The heading. Abhinava's commentary on the comic-rasa section opens here.

Abhinava opens. Now, to define hāsya, Bharata speaks — starting from the word 'atha.' Then Abhinava fastens on one word in the prose definition: the -ātmaka in 'hāsa-sthāyibhāv-ātmaka,' 'having mirth for its soul.' Why call the sthāyin the rasa's soul? Because a sthāyin, once it ripens into the relished experience (āsvāda), is no longer simply itself. Take rati, love: as it yields the savour we relish, it does not deliver that savour as bare rati. The relish is something more than the raw feeling — and that surplus is what the word 'ātmaka' is pointing to.

Abhinava carries on from s2. The relish of rati is not sealed inside rati, because the vibhāvas are held in common across rasas. Take the relish felt in laughter: deformed dress and the like make an audience laugh in ordinary life, and through that very sharing of vibhāvas the comic relish turns out to be one in nature with the relish of rati — the same thing is being savoured in comic relishing. Then he adds a further, harder point, which he sets down as another doctrine's way of putting it: rati and śoka alone stand out from the eight, for they are pleasure and pain that have risen into an unbroken stream, felt as exclusively one's own; and it is by the force of that 'mine-alone' grip that the two arise as they do. That, he says, is why the muni reached for the word 'source' (prabhava) precisely of these two.

For the remaining rasas the case is weaker. There the sharing of the vibhāva is merely conceivable, not fixed as it is with rati and śoka. So for those the muni said only 'having that for its nature' (tad-ātmaka) — reserving the stronger word 'source' (prabhava) for the two he singled out.

He proves the sharing with a homely case. One and the same wrongdoer — a man who tramples law and discipline — rouses in all who watch him heroic resolve, anger, fear, disgust, and wonder, all at once. So too any unprecedented thing, like death. A single vibhāva thus feeds five rasas together, which is just what 'a shared vibhāva' means. And with that, Abhinava breaks off: enough of this; the point is made.

Now Abhinava glosses the vibhāvas one by one. veṣa is one's get-up — the doing-up of the hair and such. alaṅkāra is ornament — a bracelet and the like.

Both dress and ornament, once deformed, become the vibhāva of the comic. And 'deformed' (vikṛta) has a precise sense: out of keeping with the place, the time, the person's own nature, his age, or his condition. A clash on any one of these five turns the get-up comic.

This yields a large conclusion. Since deforming whatever is proper to any rasa turns it comic, every rasa can be folded into hāsya. So it has been shown, Abhinava says, that all the rasas are contained within the comic.

The jester too, Abhinava adds, donning that same deformed get-up, brings the comic into full appearance. And this — he notes in passing — was already stated earlier.

'Para' in 'another's dress' means what belongs to someone else. When a performer signals 'look — this is Devadatta's own dress, this his ornament,' mimicking a known person, and shows it off in the uddhaṭṭaka, the buffoon-dance, and such comic turns, it makes the audience laugh.

Dress and ornament are not the whole list. They serve as an upalakṣaṇa — sample items named only to point beyond themselves, so that gait, movements, and the like are covered too.

dhārṣṭya is shamelessness — sheer brazenness. laulya is greed — being unchecked toward the objects of the senses.

kuhaka is the playful touching of the armpit, the neck and the like — the familiar trick of startling children, tickling a laugh out of them.

vyaṅga is a deformity — a lost limb, being crippled, and so on. And Abhinava unpacks the mūla's compound: it resolves as 'the showing of these' — the word 'showing' reaches back over the whole list of items, not just the deformed limb at the end.

'Faults' (doṣa) Abhinava takes two ways, and lets both stand. Either: things like fear surfacing in someone in whom fear is out of character, or doing what ought not to be done. Or else: the faults are nothing but the deformed dress and the other items already listed. He does not choose between the two.

The 'udāharaṇa' of the faults means the narrating or describing of them. And the mūla's closing 'and so on' (ādi) sweeps in further items too — a comic resolve, a memory, and the like.

