The section-heading: the part dealing with śṛṅgāra-rasa, the amorous mood.

Bharata takes up śṛṅgāra first for two reasons: kāma (love) is one of life's four goals, and it resonates in every heart. Since śṛṅgāra has kāma at its core, he now defines it — in the sūtra that runs from 'tatra…' down to '…ujjvalaveṣātmaka'.

The word 'tatra' can be taken two ways. Either it fixes the order of treatment ('among these, next comes…'), or it means 'this being so'. Both readings are offered; neither is settled over the other.

The prose commentary on this sūtra makes it clear. In 'śṛṅgāro nāma', the small word 'nāma' marks śṛṅgāra as the term about to be defined.

He unpacks it with the words 'yatkiñcit…'. A person decked in ornaments is called śṛṅgāravān — 'one who has śṛṅgāra' — the possessive form, not śṛṅgāra itself.

On the ancients' account, the ornamented man is the yardstick to which pure, clean, bright things are compared; so 'śṛṅgāra' belongs first to the brightly-dressed, and the word does not over-spread to everything.

The old commentators grounded their ornament-first view on authority: trusted teaching settles what the word covers. Abhinava rejects it outright — that will not stand.

Their explanation ran on a comparison (upamā). But a comparison needs a clear upamāna and a clear upameya, each in its own sphere — and here no such clean split appears. So the comparison-based account fails.

So here is Abhinava's own verdict: the primary śṛṅgāra is rati (love) itself, precisely as it is being savoured. Not the costume, not the ornaments — the relished love is what the word names first.

The connoisseurs who savour rati use a second word too: the person given over to prizing that love they call 'śṛṅgārī', 'one who has śṛṅgāra'. So rati-as-savoured is śṛṅgāra proper; the one devoted to it is śṛṅgārī.

By contrast, one who is merely hooked on love — an addict (vyasanī) — is not the same as the śṛṅgārī. The text here is damaged, so take the point lightly: the connoisseur's relish is one thing, raw addiction another.

That state of truly savouring love does happen in ordinary life — but there it never lasts long. This is why the stage is needed to hold it steady.

Anything that helps you savour that love — its own vibhāvas, and whatever is clean by śāstra, not disgusting, vivid, and charming — gets called 'śṛṅgāra' only by transference, borrowing the name. That borrowed use is exactly what Bharata means by 'upamīyate', 'is compared'.

Because it merely serves that savouring, it is 'compared' — that is, the word only points to it indirectly (lakṣyate); it does not name it outright.

Where does this borrowed comparison operate? He shows it with 'yastāvat…'. The small word 'tāvat' draws a limit: the ornamented man gets only the possessive 'śṛṅgāravān'. That very form signals that the primary sense of 'śṛṅgāra' is not in him.

So on the ornamented man the word 'śṛṅgāra' sits only by figure of speech (upacāra), borrowed from the real thing. That is what Bharata is saying.

An objection: granted the word 'śṛṅgāra' names savoured love primarily — but what actually grounds that primary usage in the first place? Foreseeing this, Bharata answers with 'yathā ca…', the analogy of how people come by their names.

He glosses the three words of the analogy: 'gotra' is the father's lineage, 'kula' the mother's line, and 'ācāra' everyday custom. These are the three things a person's name grows out of.

'Arisen from lineage and custom' means simply grown firm in common usage — not laid down at some original root. Names take hold by convention, not from a fixed primal source.

And 'settled by authoritative teaching' means settled by convention — the original name-giving act of trusted authorities. That is what fixes the names.

'Of men' (puṁsām) here means of the human race as such — covering both men and women, not males only.

For men, the name runs with the father's line — 'Viṣṇuśarmā' and so on.

For women, by contrast, the name runs with the mother's line — 'Kanakaprabhā,' 'Candraprabhā.'

The same holds for the names of the rasas and the rest. The old authorities beginning with Brahmā first laid them down; the usage of elders who know that śāstra then made them current.

Now he draws the recap together: 'so śṛṅgāra is a rasa.' It stands established even in ordinary usage. From what cause? — he asks.

