hand.

To meet that worry — 'the etymology says nothing about the actual subject' — Bharata now ties it back to the point at hand. That is why the next verse, 'nānādravyaiḥ' (v35), comes: it carries the naming-argument into the real question of how bhāvas make rasas.

The word vyañjana is read two ways at once. By derivation it means 'what gets manifested' (vyajyate) — the technical, aesthetic sense. In the kitchen picture it means the condiment or relish added to food. And 'rasa' here is meant as flavour, the taste of the dish.

The word 'of many kinds' (bahuvidhaiḥ) can attach two ways, and Abhinava leaves both standing. Either it is an upalakṣaṇa pointing to the vyañjana (the seasonings), or it is a viśeṣaṇa directly describing the 'abhinayas' (the many kinds of acting). He does not choose between them.

Bharata now draws the settled position together in a line of verse: 'there is no rasa that has no bhāva in it.'

Here Abhinava has the objector reveal what he is really driving at, using the next half-line: 'and no bhāva is without rasa either.' The objector is not conceding the point — he is turning Bharata's words into the opening of a challenge.

His point: out in the everyday world nobody calls anything a 'vibhāva' or an 'anubhāva' — those labels live only in the rasa-setting. So the terms hang entirely on rasa, and bhāva and rasa cannot be prised apart.

Now Bharata gives the answer, in the line: 'the mutual establishing of the two would come about in the abhinaya — the acted performance.'

Unpack it. Once the abhinaya — the direct realization on the stage — is fully in place, the causes and effects get called 'vibhāva' and so on precisely because they serve that realization. So the mutual establishing that then arises between bhāva and rasa is a sound and welcome thing. That is what the line grants.

A reciprocity of just this kind, born of mutual dependence, is no fault at all — that is the meaning.

On this very point he offers an illustration, in the line beginning 'the combining of condiments and herbs...'

Take the seasoning-and-herb mixture and the food as the two agents. Turn by turn, each in its turn becoming the thing acted on, they bring the dish to its tastiness. In just that way bhāvas and rasas bring each other about. The seasoning-mixture answers to the bhāvas, the food to the rasas; the tastiness is the finished savour — and neither side is fixed as only-cause or only-effect.

'Bhāvas bhāvayanti the rasas' means: they produce them. 'Rasas, on the other side, bhāvayanti the bhāvas' means: they make the bhāvas. The one verb runs both ways, and Abhinava reads out each direction separately.

That is, the rasas make those feelings into things we can label 'vibhāva' and the rest. And here is the real crux. Mutual dependence is a fault only when it is one and the same action at one and the same moment. It is no fault when the two operations are different actions — one action is the bhāvas producing rasa, another is rasa conferring 'vibhāva'-status on the causes.

Just as, by adding the seasonings and so on, the food is made to have a delightful taste — its rasavattā, its being-full-of-flavour — is produced.

Or, running it the other way: the food, serving as the base that holds them, makes the seasonings' pleasure something one can enjoy. So the food acts on the seasonings just as the seasonings acted on the food — the two directions are different actions.

Apply it back. By the bhāvas, rasa comes to be savoured — that is their work, like the seasonings making the food tasty. By the rasas, the causes and effects come to be labelled 'vibhāva' and the rest — that is their work, like the food making the seasonings enjoyable. Two different actions, no circle.

A second example. Looked at with reference to the cloth, the threads get called 'the cause of the cloth.'

And looked at with reference to the threads, the cloth is the effect. There is no vicious circle here: the same items are cause under one relation and effect under another, and the two relations differ. Exactly so in the case before us, with bhāva and rasa.

An objection. If the rasas arise from the bhāvas, then how could it have been said earlier that 'without rasa nothing whatever, no subject-matter, gets under way'? If rasa comes second, out of the bhāvas, it cannot be the thing on which everything depends.

'...and that is exactly why the rasas had to be listed first.' Having raised this doubt, Bharata answers with the verse beginning 'yathā...' — the seed-and-tree analogy.

Just as the seed stands as the root of the tree, so stand the rasas — the source from which everything else grows.

For the instruction poetry gives — instruction that comes wedded to delight — is rooted in that rasa. And the actor's performance, led out in front by the poem, is rooted in the universalized awareness that lives in the poet. So rasa is genuinely the seed: from it flow the poet's shared awareness, the poem, and the actor's work.

