GENERAL INTRODUCTION

NATARAJA GURU

AESTHETICS is the appreciation of the value of beauty. Beauty could reside in an outside object or could be expressed personally within each individual. In either case, beauty has to result from the participation between what belongs to the Self and what belongs to the non-Self. The resultant of these two aspects meeting and cancelling-out is of the very essence of beauty. Thus, beauty has a meaning in which what is visible and what is intelligible come together. There is nothing called unilateral beauty existing in the object itself or in the subject itself.

Life is a procession. It has often been compared to a chariot drawn by five horses. Inside the chariot is situated the Self, and the progress of the chariot is to be marked by a line along which, when gathered together by corresponding interests developing in the individual, values are confronted in a certain systematic order, as life interests unravel in the normal course, depending upon the age; vitality, sex, etc. of the person concerned. There are various gradations of the personality, libido, or ego, the subliminal Self or the overt aspect of the same Self, which are all to be placed in an organically graded order as representing that aspect of the Self which could be called the rider or the enjoyer here. That which is to be enjoyed is confronted progressively as this chariot advances positively through its value environment. Such objects of enjoyment or interest are first to be contacted or confronted by the five senses, which are analogous to the five horses attached to this Upanishadic chariot. There are good horses and bad horses that could be yoked with the Self to help it on its grand procession through the domain of the non-Self.

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STRUCTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

There is no aesthetics without a background of eroticism as its ground or basis. What is enjoyable applies to the body first. The senses might come afterwards, with the mind and the ego following in order. There are intellectual interests as well as sexual and other appetites, the catering to each of which has to result in what we call aesthetic value. A tragedy is experienced differently from a comedy; romance and lyric, blood-curdling tales, and light pastoral literature have all to be given their proper places in the overall scheme of the world of aesthetics. From gastronomy to the love of poetry, a hierarchy of aesthetic values could be thus distinguished and of all the objects of aesthetic interest, there is none which touches the Self so deeply as that associated with the sentiment of love between the sexes. Such a love presupposes a libidinous body where it could be experienced.

The chariot of our analogy has been compared to the gross body of the enjoyer of the most tangible of aesthetic values. It occupies a peripheral and a negative tail-end of the total situation. Intelligence, on the other hand, appreciates beauty through the spirit rather than through the body, but body and spirit have to be treated together if any aesthetics worth the name in keeping with human dignity is to be thought of at all. Aesthetics is thus a subject that belongs to a complex structural setting. The promiscuous mixing of counterparts makes aesthetics into a confusion of values which can help no man to make life enjoyable in any way. Seated in the chariot, then, the purest Self enters into communion with its counterpart when arrows sent from the enjoyer towards the object enjoyed meet arrows coming from what is enjoyed toward the enjoyer. The bhogya vishva (universe which is to be enjoyed) has necessarily to have a horizontal line of demarcation dividing it from the bhoktr rupa (form of the enjoyer) who progresses as he cuts each arrow of attraction applicable to him with his own counter arrow of response. Such is the grand procession with all its vertical and horizontal implications. hierarchical or instantaneous.

Indian aesthetics presents an alternative image in a more simplified version which brings out the same structural features. Instead of a chariot, we have an elephant on which rides the Eternal Female - a better subject for enjoyment of the most important of values called erotic mysticism - carrying noose and goad in her hands rela ting the enjoyer and the enjoyed across a horizontal dividing line marked by the sugar-cane bow and arrow also held by her. The elephant, to ensure aesthetic enjoyment, must not run wild, but under the double influence of the noose and goad it must progress steadily along legitimate lines of interest opening themselves naturally according to circumstances or occasion before the enjoyer of the aesthetic values.

A child's interest is normally centred in play or perhaps also in the school. A young man's interest is in seeking pleasures, while an older man's interest is to get away from distractions by practicing austerities. The interest of an individual of advanced years is to learn to die in as decent a way as possible through the practice of yoga. Such are the stages mentioned in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa. Shakespearean literature enumerates seven stages of life which conform to the same pattern but whose other structural or global out lines are less clearly distinguishable in the fluid process within which aesthetic values in life operate harmoniously. The example of a big fish swimming within a wide and deep stream could help to put the two sides of Self and non-Self more intimately together when we are called upon to treat aesthetics and its content unitively and universally as a general experience of all men at all times and places.