The cause is that śṛṅgāra is of the nature of a charming, bright costume. The purport is this: words may belong to just one śāstra's convention, yet through the elders' unbroken usage they become famous in the world, and by figurative transfer they come to be applied elsewhere too.

For example, people say, 'This fellow is a regular Sāṅkhya-puruṣa — he does nothing.'

Likewise: 'I have set up the pūrvaraṅga for him here'; or 'there is great back-and-forth of his here.'

So it runs the other way round here: the words śṛṅgāra and the rest are primary, literal, precisely in this domain — as names of the rasas.

In ordinary life they are the figurative ones — like 'Sāṅkhya-puruṣa' said of a do-nothing. So the primary home of śṛṅgāra is drama, not the street — the reverse of what the old teachers held.

Now someone derives śṛṅgāra from śṛṅga plus a possessive suffix ('one who has a horn or peak'). He has simply forgotten the real formation of the word.

The right formation uses the suffix ārakan: śṛṅga + ārakan gives śṛṅgāra, exactly as vṛnda + ārakan gives vṛndāraka.

That is why the word is simply registered as a ready-made form in the Uṇādi-sūtras, which list 'śṛṅgāra, bhṛṅgāra' together.

Someone else glosses gotra, kula, and conduct as separate name-sources, one by one. But since pulling them apart excludes nothing and does no real work, such glosses are only his own guesswork.

In the present question none of that separating helps him at all.

And in the world, authoritative instruction is not what fixes a name that grew out of lineage and custom — against the old teachers' claim that it is. Usage settles such names, not decree. Enough on this point.

Now he clears up, through the prose, the part of the sūtra that makes rati the sthāyin — starting from 'sa ca…' ('and it is caused by man and woman…').

The mūla's word 'strīpuruṣa' is taken in its ordinary sense — the notion 'this woman is his,' a bond of mutual longing and union.

He marks a sharp distinction. One kind of rati is mere longing, keeping pace with the stages of desire — that is only a transient feeling (vyabhicārin). Quite different is this other rati: the abiding one (sthāyin), running unbroken from the very start to the winning of its fruit, pervading every stage, with perfect joy as its single fruit. That is the rati which is the cause of śṛṅgāra.

The poet, steeped in the impressions of everyday rati, supplies the vibhāvas just so; the actor supplies the anubhāvas — so that the relishing of rati turns into śṛṅgāra.

And for the spectator who relishes it, at the first tier, recognizing the rati is required — as was said before.

The purport is this: rati is dalliance, love-play.

And that love-play, in the truest sense, belongs to the two lovers alone — for it is there, and only there, that joy comes to rest in an unbroken stream.

True joy rests in the two lovers alone. The beauty of garlands, ornaments and the rest is a different thing: it is only something the poet has imagined and set up. It is a saṁkalpa, a mental construction — not where the joy of love actually lives.

For the highest enjoyment is what is called mīlana, 'union'. It is this: through consciousness the two lovers sink into each other until they no longer stand as two. The supreme bhoga is an event of awareness, not of the flesh.

Why is that the highest enjoyment? Because in it consciousness alone leads. Every other kind of enjoyment is different: there what gets enjoyed is some dead, insentient object.

This is why the poet has Rāma say: in my body there is nothing but a hollow going-through-the-motions of breathing; my actual life is Sītā.

This also answers an objection some had raised: since rati changes as its holder changes, they said, how can it be counted as one single rasa? That objection only shows they had not understood the point.

For rati is a single thing of just this one scope. In it the two lovers share one mutual awareness, so that neither is ever cut off from the other. The holder is not really two — so the rasa is not many.

This is why the sūtra says śṛṅgāra 'has excellent youths for its very stuff'. Unpack the word: an excellent man and an excellent woman make 'the pair of excellent ones', and in the same way a young man and a young woman make 'the pair of young ones'.

In that phrase 'excellent youth', what is really meant is the shared consciousness of the pair — not their physical bodies.

For, strictly speaking, 'being an excellent youth' is a mark that belongs to consciousness alone. It is awareness, not the body, that is truly 'excellent and young' here.

And this consciousness takes on states. Because it is in these various states that our ordinary dealings actually happen, it is fitly called their prakṛti — their underlying 'stuff' or nature. That is the force of '-prakṛti' in the sūtra.