And that very awareness is, at bottom, rasa itself. The spectator is first swept up and mastered by the experience of it; only afterward, by an act of mind that abstracts and separates out the parts, does he register 'this is a vibhāva, this an anubhāva.' So rasa stands as the root everywhere alike — in the dramatic aim, in the play, in the poem, and in the spectator's mind.

So then, holding the place of the root-seed, there is the rasa that has entered the poet. For the poet is himself just like a spectator — he too relishes the mood, and it is from that relishing that the poem springs.

That is exactly why the teacher Ānandavardhana said, 'if the poet is steeped in śṛṅgāra...' and so on (Dhvanyāloka 3.42).

He carries the seed-and-tree picture one step further, and names what each part stands for. The seed was the rasa alive in the poet. From that seed grows the poem — the poem is the tree. And the flowers on that tree are the actor's work on the stage: the abhinaya, the acting-out, and the rest. So: the poet's rasa is the seed, the written play is the trunk, the performance is the blossom.

And the fruit of the tree is the spectator's own relishing of rasa. Now the whole mapping stands complete: the poet's rasa is the seed, the play is the tree, the acting is the flower, and the taste of rasa in the audience is the fruit the tree was grown for. The analogy's point is that everything runs toward that final relish — the fruit is why there is a tree at all.

Here is the grand conclusion of the whole tree-picture: since it all ripens into the taste of rasa, the entire world is made of rasa alone. Then he notes an add-on that some interpreters press. They want the reader to see a whole shelf of doctrines mirrored in this passage — the Buddhist Vijñāna-vāda (only cognition is real), the theory of twofold word-denotation (or the sphoṭa), the Sāṅkhya satkārya-vāda (the effect already lies hidden in its cause, as the tree in the seed), the non-dualist 'all is one', and more. That is the view of 'some' — and, as the next line shows, Abhinava does not share it.

Abhinava's answer is blunt. We, he says, regard all that doctrine-dropping as mere showing-off — someone with no real training airing a scrap of learning that has no bearing on the subject. It is the resort of a vain effort. So let it drop. He refuses to haul the whole philosophical toolbox into a discussion about how one rasa gives rise to another.

Others map the same tree the opposite way. For them the seed is the bhāva; from it grows the tree, which is rasa; the flowers are again the abhinaya; and the fruit, once more, is the bhāva — now enjoyed through the audience's apprehension. So on their telling the bhāva sits at both ends, seed and fruit, with rasa only in the middle. Abhinava reports their reading here and knocks it down in the next two lines; the two mappings are not to be blended.

His verdict on that reading: those others have explained the entire passage in a way that cuts against what is actually under discussion. The whole context here is the primacy of rasa — and their inverted mapping loses exactly that.

Why it fails: on their scheme the bhāva would stand at the start and at the finish alike — both the seed and the fruit — so that rasa is squeezed out of the central place the whole chapter gives it. That will not do. So set this reading aside as well.

He sums up the whole debate. Three questions were on the table: do the bhāvas come from the rasas, or the rasas from the bhāvas, or do the two produce each other? The purport, he says, is that all three can be granted — each is true from its own standpoint. They are not rivals with one winner; they are three angles on a single process. That is where Bharata's discussion lands.

This is an avataraṇikā — he shows how the text turns a corner. The rasas have been named and sorted, and their general definition has been given and critically cleaned up. Now Bharata will hand each rasa its own specific definition. But first he lays the groundwork, restating the general point, in the line beginning 'tadeṣām...' (v39). The sentence just tells the lecturer: here the general treatment ends and the specific one is being set up.

He unpacks the mūla's 'we shall now expound...'. Since the shared, general definition is already in place, we turn to what completes the specific side of the picture: each rasa's utpatti (origin), varṇa (colour), daivata (deity), and nidarśana (illustration). These four are the pieces that give each rasa a definition of its own.

Take the first item, utpatti, 'origin'. It serves as a specific mark on two sides at once: it defines the rasas that do the producing and the rasas that get produced. Saying what comes from what is itself a way of pinning down each rasa.

How does 'origin' define both sides? By mutual delimitation. Take the producing rasas. What makes one a 'producer' at all, and marks it off from the other producers, is settled by what it produces. Śṛṅgāra counts as its own distinct producer precisely because it yields hāsya and not, say, karuṇa. So even a producer is pinned down by its product.