Glossing the anubhāva list: 'throbbing' attaches to each of lip, nose and cheek — a throbbing of the lip, of the nose, of the cheek. vyākośana of the eyes covers both their opening wide and their closing; ākuñcana is only a slight narrowing. These last two are to be taken with 'the glance' (dṛṣṭi).

āsya-rāga is the reddening of the face. And 'grasping the flanks' means pressing or clutching one's two sides.

The word 'tandrā' here means a dazed torpor. And all of these — the vibhāvas, the anubhāvas and the passing feelings just listed — are to be parcelled out, each where it fits, among the varieties smita and the rest that are about to be set out, following the three character-types: superior, middling and low.

Abhinava turns to the mūla's 'this is twofold.' Here is the reading he will put to the test: when the jester, by vibhāvas seated in himself — his own deformed get-up and such — laughs on his own account, that comic is 'self-seated' (ātmastha) for him. This is the first horn of the division as some would take it.

And the other horn: when the queen makes someone else laugh, the comic is 'other-seated' (parastha) for her. But this whole way of taking the twofold division, Abhinava declares, is wrong. The refutation now follows.

Here is the first flaw. On that reading the self-/other-seated split falls on the vibhāvas — a matter of whose get-up is working on whom — and not on the hāsa at all. But the mūla means to divide the comic itself into two kinds. So the reading has divided the wrong thing.

A second flaw. A master's grief kindles grief in his servants; by this definition that would make grief 'other-seated' too. Then other-seatedness would crop up in every rasa, not the comic alone — so it cannot be what marks off hāsya's special twofold division. The label proves too much.

Suppose you retreat to a revised rule: the comic arises in oneself but is shown forth in another — the queen — and that is what 'other-seated' means. Even so it fails. A grave master keeps his own anger off his face, and it becomes visible only through his servants' reactions. By your revised rule that anger too would count as 'other-seated.' The label still spreads past hāsya into other rasas, so the account collapses either way.

A second attempt to rescue the ātmastha/parastha split: the comic stimulus itself is self-situated (ātmastha), sitting in the one who laughs; so what makes another laugh (anya-vibhāvaka) must be a separate, 'other-situated' thing. Abhinava answers: this too is wrong.

Abhinava's reply. On that account another's laughter would be nothing more than one stimulus among the stimuli of your own laugh. But that is true of every rasa — another's love can stir your love, another's grief your grief. So it fails to single out any special 'other-situated' hāsa.

So Abhinava settles what 'other-situated' (parastha) hāsya really means. You see someone else laughing and — though you yourself see nothing funny, no stimulus of your own — you are caught laughing too. Everyone has watched this happen. That, not the earlier gloss, is the point.

Even when the comic stimuli are present, a dignified man may hold his laugh in check out of gravity — yet the instant he sees another laugh, he is swept helplessly into laughter. Such is laughter's nature. Take the analogy Abhinava gives. When you watch someone taste a sour pomegranate, your own mouth waters just from seeing his mouth water — the sour taste's reaction passes over by sight alone. Map it: the sour taste is the hāsa; the watering mouth you see is another's laughter; your own watering mouth is your answering laugh. What it proves: laughter, like that reaction, passes from one person to another by its very nature. And that is why hāsya spreads more abundantly than any other rasa.

Here Abhinava marks where Bharata takes up the subdivisions: 'ṣaḍbhedāḥ' — its six kinds — and 'dvau dvau' — two apiece, one pair for each of the three character-types.

Some (kecit) read the six kinds as a simple scale: each successive kind has a stronger comic stimulus than the last, in fixed order. Abhinava rejects it — that is wrong. Why, he gives next.

Here is why the scale-reading fails: if the six were merely points on a ladder of intensity, nothing would halt the ladder at six — you could always slip in further grades. So the real intent behind the six is transmission: each self-arisen laugh is paired with its transmitted counterpart.

Take the top type. Its own gentle smile is smita. Let that smile be caught from another — transmitted — and it turns into hasita. So smita and hasita are not two intensities: they are the self-arisen and the transmitted form of one and the same thing.