And because that consciousness is fit to be savoured — relished as awareness itself — it becomes the śṛṅgāra-rasa. That is how rati turns into rasa.

Take the failing case. Where the pair are not excellent, the rati has no firmness; and where they are not truly joined, likewise. In such cases it is not really the rati-consciousness at all.

Why does that failing case fall short? Because there separation of the two becomes thinkable. True śṛṅgāra, by contrast, lives and breathes by a consciousness that cannot be sundered.

He quotes a Prakrit love-verse. The wording as transmitted is corrupt; Abhinava supplies its sense himself in s59.

The second line of the same Prakrit verse, closing it. As with the first line, the transmitted text is corrupt and its meaning is drawn out in the gloss that follows.

Abhinava explains the verse: it shows each lover holding the other to be the whole treasure of their life. That mutual conviction is exactly the unsundered consciousness he means by true śṛṅgāra.

Now he unpacks the word veṣa. It is derived from a sense 'to pervade': the veṣa is what pervades a mental state and carries it across to others, making it known to them. And this veṣa is nothing but the vibhāvas and anubhāvas.

By the same derivation: the ones that 'veṣ-', that pervade and run all through the abiding emotion, are the vyabhicārins, the passing feelings.

And these — the veṣa — being ujjvala, that is, lofty and excellent, the whole compound ujjvala-veṣātmaka resolves as: 'that whose very nature is an excellent veṣa'. So the sūtra's word is fully decoded: veṣa (the vibhāvas, anubhāvas, and vyabhicārins), ujjvala (excellent), and ātmaka (whose nature it is).

The sūtra had folded the vibhāvas and the rest together in brief; now they must be spread out and taken up by division. With that in mind Bharata sets out the two states of śṛṅgāra, in the words beginning 'It has two seats (tasya dve adhiṣṭhāne)…'.

The word adhiṣṭhāna, 'seat', here just means 'state'. Its force is 'a place stood-in': it is where a state takes its stand in the form of śṛṅgāra.

So saṁbhoga (union) and vipralambha (separation) are not two sub-kinds of śṛṅgāra; they are two states the one rasa stands in. The analogy: cow-hood is a single thing. Śābaleya and Bāhuleya are just two particular cows — not two kinds of cow-hood. Map it across: śṛṅgāra is the one cow-hood; union and separation are the two individual cows. The rasa stays one; only its states are two.

Here is Abhinava's own doctrine, set against the rejected view. Union and separation are not two species of śṛṅgāra. Rather, there is a single rati — love — that runs unbroken through both states. This rati is no passing itch; it is a firm bond of settled attachment. And śṛṅgāra is precisely that rati as it is being savoured. So the rasa is the tasting of the one love, not the union and not the bright costume.

The yakṣa's message to his wife, sent by the cloud. Others say love only withers when the lovers are parted. But yours, he tells her, does the opposite: un-enjoyed, kept from its object, it only thickens and piles up into heaps of love. Separation feeds it rather than starving it.

Because it is one unbroken love, each state is shot through with the other. In the midst of union the lovers already dread the parting that might come. In the midst of separation they are threaded through with the day-dream of reunion. That mutual soaking of union in separation and separation in union — that, says Abhinava, is the whole body of śṛṅgāra.

What of the many named phases of love the manuals list — longing, jealousy, the beloved away on a journey, and so on? They need no extra pigeonhole. Every one of them fits inside the two seats, union and separation. The one condition is that the settled love, the firm bond, is underneath them; only then do these phases belong to śṛṅgāra at all.

It follows that even the standard names, like 'sambhoga-śṛṅgāra' — union-love — are used loosely. You can call a moment 'union-śṛṅgāra' even when no actual enjoyment is going on, and the word fits only by transference. What really bears the name śṛṅgāra is the savouring of rati; the 'union' in the label is a figure of speech.

From all this comes a striking claim. The keenest relish, the fullest camatkāra, does not live in union by itself or separation by itself. It comes precisely where the two run together — where union is edged with the fear of parting, or separation is lit up by the longing for reunion. The blend, not either half, is where śṛṅgāra tastes strongest.