And it runs the other way too: what a produced rasa is, and how it differs from the other products, is fixed by which rasa gave rise to it. So producer and produced each define the other. That mutual defining is exactly why 'origin' can serve as a specific defining mark.

The second item, varṇa — the colour assigned to each rasa, white and the others. This one needs little comment: a colour is obviously a mark that tells one rasa from another. He passes over it quickly.

The fourth item, nidarśana, 'illustration' — shown in the passages that begin 'śṛṅgāra by name...'. What it amounts to is each rasa's tie to its own set of vibhāvas, anubhāvas, and vyabhicārins. You exhibit a rasa by naming the specific dramatic elements that belong to it, and that display is the nidarśana.

Now a catch. Not all four items give clean, self-standing certainty. 'Origin' alone opens the door to the circularity worry — producer and produced leaning on each other. And colour and deity rest only on received scripture (āgama), not on anything you can check for yourself. So these three — origin, colour, deity — cannot on their own be a sure means of settling what a rasa is.

But the fourth item is different. The tie to a rasa's own particular vibhāvas and the rest actually does render each rasa distinctly recognizable — and that is why it is called the nidarśana, the true 'illustration'. Where origin, colour, and deity fall short as sure means of ascertainment, the specific vibhāva-set does the job. (Marker 38 closes here.)

He begins with the first item, origin, at the words 'teṣām...' (v39). Bharata calls four rasas the 'origin-causes' of the other four. Abhinava at once softens 'cause' to 'indicator': the four — śṛṅgāra, raudra, vīra, bībhatsa — do not literally manufacture the other four. They point to them, flagging the modes by which one rasa gives rise to another.

The upshot: every possible way one rasa can produce or be produced by another is signalled by these four cases alone. Four producing rasas, four products — and that exhausts the pattern. Nothing is left over that would call for a fifth.

Take the first mode. Sometimes one rasa gives rise to another by showing up as a mere semblance of itself — an ābhāsa, an imitation (anukāra), not the genuine article. This is the case śṛṅgāra is set to indicate: laughter (hāsya) springs up precisely when śṛṅgāra appears only as a semblance of itself. This is the mūla's 'śṛṅgārānukṛtir yā tu sa hāsyaḥ' — hāsya is the imitation of śṛṅgāra.

Why does semblance-śṛṅgāra come about? Because when the whole apparatus is only a semblance — the vibhāva a look-alike, the anubhāva a look-alike, the vyabhicārins look-alikes — the love they add up to is itself only a semblance of rati. And the śṛṅgāra built on it is a śṛṅgāra-ābhāsa, whose very savouring (carvaṇā) is only a semblance of savouring: it looks like the tasting of love but is a mock-tasting. This semblance-śṛṅgāra is what surfaces as hāsya.

And here is why the love is only a semblance. What passes for rati in such a case is mere craving — bare hankering, kāmanā. Now bare craving is a passing feeling, a vyabhicāri-bhāva, not the settled, durable sthāyin that alone can ripen into true śṛṅgāra. A sthāyin can mature into a rasa; a fleeting itch cannot. So the 'love' never reaches the stable footing real śṛṅgāra needs — which is exactly why it stays a semblance. (This sets up the Rāvaṇa example that follows.)

In such a man the 'love' is only kāmanā, bare longing — a passing mood, not a genuine abiding emotion. Yet it puts on the mask of a sthāyin: it shines forth as though it were the real, foundational rati. And precisely because the sthāyin here is a pretender, everything hung on it — the vibhāvas, the anubhāvas, the passing moods — sinks to mere ābhāsa, a semblance of the real thing. That is what makes such love śṛṅgāra-ābhāsa, not śṛṅgāra.

So the rati in Rāvaṇa is only a sthāyin-semblance, a sthāyy-ābhāsa. Here is the proof. Whether Sītā hates him or merely looks past him with indifference, the thought never so much as touches his heart. A man whose love were the genuine abiding emotion would be cut by her coldness; Rāvaṇa is not. His craving does not depend on her at all.

See what this shows. If Sītā's loathing really reached him, even his swaggering amorous confidence would collapse on the spot — as a true lover's would. But it does not reach him. And, the other way round, the reassurance 'she loves me' is for Rāvaṇa beside the point; he does not need it to go on desiring her. His craving stands on neither her love nor her hatred.

