As I was reading about Santa Rasa (about peace) in Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, Fordham University Press, New York, 2014,as I cannot accept or understand many argument put forth by the author after quoting Abhivanagupta on Santa rasa, I stopped reading and began to think what actually peace is. Then I wrote this song expressing my view.
Roberts:
…As Abhinavagupta combines these two senses of the term,
[t]he peaceful rasa may be characterized as the full development into aesthetic enjoyment of certain type of happiness (sukha) occurring as a (p.21) basic emotional state. This happiness consists in the dying off, that is, the complete cessation, of desires, that is, yearnings for objects of sense, and may be called an indifference to worldly things (nirveda).6
Santa, then, evokes the peaceful repose of the self in brahman, which grants the momentary cessation of conscious thought and the transcendence of subject-object duality. For Abhinavagupta, the spectator’s absorption in the drama is akin to the deepest contemplation. … proponents of devotional religion (bhakti) further expand this contemplative calm to include a kind of mute awe in the presence of a deity.— Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, New York, Fordham University Press, 2014, pp. 21-22
6. Loc 3.26a, translated by Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan: The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, 521
Critics also raise questions about the existence of santa rasa because it is essentially a negative state: the absence of desire. This negation of mental activity cannot be regarded as an emotion, which is by definition a positive mental state. Abhinavagupta deftly makes a technical distinction to counter this objection: there are two types of nonexistence, that of something that has never come into being and that of something which once existed but has been destroyed. The negative mental state of santa is the latter. All persons come into the world with desire, but when desire ceases, the mind returns to peaceful equanimity. Santa is a state of mind that is not particularized by any of the other moods, a mode of awareness from which those other moods have melted away.
….Abhinavagupta grants that santa rasa cannot be represented in its culminating state, but this is true of other rasas such as love and its culmination in sexual ecstasy as well….—p. 26
Mathigiri, 1-9-2017
As I was reading about Santa Rasa (about peace) in Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, Fordham University Press, New York, 2014,as I cannot accept or understand many argument put forth by the author after quoting Abhivanagupta on Santa rasa, I stopped reading and began to think what actually peace is. Then I wrote this song expressing my view.
Roberts:
…As Abhinavagupta combines these two senses of the term,
[t]he peaceful rasa may be characterized as the full development into aesthetic enjoyment of certain type of happiness (sukha) occurring as a (p.21) basic emotional state. This happiness consists in the dying off, that is, the complete cessation, of desires, that is, yearnings for objects of sense, and may be called an indifference to worldly things (nirveda).6
Santa, then, evokes the peaceful repose of the self in brahman, which grants the momentary cessation of conscious thought and the transcendence of subject-object duality. For Abhinavagupta, the spectator’s absorption in the drama is akin to the deepest contemplation. … proponents of devotional religion (bhakti) further expand this contemplative calm to include a kind of mute awe in the presence of a deity.— Michelle Voss Roberts, Tastes of the Divine, New York, Fordham University Press, 2014, pp. 21-22
6. Loc 3.26a, translated by Ingalls, Daniel H. H., Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M. V. Patwardhan: The Dhvanyaloka of Anandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, 521
Critics also raise questions about the existence of santa rasa because it is essentially a negative state: the absence of desire. This negation of mental activity cannot be regarded as an emotion, which is by definition a positive mental state. Abhinavagupta deftly makes a technical distinction to counter this objection: there are two types of nonexistence, that of something that has never come into being and that of something which once existed but has been destroyed. The negative mental state of santa is the latter. All persons come into the world with desire, but when desire ceases, the mind returns to peaceful equanimity. Santa is a state of mind that is not particularized by any of the other moods, a mode of awareness from which those other moods have melted away.
….Abhinavagupta grants that santa rasa cannot be represented in its culminating state, but this is true of other rasas such as love and its culmination in sexual ecstasy as well….—p. 26
Mathigiri, 1-9-2017
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