The first half of a famous lovers'-quarrel verse. Man and wife lie on one bed, faces turned away, saying nothing, aching. Each secretly wants to make up — the longing for reconciliation is already there in both hearts — yet each clings to wounded pride and will not be the first to yield.

The second half completes the scene. Little by little a sidelong glance turns, then the two pairs of eyes meet and mingle — and the pride-quarrel simply shatters, collapsing at once into a laughing, headlong clasp round the neck. The sulk breaks not into more distance but straight into embrace.

Abhinava reads the Amaru verse back onto his thesis, naming the mapping. In it the relish is made of two things fused: the jealous sulk (separation) and the reunion (union). The dramatic factors of both states — the averted faces and guarded pride on one side, the mingling eyes and laughing embrace on the other — are breathed together into a single living experience. And that fusion is exactly why the taste of rasa there is so heightened. The verse thus shows in action the claim of s71.

Now a rival objection, and whose it is matters. Śrī Śaṅkuka had pressed this difficulty: in Purūravas's fit of madness, and in Vatsarāja's ascetic disguise, the hero wears no bright, resplendent costume at all — yet these are cases of separation-love. If śṛṅgāra is defined as 'having a bright costume,' how can it be śṛṅgāra here? Abhinava answers that on his own reading the objection simply has nowhere to land. Śṛṅgāra is the savouring of rati, not the costume; so a plain or wretched dress takes nothing away.

Here is why the objection collapses. Bodily enjoyment is not itself a rasa. Bathing, dressing, putting on fine clothes — these are just activities; no rasa lives in them. In the same way, the bright costume of union is only outward business. Since the rasa is the tasting of love, not the enjoyment or its finery, a hero in rags or in ascetic dress can hold śṛṅgāra just as fully.

Someone had tried to defend the definition a different way: because the noble lover is steadfast, he keeps his love even when the fine costume is gone. Abhinava brushes this aside as idle chatter — 'yakṣa-talk,' a wry jab, since a yakṣa was just quoted. It is not that the defence is false; it is that it misses the real point, as the next line explains.

Why call that defence idle? Because it does not dispel the objection that is actually on the table. At this an interlocutor pushes back: 'But surely the objection just is this — how can there be śṛṅgāra where the costume is not bright?' He wants to hold Abhinava to that literal challenge.

Very well — grant that this is the objection. Even so, Abhinava replies, it fails, because Bharata's words were never loaded with the claim the objector reads into them. The definition never said 'bright costume is required for śṛṅgāra.' The statement simply does not bear that heavy a burden, so there is nothing here for the objection to break.

The correction turns on the direction of the claim. Bharata never said 'given a bright costume, you get śṛṅgāra' — as though the resplendent dress were the condition and the rasa its result. Read that way the plain-costumed Purūravas would indeed be a problem. But that is not what the text says.

What Bharata actually said runs the other way: where śṛṅgāra is present, the bright costume comes with it — the resplendent dress is a mark that follows the rasa, not a gate the rasa must pass through. So a hero can hold śṛṅgāra with no fine costume at all, and Śaṅkuka's difficulty never arises. Enough of that. He now turns to the mūla word 'tatra,' beginning the treatment of the union-state.

A brief signpost. Of the two seats of śṛṅgāra, Bharata now takes up the first — sambhoga, the state of union. The next lines will unpack how it is roused.

In union, strictly speaking, the two lovers are each other's vibhāva — the very ground on which the love rises. The woman rouses the rati in the man and the man in the woman; they are the mutual foundation (ālambana) of the rasa. Everything else — season, garland, ornament — will only be the kindling.

The mūla's list of season, garland and so on now gets placed. These are the kindlers (uddīpana), and their job is to show that the lovers are an uttama pair — refined, high-born. Why does the season matter? Because a noble lover feels rati only in its fitting season and setting; out of season there is none. So the season-factors mark the right occasion. Then the plain glosses: 'ṛtu' is spring and the rest; 'mālya' is flowers and such.

Next word: 'anulepana' is the anointing of the body with fragrant unguents. Abhinava widens it — it stands for anything at all that fans the flame of desire, not scented paste alone.