This is why Bharata will call hāsya a thing of settled states — v61 counts it three-stated (tryavastha), not six. If the six were independent intensities, hāsya would carry six states; pairing them by transmission keeps the count fixed at three.

Abhinava parses the six names by their prefixes on the one root has-. smita is the slight smile; drop its slightness and it is hasita; vi- makes vihasita more pronounced; upa- brings upahasita right up to the next pitch; apa- turns apahasita aside, off-key; ati- pushes atihasita to sheer excess. One root, shifted by prefix alone — upasarga-bheda yields artha-bheda, a change of prefix a change of sense.

Glossing the definition verses. sauṣṭhava is gracefulness without excess; dvijāḥ are the teeth; dhīra means measured and unhurried — that keeps a smile a smile. Then, to lift the expression past a slight smile into hasita, the verse says vikāsitaiḥ, 'with cheeks fully open.' The next word he picks up is atha.

So 'atha' here is not a bare 'now': it marks the instant of transmission that follows the smile. The next word taken up is tad.

'tad' points back to the smile: the same smita, once transmitted, takes on the hasita form. Again the whole point is transmission, not a fresh grade of intensity.

For upahasita, the verse's jihmadṛṣṭi is the oblique, sidelong glance — a look about to turn away — used at the fitting moment; and it governs the bodily posture and the rest of the enactment.

For apahasita, asthāna means out of place — laughing at the wrong moment, say at a time of grief. For atihasita, vikṛṣṭa (of the voice) means harsh, grating on the ear. The next word he takes up is nāṭaka.

'nāṭaka' in the verse is used broadly for any dramatic form (rūpaka), not just the nāṭaka type. And 'svasamuttha,' the self-arisen laugh, covers the three non-transmitted members — smita, vihasita, apahasita — one drawn from each character-type.

'parasamuttha,' the other-arisen laugh, is precisely the transmitted one — hasita, upahasita, atihasita, again one from each type. So the six sort neatly into two threes: three self-arisen, three transmitted.

In the higher (uttama) type, the transmitted-form laugh (hasita) is the counterpart of the self-form smile (smita) — the very pairing already shown for smita and hasita, now stated as the rule for each character-type.

By contrast — and this was said before — love, anger, grief and the other feelings do not transmit in this way. Only hāsa catches from the mere sight of another's.

How love and the rest do spread, without any transmission: either one and the same object stirs the feeling in several people at once, or a person who already carries the feeling becomes himself a stimulus for it in another. Either way the feeling is freshly caused, not relayed across as a laugh is.

What does not happen with love and the rest is the laugh-style relay: the same stimuli first raise the feeling in one man and then hand it across to a second man who is only just forming his own. That relay belongs to hāsa alone.

Others (anye) generalize: the self-arisen/other-arisen split Bharata draws for hāsa is really an upalakṣaṇa — a marker meant to be carried across to every rasa. Abhinava rejects this too: wrong. (Laughter's transmission, he goes on, is a plain fact of experience and belongs to hāsa in particular.)

Here is the ground for rejecting that other view. That laughter spreads from one person to another is something we know straight from experience — you watch someone laugh and you laugh too, with nothing further to be proved. Because this spreading is felt plainly and belongs to laughter in particular, the self-based / other-based split cannot be stretched, as those others wanted, into a mark that fits every rasa alike.

But another teacher reads verse 61 differently. He says hāsya, spread across the three character-types — highest, middling, lowest — carries three states, one answering to each type. And because its exciting cause (vibhāva) comes in a stronger and a weaker degree, each of those states splits into two forms. So far: three, doubled to six.

And then, he continues, each of those six doubles once more by the self-based / other-based split. Three states, times two forms, times two again — twelve divisions in all. That, this other teacher insists, is what verse 61 is really driving at.

And on this twelvefold scheme, Abhinava notes, a further separate reckoning of the causes creeps in on top. But that runs into atiprasaṅga — it over-reaches, forcing the divisions to keep multiplying past any natural stopping point. For that reason Abhinava does not take up that teacher's view or lay it out here.

And with that the chapter on hāsya-rasa, the comic rasa, comes to a close.