Why is his craving so self-sufficient? Because at bottom it is nothing but the delusion that lust breeds. It is like the flash of 'silver' one seems to see on a shell: the shell is really there, but the silver is only an appearance with nothing behind it. Map it across — the shell is Rāvaṇa's bare lust, actually present; the 'silver' is the genuine love it masquerades as, which is not there at all. His rati only looks like real abiding love; it is śṛṅgāra-ābhāsa.

The first half of a verse spoken by Rāvaṇa. The mere sound of Sītā's name works on him like a spell of delusion reaching out from a distance: the instant it touches his ear, his mind cannot stand still even for a fraction of a moment without her.

The verse ends: his body sick with desire and his very love wounded, he confesses he cannot even see how the happiness of winning her would ever come about. And Abhinava gives his ruling: in this speech of Rāvaṇa's, and others like it, however impassioned the words, what we have is only rati-ābhāsa — the semblance of love, not love itself.

Now the turn. Rāvaṇa himself feels no laughter — for the character there is only tormented desire. Yet look at what he sets before the audience. The love-object, Sītā, is all wrong for him — another man's faithful wife, his prisoner. The passion clashes with his age and his rākṣasa nature. His passing moods — worry, wretchedness, bewilderment — and his outward acts — floods of tears, wailing — are, by their sheer impropriety, only semblances of the real love-signs. And a semblance of a love-stimulant, being improper, is exactly what stirs laughter. So these improper love-elements become the vibhāvas of the comic. This is how 'from śṛṅgāra arises hāsya': Rāvaṇa's śṛṅgāra-ābhāsa is, for the spectator, hāsya.

Abhinava points ahead: all this will be treated in its place, under Bharata's definition of hāsya, which opens 'distorted dress and another's ornament...' — the very words that list the out-of-place, borrowed, misfitting things that provoke laughter.

Step back. By putting śṛṅgāra first — 'from śṛṅgāra comes hāsya' — Bharata is not merely noting one pair. He is flagging the whole mechanism of ābhāsa: how a rasa, gone improper, lapses into a mere semblance of itself and so shows up as the comic. Śṛṅgāra is the sample case that teaches the pattern.

And the pattern is general. So wherever you meet a semblance of karuṇa, of vīra, of any rasa — a pathos or heroism gone improper — you should recognize it, too, as turning comic. Every rasa-ābhāsa, without exception, resolves into hāsya.

Here is why every rasa-semblance turns comic. What makes anything a stimulant of laughter is just one thing: conduct that is out of place. Impropriety is the whole engine of the comic. So any rasa-element gone improper — reduced to mere ābhāsa — is by that very fact a stimulus of laughter.

And no rasa is immune to it. Impropriety can creep into the stimulants and the enacted signs of any rasa whatever. That is why any rasa at all can tip over into its comic semblance.

The same holds of the fleeting moods, the vyabhicārins: they too have their semblances that turn comic. And it is exactly for this reason that the old masters, expert in what aesthetic awareness really is, everywhere mark off rasa from bhāva and both from their mere semblances — rasābhāsa and bhāvābhāsa. The whole vocabulary of 'semblance' was built to catch just this.

Take even the peaceful rasa, śānta. Let its object be something that cannot truly bring release — a sham detachment fixed on the wrong thing. Then what you have is only a semblance of śānta, śāntābhāsa; and that, like every other rasa-semblance, is simply comic. The false ascetic is a figure of fun.

This gives the farce its point. Through the prahasana — the comic genre built entirely on impropriety — the audience is taught to renounce what is out of place across all four aims of life: dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa. By laughing at the improper, the spectator learns to drop it. The text may add 'to princes and the like' — the pupils so instructed — but that reading is uncertain.

This will get its full treatment under the definition of hāsya. Meanwhile, as an illustration — and now of a semblance even of the comic, hāsyābhāsa — Abhinava reaches for lines by his own paternal uncle, Vāmanagupta.

The first half of Vāmanagupta's verse: if this ordinary world will not honour deeds that surpass the common measure, then what is there even to say?

The verse ends: 'But this fellow, so quick to laugh at extraordinary deeds — at HIM, who here does not laugh till his sides ache?' The man who mocks greatness is himself the true laughing-stock; his laughter is hāsyābhāsa. Abhinava then draws the general lesson: in the same way, when someone grieves over a person who is no relation of his, even that show of pathos is really comic — karuṇa gone improper is just hāsya. Apply the rule everywhere. And this verse is exactly the example promised.