Two more words glossed. 'Alaṅkāra' is jewellery — bracelets and the rest. 'Iṣṭa-jana,' the dear folk, means the lover's close companions: the vidūṣaka, the jester-friend, and others of the intimate circle.

Abhinava draws a point from the last two items: the ornaments and the attending companions both advertise that the hero is an uttama — a man of high, commanding station. To back it he begins a verse: a truly resolute man gives no thought to women while his campaign of conquest is still incomplete. (The second line, in the next segment, seals it with the image of the sun, which does not turn to evening until it has strode across the whole world.)

The sun does not sink to twilight until it has crossed the whole sky. Just so, a spirited man gives no thought to a woman until his conquest is complete.

The tag marks the verse as Rājataraṅgiṇī 4.442. Then he resumes the sūtra: 'viṣaya' here means songs and the like — the pleasing objects of the senses.

Garlands and the like already come under 'viṣaya.' Even so the sūtra names them on their own, because they matter so much.

'Fine dwelling' means a mansion and such. It stands in for any choice place. And 'upabhoga' is the enjoying of all these.

'Upavana' means a pleasure-garden. One may enjoy it in person, or just hear about it — even while lodged far off in another house.

And this hearing of the garden stands in even for just imagining it. 'Krīḍā,' sport, means bathing and frolicking in water and the like.

'Līlā' is playfully imitating the beloved. And because the sūtra adds 'etc.,' other delightful things count too — the sight of a pair of swans, paintings, dolls, and the like.

All of this, taken together, is to be counted as the vibhāvas — the exciting causes — of śṛṅgāra.

Take this whole array of delightful objects at its fullest. When it stands complete, the excellent hero's rati (love) wells up.

This is why, in the Ratnāvalī, the mansion-description, the visit to the garden, the worship of Kāmadeva, the spring season, and all the rest are gathered under the single line, 'the kingdom, its enemies subdued, handed to a capable minister…'

So the whole ensemble taken together is the vibhāva. To split it into 'ālambana' and 'uddīpana' is only a mental convenience.

This is exactly why Bharata nowhere states such a division, nor even hints at it. And rightly so.

For in a single play, garden, season, garland and all the rest are shown, yet the rasa is one — because the vibhāva itself is not really split.

But surely, one objects, at the first glimpse of just the young woman there is no garden or mansion present at all — so where is the full vibhāva?

Who says so? For a hero brimming with royal wealth, the impression of his own abundant riches is always with him. So the whole set of vibhāvas is already complete, even at first sight.

For a play built around such a hero is itself the illustration in every such instance.

So it makes no sense to give a separate example for each vibhāva one at a time.

In a single detached stanza a vibhāva may stand alone, and rasa is still tasted. There the wonder arises because the connoisseur himself supplies and connects the rest.

But what of a lesser hero, where the kindling circumstances are incomplete — would no wonder arise there? Take this Apabhraṁśa verse.

The second Prakrit line, with its Sanskrit chāyā: 'In the lamp no oil is left; a whole palam was bargained for a single coin' — a household pinched by poverty.

—and the beloved, his limbs radiant with beauty, has entered the house. Amid the poverty, that single radiant loveliness is enough to stir the wonder.

Likewise this Prakrit verse, continued below: 'a woman a month after giving birth, six months pregnant, feverish for a day…'

A woman a month after giving birth, six months pregnant, running a day's fever, and just come down worn out from the dancing-floor — that, my boy, is the beloved you should keep wanting. The Prakrit verse is given, then its Sanskrit chāyā.

The pay-off line of the chāyā: such a beloved, my boy, is the one to desire. The verse stacks up conditions that ought to put a suitor off, then flatly says: want her all the same.

The purport of such verses: the delight arises because one single element — her sheer loveliness — stands out and dominates. You do not need the whole set of favourable conditions; one predominant factor is enough to spark the relish.

Do not misread it: the delight is not caused by what is missing. It is the vibhāvas the poet weaves in, which the actor then brings to life so vividly they seem seen with the eyes — presented rightly, these make the sambhoga-rasa, whose nature is enjoyment without any obstruction, spring up at once, on the instant.

