Bhattanayaka and the Vedanta Influence on Sanskrit Literary Theory.

• Author: Reich, James D.
• Position: Essay

INTRODUCTION

It has long been known that the literary theorist Bhattanayaka (ca. 850-900 CE) (l) had a strong influence on Abhinavagupta's famous aesthetic theories. He figures prominently in Abhinavagupta's summary of prior aesthetic theories in the Abhinavabharati, and Abhinavagupta credits Bhattanayaka with developing much of the terminology that became central to his analysis of aesthetic experience. Just what Bhattanayaka actually thought, however, has remained something of a mystery, as nothing he wrote has survived intact. (2) Most of what we know about him has to be reconstructed from Abhinavagupta's summaries and quotes. But what we can reconstruct points strongly to the conclusion that Bhattanayaka was an innovative and important figure in the history of Sanskrit literary theory.

In a series of articles and in his most recent book Sheldon Pollock has revived the study of Bhattanayaka and has argued, among other things, that Bhattanayaka is responsible for a crucial shift in how aesthetic experience was understood by Sanskrit intellectuals. (3) Prior to Bhattanayaka, Pollock argues, aesthetic theory was focused on the text. This includes Anandavardhana's famous Dhvanyaloka (ninth cent.), which analyzed literary emotions by trying to explain, in Pollock's words, how "an emotion can come to inhabit the literary work" (Pollock 2010: 145). Bhattanayaka, however, shifted the discussion, focusing not on the text itself so much as the experience the text produces in the reader. In this respect (and others) Abhinavagupta follows Bhattanayaka faithfully.

According to Pollock, the basis for Bhattanayaka's shift was his decision to theorize literature in terms of Sanskrit textual hermeneutics, or Mimamsa. (4) Pollock is not alone in this interpretation; it is a typical understanding of Bhattanayaka. (5) In Pollock's version of this argument, by far the most thorough, Mlmarnsa, which had developed sophisticated ways of describing exactly how the words of the Vedas prompt humans to undertake rituals, was used by Bhattanayaka as a way to think about how the words of a poem prompt human aesthetic experience. This hermeneutic system, Pollock argues, is at the root of Bhattanayaka's literary theory, and is the key to understanding him.

The evidence for Bhattanayaka's involvement with Mimamsa, however, has been greatly exaggerated in these interpretations, to the point of obscuring other aspects of his thought. Mimamsa, though perhaps present to some small degree, was certainly not the most important influence on Bhattanayaka, and it is evident that many of his stated positions are orthogonal to Mimamsa concerns, or even at odds with them, and cannot be explained in terms of them. On the other hand, theological ideas drawn from the tradition of non-dual Vedanta play a clear and prominent role in his thinking. Vedanta ideas not only take up a fairly large portion of what little material we have about Bhattanayaka, they are also conceptually central to the ideas presented there, and to Abhinavagupta's response to them.

This fact has been curiously overlooked in modern scholarship on Bhattanayaka, an oversight that results in multiple misunderstandings. (6) Without considering the Vedanta elements in his thought, Bhattanayaka's ideas become cut off from their foundations and thus more difficult to understand, while Abhinavagupta's response to them, consequently, becomes puzzling and seemingly arbitrary. My aim, therefore, is to re-evaluate what we know about Bhattanayaka, taking the clear Vedanta dimensions of his ideas more seriously, and to show that when we do this we gain a more nuanced and coherent picture of Bhattanayaka's highly interesting aesthetic theory than the comparison to Mimamsa can yield.

This re-evaluation necessarily works with the materials we have, which, again, are largely comprised of Abhinavagupta's summaries and quotations. This raises a problem. How do we know that Abhinavagupta is an honest witness to the real ideas of the historical Bhattanayaka? How do we know whether or to what degree he is distorting them? Actually, we can't. The picture that emerges from this analysis--indeed from any possible analysis, unless we recover a copy of the lost Hrdayadarpana--will necessarily be of Bhattanayakaas-presented-by-Abhinavagupta, and not of Bhattanayaka himself. But this is still desirable. By all accounts, Bhattanayaka's work disappeared quite early, and it is through Abhinavagupta that his ideas have been passed on, not just to us but to the entire subsequent

Sanskrit tradition. Given this, it is important to see exactly how Abhinavagupta understood and portrayed Bhattanayaka, and how he understood his own ideas by comparison, because this allows us to understand an important and influential moment in Sanskrit literary history even if that moment involved distortions of previous material. So with the caveat that the name "Bhattanayaka" will, strictly speaking, refer to Bhattanayaka-as-presented-by-Abhinavagupta, I will proceed to examine who this figure was. First I will present a basic overview of Bhattanayaka's theory. Then I will explore the interpretation that this theory is firmly grounded in Mimarnsa. Finally, I will show how attention to Vedanta can help clarify both Bhattanayaka's theory itself and Abhinavagupta's response.

