Abhinavagupta

Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016 CE) was a Kashmiri philosopher, theologian, mystic and literary theorist — one of the most brilliant and comprehensive minds in Indian history. He was the great systematiser of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism, whose vast Tantrāloka (“Light on the Tantras”) is the encyclopaedia of the tradition; the author of profound commentaries on the philosophy of Recognition (Pratyabhijñā); and, in his commentaries on Bharata’s The Nāṭyaśāstra and Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka, the most influential theorist of aesthetics in Indian thought. His theory of Rasa — that the experience of art is a universalised tasting of emotion in which the spectator savours his own consciousness as bliss — remains the classic Indian account of what art is and why it matters.

Life

Abhinavagupta came from a learned family in Śrīnagara, Kashmir; his ancestor Atrigupta had been brought from Kannauj by the eighth-century king Lalitāditya. His mother died when he was young, and his father Narasiṃhagupta taught him grammar, logic and literature. He never married, and devoted his life to study, travelling throughout Kashmir to learn from nineteen or more teachers — Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Buddhist and Jain — and above all from the Śaiva master Lakṣmaṇagupta (pupil of Utpaladeva) for philosophy and Śambhunātha for the Kaula tantric tradition. He lived as a householder-teacher in a household of students and relatives, and wrote some forty-four works. Legend says that at the end of his life he walked into the Bhairava cave at Bhīruva, near Śrīnagara, with twelve hundred disciples, reciting his hymn Bhairavastava, and disappeared.

Works

His works fall into three groups:

• Tantric and theological: the Tantrāloka, a vast synthesis of the theory and practice of the Trika in thirty-seven chapters; the Tantrasāra (its prose summary), the Mālinīvijayavārttika, the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, and hymns.
• Philosophical: two commentaries on Utpaladeva’s Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā — the Vimarśinī and the longer Vivṛtivimarśinī — and the Paramārthasāra, and a commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā (Gītārthasaṅgraha).
• Aesthetic: the Abhinavabhāratī, his commentary on Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, and the Locana, his commentary on Ānandavardhana’s Dhvanyāloka.

Philosophy

Abhinavagupta’s metaphysics is the non-dualism of Kashmir Śaivism. Reality is Śiva, consciousness that is not only light (prakāśa) — pure awareness — but also self-awareness (vimarśa) — the capacity of consciousness to know and say “I”. This self-awareness is freedom (svātantrya) and power (śakti), and it expresses itself as the universe. The world is not an illusion, as for Advaita, but the real play of consciousness. The individual self is Śiva who has freely contracted himself into limitation; liberation is recognition (pratyabhijñā): seeing that one’s own awareness is the universal “I” of Śiva. Abhinavagupta classified the paths to recognition — from “no means” (anupāya), sudden recognition through the teacher’s grace, to ritual and yoga — and held that every experience, including sensual pleasure and beauty, can open onto it.

Aesthetics

Rasa

Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra had explained that in drama, the combination of determinants (causes such as characters and settings), consequents (expressions such as tears and gestures) and transitory feelings produces rasa, “flavour” or “relish” — the aesthetic emotion. But what is rasa, and where is it? Earlier theorists had argued that it lies in the original character (Rāma’s love for Sītā), or in the actor, or that it is inferred by the audience. Abhinavagupta, following Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka, argued that rasa exists in the spectator — not as personal emotion, but as a universalised (sādhāraṇīkṛta) emotion. In the theatre, the events on stage are freed from the limitations of “this person, here, now”: the spectator does not think “Rāma loves Sītā” or “I love my beloved”, but experiences love as such, free from personal interest, fear or desire. The spectator’s latent emotional impressions (vāsanās) are awakened and savoured. And what is savoured, at bottom, is the spectator’s own consciousness, momentarily freed from its usual limitations, as bliss (ānanda). Aesthetic experience is thus akin to — though not identical with — the bliss of liberation. This is why tragedy can give pleasure: the sorrow tasted in art is universal sorrow, tasted by a consciousness at rest.

Dhvani

In his Locana, Abhinavagupta developed Ānandavardhana’s theory of dhvani, “suggestion”: the soul of poetry is not what is said literally but what is suggested — above all, rasa, which can never be stated directly (“the word ‘love’ does not make anyone feel love”) but only evoked.

Śānta rasa

Bharata named eight rasas: the erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious and marvellous. Abhinavagupta defended a ninth, śānta, “peace” or “tranquillity”, whose stable emotion is the knowledge of truth, and argued that it is the rasa of rasas — the underlying state from which all the others arise and into which they subside, the aesthetic counterpart of liberation. See Rasa.

Legacy

Abhinavagupta’s aesthetics became the standard theory for later Sanskrit poetics, and his theory of rasa shaped Indian music, dance and drama to the present. His theology survived among Kashmiri Paṇḍits and was revived in the twentieth century by Swami Lakshmanjoo, the scholar K. C. Pandey (whose 1935 study was the first major book on him), Jaideva Singh, and, in the West, Raniero Gnoli, Paul Muller-Ortega, Alexis Sanderson and others. His thought has been compared with German idealism — the self-positing “I” of Fichte, Hegel’s Spirit — and his aesthetics with Kant’s disinterested pleasure and with Aristotle’s catharsis.

Abhinavagupta in conversation

His answer to why tragedy pleases is still the best: in art, sorrow is freed from being my sorrow, and what we taste is our own consciousness at rest.