Relishing is not like walking. Walking only reaches completion at the end, when you finally arrive. Relishing is not finished off at some endpoint like that.

On the contrary, relishing happens at the very first moment. And that relishing is nothing other than the vivid, eye-like perceiving of the vibhāva itself.

That vibhāva, already at the first stage taken as something relishable, is then turned to face actual relishing by the deft eye-play and the other gestures. The anubhāvas do the turning.

This is exactly why those eye-movements and gestures are called both abhinaya (acting) and anubhāva. To lead the spectator round to face the rasa — that leading is what anubhāvana, 'being an anubhāva,' actually means.

The uddīpana is the factor that empowers the relishing of the rasa — it is what makes the tasting possible. So when it is missing, even a poem crammed with descriptions of the vibhāvas gives no relish at all.

The reason: where the kindling factor is gone, there is nothing to relish. Take a verse of his own teacher Kavīndra Bhaṭṭendurāja. 'Travellers — right here along the bank of the Godāvarī, give up this path; look instead for some other road.'

'For right here some hard-hearted beauty has set a red aśoka blooming — kicked by her lotus-foot, it throws up a bodice of fresh new shoots.' The travellers are warned off a road haunted by a woman lovely enough to make the very tree flower at her touch.

The same holds in other cases too. So for such a verse the staging — the abhinaya and the rest — has to be worked out and supplied. Add the acting, and even a description-verse can come to relish.

An objection: once the vibhāvas are lifted into their universal, shared mode, how can they still be pinned down to one particular rasa? Yet in drama they clearly are not left loose like that.

And this much, here, is what the poet's own effort hands over. [The question is repeated:] how then does the universality arise? The transmitted text is unsettled at this point; the thread is picked up cleanly in the next atom.

The reply: in drama the vibhāvas are not just loosely universal, held by some external rule. The poet's own effort supplies exactly what is needed. Because that effort is there, it makes the prompting feature — the one that calls up this rasa — surge into prominence; and by that force the generalized vibhāva settles onto its particular rasa right at the outset. Universality and this-rasa-not-another are fixed together by the poet's craft.

Take Rāma's cry, 'Alas, beloved, O daughter of King Janaka!' The instant you hear it, there is no room to suspect it is the trigger for any emotion but love. Though it is a wail of loss, the words fix rati at once — the poet's craft has already pinned the particular.

And this same point rebuts the stock objection — 'then a lustful woman could take a corpse for her love-object,' and cases like it. Because the poet's crafting fixes the particular from the start, such absurd suppositions never get off the ground.

Now to the sūtra's list of anubhāvas. By 'deftness of the eyes' and what follows, what is meant is a lovely, loving glance.

There is a definition coming later, at 8.47: 'the raising of the root of the brows is what deft (catura) means.' Abhinava ties the sūtra's 'deftness of the eyes' to that.

That deft glance is described along with the brow-toss (bhrū-kṣepa); and 'the turning of the eyeball is the sidelong glance (kaṭākṣa)' (8.100) — that is the action of the pupil. So the mūla's bhrū-kṣepa and kaṭākṣa each answer to a technical definition in chapter 8.

Here is how the whole compound assembles. With deft eyes, brow-toss and sidelong glance, one makes every movement of the eyes graceful, slow, sweet and lovely to watch — that is the facial acting (upāṅga). The gestures of the limbs, made at the proper moment, graceful and of tender import — that is the bodily acting (āṅgika). And words that are sweet and pleasing to the ear — that is the verbal acting (vācika). So the sūtra's single list names three kinds of abhinaya at once.

And just because the words already carry these precise senses, the rival gloss fails. Someone read 'lalita' and 'madhura' as pointing to the whole haul of gesture-ornaments that will be taught in the Sāmānyābhinaya chapter (ch22). Abhinava says flatly: that is wrong. The two words mean the specific graceful, sweet qualities of eye, gesture and speech just spelled out — not a blanket cross-reference.

The sūtra's list of anubhāvas closed with 'vākya-ādi', 'speech and the rest.' From that little 'and the rest' Abhinava pulls in the sāttvika-bhāvas as well — the involuntary signs of feeling, like a flush spreading over the face and the hair standing on end.