So one case teaches all. From this single pattern — śṛṅgāra lapsing into hāsya — you infer the rest. And that is exactly why Bharata gave only a representative statement, an 'as for instance', rather than spelling out every rasa's comic semblance. He names one and lets the student infer the others.

Now the second way one rasa gives rise to another — a different mechanism from ābhāsa. Here the point is sequence: as soon as the first rasa yields its fruit, a second rasa must follow. The sample case for this is raudra, fury, which necessarily issues in karuṇa, pathos.

Why must pathos follow fury? Because fury's fruit is killing, binding, maiming. And killing and binding are precisely the stimulants of grief. So once raudra has done its work, karuṇa cannot but arise: the slain and the bound are the very stuff that pathos feeds on.

For the example, the Veṇīsaṁhāra. The lines begin: 'This very day the two of us went out to battle; and seeing our father and mother, we bowed our heads, and they kissed us on the brow — I and Duḥśāsana...' The speaker recalls a tender family moment; set against the slaughter to come, it is fury turning into pathos. The speech runs on past this point.

The verse from the Veṇīsaṁhāra closes: the boy Abhimanyu has been cut down in battle, and the speaker, drained of all composure, imagines standing before the parents with nothing to say. That is grief (karuṇa) rising straight out of the slaughter — raudra. Then Abhinava adds a further link: just as raudra yields karuṇa, so too, right on the heels of raudra, terror (bhayānaka) is bound to arise.

After śṛṅgāra, karuṇa reliably follows. And Abhinava sharpens it: karuṇa is not just a sequel — it is already operating at the very moment love arises, because love always carries the possibility of loss. His example is the Tāpasavatsarāja: King Vatsarāja's grief when he hears that his beloved Vāsavadattā has perished in a fire. The love was the śṛṅgāra; the grief is the karuṇa born from it.

An objector breaks in: in that Vatsarāja case the sorrow is really just kinship-grief — the ordinary pain of losing a dear one, triggered when the love-bond is severed. It is not karuṇa produced by śṛṅgāra the rasa. Abhinava answers flatly: not so. The reasons come next.

Abhinava's reply: your objection proves too much. Take the raudra-to-karuṇa succession, which you accept. There too, at the moment grief arises, the anger (krodha) that drove the raudra is itself cut off. So if 'the sthāyī gets severed' were grounds for denying that śṛṅgāra begets karuṇa, the very same reasoning would forbid raudra begetting karuṇa. The severance is no disqualifier.

He quotes Veṇīsaṁhāra 1.7: may the Pāṇḍavas rejoice, the fire of their hatred put out now that their foes are crushed. The image makes his point vivid — when the deed of vengeance is done, the burning anger dies down. The sthāyī of raudra is extinguished exactly as grief takes its place.

Second reply: it is not bare kinship that makes the grief. If it were, look what would follow. He begins quoting a lament (Tāpasavatsarāja 2.16): 'trembling, her sari's edge slipping in fear, casting thy anguished eyes in every direction...' — spoken to the lost beloved as 'thou'. Hold onto that intimate 'thy'; the next line shows why it matters.

The lament finishes: cruelly, all at once, she was consumed by the smoke-choked fire, and he did not even get to look on her. Now Abhinava's blade: the whole verse lives on that little word 'te' — 'thy' eyes, 'thou' wast burnt. That tender address is the beating heart of the grief. But if the sorrow were mere kinship-grief, that intimate 'thy' would do no work at all. Its being indispensable proves the grief is love-grief: śṛṅgāra is what karuṇa is made of.

One more proof. In the laments of lovers, śṛṅgāra alone is the life of karuṇa — the grief is simply love speaking through loss. He quotes Rati mourning Kāma (Kumārasambhava 4.9): 'You once told me, my dear, that you live in my heart — now I see that was a deception.' The line runs on into the next atom.

Rati's lament completes: if 'you dwell in my heart' was not just a manner of speaking, then — now that you are anaṅga, 'bodiless', burnt to nothing — how can our love be unhurt? There is a double edge here: 'rati' is Rati the widowed goddess and love itself, and 'anaṅga' is Kāma's own name, 'Bodiless', now turned into the literal fact of his ash. The grief is pure love; that is why śṛṅgāra is called karuṇa's life.