OUTLINE OF BHATTANAYAKA'S THEORY

The main summary of Bhattanayaka's position is found in Abhinavagupta's commentary on Natyas'astra, the famous dramaturgical manual. It is found in the section theoretically analyzing rasa, the aesthetic mood of a poem or play, (7) and is just one portion of Abhinavagupta' s very long and well-known summary of various interpretations of Bharata's statement that "rasa arises from the conjunction of literary elements." (8) In the most basic sense, this statement means that when the proper combination of emotional factors is present in a scene, the rasa will somehow be present as well. In summarizing and refuting all previous interpretations, Abhinavagupta is building up to his own view, which is that the word "arises" in Bharata's statement actually means "manifested," in a very specific sense. (9) What precisely Abhinavagupta meant by "manifested" is complex. Anandavardhana, the originator of this theory, meant by "manifestation" that the elements of a poem or play, when brought together in the correct way, could make a mood (or a plot fact or rhetorical figure) evident to the reader without stating it directly. (10) Bhattanayaka had reportedly criticized this theory, and Abhinavagupta then "defended" it, but in the process of defending it Abhinavagupta actually co-opted many ideas from Bhattanayaka and changed the theory dramatically. Simply put, for Abhinavagupta, manifestation refers not to something internal to the text itself, but to the way in which the elements of a text can make latent emotional memories "manifest" within the mind of the spectator in a particular way that strips them of their individual, personal associations and allows the spectator to relish them as emotions-as-such. This gives the spectator a reflexive awareness of his own mind that transcends his subjectivity and is pleasurable because it mimics in a small way the blissful reflexive awareness of the god Siva, who, in Abhinavagupta's monist idealistic theology, is in fact the supreme consciousness at the foundation of all our minds and of all reality.'' In other words, manifestation puts us in touch with a deeper level of our being. In order to understand how all this relates to Bhattanayaka, it is necessary first to understand how Bhattanayaka's ideas are represented by Abhinavagupta.

The summary Abhinavagupta gives of Bhattanayaka begins with Bhattanayaka pointing out the problems that arise if rasa is understood to be a particular emotion tied to the subjectivity of a particular person: either the character or the audience member. Neither of these options is possible, according to Bhattanayaka. He takes for his example the Ramayana, the tragic story of king Rama and his separation from his queen, Sita. The sadness one feels while reading this poem cannot be perceived as pertaining to oneself, says Bhattanayaka; that is, we do not experience it to be our own suffering. If this were the case no one would enjoy sad literature. Moreover, for a personal emotional experience to arise in an audience member during the love scenes the spectator would either have to 1) remember a particular person the spectator is or was in love with or 2) feel love for the actual characters being portrayed on stage (or, mutatis mutandis, on the page). The latter, option 2, cannot be taking place because it is the characters' love for each other that is being portrayed--a dialectic from which the spectator is necessarily excluded and in which he could only intervene inappropriately or mistakenly. Nor does the spectator have any personal memories of Rama or Sita that could be stirred and which he could be said to re-experience during the course of the poem or play. He doesn't even have memories of anyone similar to Rama and Sita, since the divinity of these two places them too far outside the ordinary course of human experience. The assumption here is that emotions, as processes that take place within an individual's mind, always have objects, which is in conflict with the fact that in the aesthetic context there is no object towards which a spectator's emotions could sensibly be directed. The conclusion is that the aestheticized correlates of ordinary emotions, whatever they might be, cannot be experiences that pertain to a subject and are directed towards an object. Although the spectator has access to them as forms of experience, they cannot be his experiences of something, the way ordinary emotions are. (12)

On the other hand, the aestheticized emotions are not anyone else's either. If the emotion were not the spectator's own emotion and were instead encountered as...