Because these signs work as anubhāvas, they keep the spectator from standing coldly apart — his detachment is broken. And because they face outward, shown and shared rather than shut in, they answer the worry that the relish is locked inside one's own single self. The same point carries forward to the items still to be listed.

The rasa is already relishable while the vibhāvas are in play, and at the anubhāva-stage it could go flat if the mind got mired in one passing mood. The transitory states come in afterward; not straying from the rasa, they paint in its relishability and swell it to a higher pitch. That is why Bharata sets them out last — 'and its transitory states...'

The mūla's compound 'ālasya-augrya-jugupsā-varjyāḥ' resolves like this: take the whole roster of transitory states, drop three of them — laziness (ālasya), fierceness (augrya), and disgust (jugupsā) — and everything left over is a vyabhicāri of śṛṅgāra.

'Its' in the mūla means śṛṅgāra taken across both its states, union and separation. Now notice what it means to ban disgust here — for disgust is itself a sthāyī-bhāva, the stable emotion of a whole rasa of its own. Banning it as a transitory state quietly concedes a general truth: even an emotion that is stable in one rasa can, in another, do the work of a passing one.

And the ban on laziness is narrower than it looks. What is ruled out is laziness only when it rises from its own proper cause — drunken heedlessness (mada) and the like. Languor that comes from some other source is not ruled out at all.

So these poetic lines praising a woman's languid, half-closed eyes and languor-shining arms are no fault. The languor there is the charm of beauty, not the sluggishness that comes of drunkenness — and only the latter was ever banned.

The lesson: on stage and in poetry alike, the sequence must be honored — vibhāvas first, then anubhāvas, then the transitory states. That order is not something the poet may shuffle.

Why that order? First the stable emotion rises up and finds its footing.

Only once it is settled does its retinue gather round — the transitory states falling in behind. That is the order in which we actually experience the emotion, and so the order the poet is bound to follow.

One might object: surely world-weariness (nirveda) and its kind cannot be transitory states of union — they are painful, and union is joy. Anticipating this, Bharata moves to the next sūtra: 'but those brought about by separation...'

That little word 'but' (tu) is doing real work: it marks off separation from union, signalling that a different set of transitory states belongs to each.

Read the two sūtras as a single sentence, and the 'but' shows its point. The painful states like world-weariness are set aside, and the barred ones like laziness are left out; what union admits as its transitory states are only the joy-filled ones — contentment (dhṛti) and its kind. The painful states are handed over to separation.

What keeps śṛṅgāra alive is the two lovers subsisting on each other's hope. To point at that, the mūla leaves its word 'its' unelaborated — held open rather than spelled out, so that union and separation both stay bound together under the one word instead of being pulled apart.

For that very reason Kālidāsa — his speech hallowed by the Lord's grace — took pains in the Raghuvaṁśa to win a blended relish of union and separation together: he draws out Rāma's own experience by describing the earlier state, letting union be tasted against the backdrop of its opposite.

The mūla's list of separation's states names both 'sleep' (nidrā) and 'dream' (svapna). Strictly, dream is already part of sleep — but because it matters so much in separation, it is singled out and named on its own.

He gives the opening words of the verse he is about to quote in full — Pārvatī's dream-cry to Śiva, 'Where are you going, O blue-throated one?'

In the small hours, with only a third of the night left, Pārvatī would shut her eyes for just a moment, then start awake —

— and, murmuring half-clear words, 'Where are you going, O blue-throated one?', she found her arms locked around a neck that was not there. She had dreamt Śiva beside her, spoken to him, embraced him — and woke to empty arms.

That closes the Kumārasambhava verse. Now a Prakrit gāthā on the same theme opens: of a young woman just woken from a moment's dream-sleep, her whole mind bent on seeing her beloved once more —

Then the Prakrit's second line, with its Sanskrit chāyā given alongside: risen from that flash of dream-sleep, her mind fixed on seeing him yet again —

— she keeps her eyes shut, hoping to fall back into the dream and see him once more, and so the entire day drifts past her. Here too dream and half-sleep serve as transitory states of separation.