Now the third link: from vīra, terror (bhayānaka) can arise. His example (Veṇīsaṁhāra 5.5): as Arjuna struck down Karṇa's son in full view, the whole world shrank in dread of him. The heroism is the vīra; the world's terror is the bhayānaka it begets.

Here Abhinava names an opponent. Śrī Śaṅkuka had claimed that in this case there is no operation of utsāha — the heroic energy that is vīra's sthāyī plays no part. Abhinava rejects it outright: that is wrong. He gives Śaṅkuka's view as Śaṅkuka's own and then dismantles it; the two positions are left opposed, not harmonized.

Abhinava's refutation: if utsāha did not operate here, it would have no object to fasten on — and heroic energy just is the drive toward a deed one has in view. Strip away the deed-to-be-done and there is nothing for utsāha to be. So utsāha does operate; Śaṅkuka is refuted.

He fills in how it works in the heroism of battle. There the hero's pratāpa — the blazing valor, also called tejas, that springs from beating the enemy and burns the enemy's very heart — takes life, in the foe's wives and kin, as sheer terror. The one rasa in the hero shows up as bhayānaka in those on the losing side.

He supplies an illustrating benediction. 'May He protect you' — the dark-hued slayer of demons — 'he at the mere memory of whom, in eyes darkened with collyrium the shade of his own complexion...' The sentence is left hanging; its point lands in the next line.

The verse completes: the surviving demons tremble even at the dark lotus-eyes of their own beloved wives — beautiful as those eyes are, the collyrium-dark hue recalls the dark slayer who killed their kin. So the hero's valor keeps breeding terror even in the tenderest moment. Abhinava then draws the doctrinal point: this vīra-to-bhayānaka succession should be stated to hold as a rule, not by chance.

How does the root-text signal that the succession is a rule? Through the little word 'ca', 'and'. In Bharata's line 'from raudra and karuṇa', the ablative 'raudrāt' already marks 'what comes straight after raudra', and the 'ca' set right beside it locks that in as regular. Abhinava reads the grammar closely: the placement of 'ca' is what carries the niyama.

Now the third mode, defined cleanly. Some rasa sets out with another rasa consciously aimed at as its very goal. The example is vīra: the hero acts precisely in order to bring about a further rasa. This differs from the earlier cases, where the second rasa merely followed — here it is the intended fruit.

Why is vīra the example of intended-fruit? Because a great man's heroic resolve works only with its eye on one goal: to astonish the world. That astonishment is adbhuta. So the hero's vīra deliberately aims at adbhuta as its fruit — the wonder is what he is after, not an accident.

His example: young Rāma, arm raised, poised to snap the great bow of moon-crested Śiva (Mahāvīracarita 2.54). It is a feat aimed squarely at wonder — the whole court will gasp. The hero's vīra is spending itself to produce adbhuta.

Here is the sharp distinction. Raudra also has an intended fruit — but that fruit is the destruction of the enemy, not grief. The karuṇa that follows raudra (as shown earlier) is only a consequence, never the aim. So raudra and vīra both intend a fruit, but raudra intends the killing; the karuṇa comes uninvited. That is what sets the two modes apart.

A lighter instance of the same intended-fruit mode: the vidūṣaka's own hāsa is aimed deliberately at the heroine's laughter. The jester clowns precisely in order to make her laugh — one rasa consciously set on producing another, just as vīra is set on adbhuta.

The fourth and final mode: a rasa whose vibhāvas are the very same as another's cannot help but drag that other in along with it. The example is bībhatsa: its exciting-causes — blood, corpses, and the like — are exactly the things that also cause bhayānaka, so disgust necessarily pulls terror in with it. Abhinava spells this out in the lines that follow.

Take the disgusting (bībhatsa). The very sights it feeds on — blood and the rest — cannot but be causes of fear as well. The gore that sickens also frightens; that is why bībhatsa drags bhayānaka along with it.

And the passing states (vyabhicāribhāvas) that always ride along with those causes — death, fainting, epilepsy, and so on — are shared as well. Both the disgusting and the fearful draw on the very same accompaniments.

Its outward signs are shared too — the face twisting in revulsion, and the rest. The Veṇīsaṁhāra puts it on stage: 'Hold the ranks!' — but the soldiers bolt from the field, their weapons dropping from their hands, unnerved at the sight of the gory Bhīma who has drained the blood of the fallen Duśśāsana. The disgusting sight itself routs them in terror. That closes the co-presence mode. Now to the next: when one rasa evokes another through a mere semblance of itself (tadābhāsa), śṛṅgāra is the example.