Here is one more example. His companions call him; he answers 'coming!'; he has already thrown off sleep and is wide awake.

Yet the traveler, though he means to set out, will not loosen his clinging embrace even slightly. Everything says he is leaving — and still he cannot let go.

In verses like these it is the separation that is the soul of the mood. But in the union-phase the beloved is right there, so sleep and the like do not really arise; and even 'waking' there counts as no more than a passing transient.

Even in union, sleep and the like may come from the tiredness of love-making. But such sleep adds no special charm to the love itself.

In separation it is the reverse: there the waking, the sleep, the dream rise straight out of the ceaseless brooding on the beloved. So they come charged with the rasa.

And the sūtra lists these under separation because sleep and such simply occur far more there. That is why they are named the way they are.

Of madness, epilepsy, and disease, only the phase that is not utterly repulsive should be shown — in a poem or on the stage.

The old teachers rule that the disgusting phase must not be shown even where it might occur. But we put it differently.

We say this: when the phase is that degraded — a state of loathing one's own life — then the love itself, whose whole heart is the relishing of the beloved's body, [is severed].

In such a state the very bond of attachment — which is what love is — snaps. So depicting that phase is not merely forbidden; it is flatly impossible, because the rati that would make it śṛṅgāra is already gone.

So 'death' in this list must be taken as a brief swoon, one from which the person soon revives — not a real, final death.

For 'death' as a quick revival leaves grief no place to settle. As the verse tells: at the sacred confluence of Gaṅgā and Sarayū, the king gave up his body and at once was enrolled among the gods.

The verse turns straight to reunion: the king, rejoined with his beloved now lovelier than before, again sports in the bowers of Nandana. This is why the skilled poet, even by breaking the sentence, never lets 'death' stand as the point: he steers the third line at once back to the beloved, so the mind never comes to rest on the dying.

And by that one word 'again' — 'again within Nandana's gardens' — the poet makes that same sense of continued life and reunion shine out all the more.

Others, though, read it differently. On their view 'maraṇa' in the list does not mean the actual loss of life at all.

Rather, they say, 'maraṇa' is a conscious state — the very resolve to give up one's life — such as arises when a character reaches for the hanging-noose. Taken that way it is a transient feeling, and instances are easy to find.

The word 'etc.' takes in dejection, delusion, and the rest. Though these are only transients, once their own outward signs display them, they in turn make the separation-rasa felt.

That is why the sūtra says the acting is done 'by the outward signs.' But others take the 'etc.' to point to the karuṇa-rasa, and so they bring karuṇa's own signs forward as the main thing.

Still others, by the grammarians' ekaśeṣa, keep both senses together. — Now the word 'vipralambha' ordinarily means a deception, a mocking cheat. But here it is used by transfer: what is meant is its effect, namely viraha, separation.

For between two who truly love each other there can be no real 'deception' of love. So the literal sense will not fit — which is why the word must be taken for its effect, separation.

By the word 'wrought by separation,' the sage shows that śṛṅgāra is both produced and most richly nourished by separation. And so he shows that without it śṛṅgāra takes on no charm at all — not on the stage, not in a poem.

See how it works. Even in union, so that it will not be like sucking one solid lump of sugar — sweet, but monotonous — the poets slip in some discord: a slip of the name, a jealous rivalry, or the like, enough to spark a lovers'-tiff separation (kalaha-vipralambha).

‘For love is wayward’ — so Vātsyāyana and others say in the Kāmasūtra.

And the Muni himself will say the same later — ‘love’s bent toward waywardness’ (22.207).

These passing states work like a lightning-flash — opening and shutting. They flash up in the middle of the thread of the abiding emotion, then disappear, and so give it its variety. But they never hold steady.

One might object that the abiding emotion is not fixed either, instant by instant. True — but it stays as a latent impression, and it runs on as an unbroken stream of moments of the same kind. In that sense it is steady.

The passing states are not like that. They do not hold on even for a single moment.

Even the trace they leave behind pours into the abiding emotion’s trace and swells it — nowhere else.

And the memory that follows works the same way — it recalls the abiding emotion, not the passing flicker.

So when some teachers illustrate each passing state separately, one by one, they are not following the working principle of the system.