The verse has two 'tu's: 'śṛṅgārānukṛtir yā tu … sa hāsyas tu prakīrtitaḥ.' The first 'tu' means 'in each and every instance' (vīpsā). The second 'tu' means 'because'.

So read the line this way: 'whatever imitates śṛṅgāra, that is hāsya.' And since the second 'tu' means 'because', you must supply the sense — 'a hāsya produced by vibhāvas of exactly this imitative kind.'

And 'śṛṅgāra' in 'śṛṅgārānukṛti' takes the possessive affix 'ac' (by Pāṇini's arśa-ādi list), so it stands for śṛṅgāravat — 'having śṛṅgāra'. The compound therefore means 'an imitation that carries śṛṅgāra in it'.

One might worry that śṛṅgāra can itself produce adbhuta — pointing to lines like 'her eyes were opened wider [in wonder]' (Ratnāvalī 2.15). That worry has no ground whatsoever.

For in Udayana himself the mood is plainly love (śṛṅgāra). Whatever wonder there is, is wonder at the marvel of creation — the God-made beauty he beholds — not an adbhuta that the love itself gave birth to.

And that wonder does not come at the same moment as the love, nor does it follow after it.

The wonder actually comes before the love; so there is nothing to the objection. Now the second mode: when a rasa evokes another as a downstream, mediated fruit (paramparā-phala), raudra is the example.

Raudra's fruit-deed is slaying and the rest; and, because of the 'ca' in the verse, so is the further deed that is itself the shape of that result. That very thing is karuṇa — wrath's killing bears grief as its downstream fruit.

And the 'eva' in 'raudrasya-eva' rules out an over-long causal chain: karuṇa is raudra's near mediated fruit, not the far end of some remote series.

Now the third mode: when a rasa evokes another as its immediate, next-door fruit (samanantara-phala), vīra is the example.

The 'ca' here means close conjunction. Vīra's fully immediate fruit is adbhuta. And note the pun hidden in 'pari-kīrtitaḥ' ('is declared'): read 'pari' as 'all around' and it yields kīrti — the fame, the renown and blazing majesty (pratāpa) spreading on every side — and from that fame, as its cause, the wonder springs.

The 'api' in 'vīrasya-api' opens the door past adbhuta: śṛṅgāra too can be vīra's immediate fruit — as at Draupadī's svayaṁvara, where the feat of valor itself wins the bride.

Now the fourth mode: when a rasa evokes another simply by standing present alongside it (sahabhāva), bībhatsa is the example.

The very sight of the disgusting thing — being itself the vibhāvas and rest that make up fear — that very sight is called bhayānaka.

Calling the sight itself 'bhayānaka' is a figure of speech (upacāra): the sight is only fear's vibhāva, and it takes the name of the fear it causes. What this fourth mode actually yields is the felt co-presence of the two rasas.

The 'ca' in the verse points up that very co-presence; the 'tu' in 'sa tu bhayānakaḥ' sets this case apart from the three modes before it.

And so the ways one rasa can evoke another come to exactly four — semblance, mediated fruit, immediate fruit, and co-presence — and not a single one more.

Though the same relation holds for the remaining case too, Bharata leaves it unstated. And the four rasas named here as origin-causes — śṛṅgāra, raudra, vīra, bībhatsa — of themselves span the four human aims (dharma, artha, kāma, mokṣa).

For that quartet — śṛṅgāra, raudra, vīra, bībhatsa — is what brings the four aims of life to their surpassing beauty. The delighting rasas — hāsya, karuṇa, adbhuta, bhayānaka — come only as their followers, and are to be worked into a drama as attendants trailing after them.

Abhinava recalls his own settled result: the rasas are only this many — the four that generate (śṛṅgāra, raudra, vīra, bībhatsa) plus the four they carry with them — and, he says, that was fixed already. Now Bhaṭṭa Lollaṭa had reached the same number by a different route: rasas could in principle be endless, but by the received convention of the connoisseurs' assembly only this many are fit to be staged. Abhinava will have none of it. Since he has already given a principled reason for the count — the fourfold way one rasa implies another — Lollaṭa's fallback on mere convention rests on presumption and is not worth engaging. Enough of it.