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CANCELLATION OF COUNTERPARTS

The enjoyment of watching Othello or Macbeth on the stage results when the onlooker as representing the Self experiences the grand and murderous passions taking place on the stage as if they were taking place within his own subjective Self. It reveals to him his own nature in certain of its aspects not otherwise experienced without the play. It is in this sense that Shakespeare says that "The play is the thing," and both together represent one and the same high aesthetic value. When Medea kills her own children, argues with Jason from the roof of the house of the cruel murder, and finally ascends to heaven as a divinity, it is the same cancellation of Self and non-Self that results in spite of the gruesome nature of the tragedy. Hernani and Dona Sola drink poison from each other's hand at the stroke of the midnight hour, when they should have gone to bed together, at the end of the master romance of Victor Hugo. The curtain drops on a scene of empty consolation which is aesthetic beauty touching almost absolute limits.

In works such as the Saundarya Lahari of Sankara, the theory of beauty has been developed masterfully along these lines, enabling us to view aesthetics in its proper perspective. In no tradition has such a perspective been so clearly understood as in that of the Golden Period of Sanskrit Literature of which Kalidasa's works reach the highest of watermarks. One step more from this view of aesthetics and we land in the very core of the Beauty of the Absolute which is outside the scope of the present subject.

Narayana Guru has put succinctly the whole of what we have said in the 69th verse of his Atmopadesa Satakam, when he says:

With hearing and such as horses linked, carrying within
The Self-image, and ruled over by the master of thinking powers,
Such is the libido-chariot mounted whereon the "I"- sense
Unceasing deals outwardly with each form of beauty as it proceeds.

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AESTHETICS AND THE SAUNDARYA LAHARI

PATRICK MISSON

GENERALITIES

AESTHETICS is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as, "Belonging to the appreciation of beauty, having such appreciation, in accordance with good taste."

The subject of aesthetics is almost as old as philosophy itself. In the thinking of Socrates and Plato the notions of Supreme Goodness or Truth or Beauty were considered together, the Greek term to kalon encompassing all of them, under the notion of High Value. Plato will talk of an Ideal of Beauty having a hypostatic reference and will relate all other notions of beauty to it as mere approximations. Contemporary writers on the other hand, will talk of "significant form," and will scorn canons or definitions based on the tastes of past times.

In our own approach to this subject we will keep in mind the epistemology, methodology and axiology of Advaita Vedanta, as our work is intended to be a part of the research undertaken in the Narayana Gurukula under the guidance of Nataraja Guru. Thus the sastras or authorities upon which we base our arguments are the three canonical scriptures of Advaita, i.e., the Upanishads, the Brahma-Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, together with the tradition extending from them up to the present day, together with the works of Kalidasa, Sankara and Narayana Guru. Our methodology will be structural, and the aim or value sought for is Wisdom or Understanding. In all this, we are attempting to continue our Guru's work, so we beg that all that is of value here may be attributed to the Guru, and all that is not to our own misunderstanding. This paper is primarily intended for students of the Gurukula, to whom the terminology and methodology used will certainly be more familiar than to others, and for this reason we shall not apologise for our constant references to the words of our own Guru.

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THE STRUCTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

As we are placing ourselves thus within the Indian contemplative tradition, we hope to clarify our point by first quoting verse 69 of the Atmopadesa Satakam of Narayana Guru, which deals with aesthetics:

With hearing and such as horses linked, carrying within
The Self-image and ruled over by the master of thinking powers-
Such is the libido-chariot, mounted whereon the "I" sense
Unceasing deals outward with each form of beauty as it proceeds. ¹

In his commentary on this verse, Nataraja Guru points out that the objects of sense interest are to be considered as comprising a graded series extending upon a vertical axis along which the Self proceeds. The central reality here is the atma pratima or Self-image, which does not participate in outside action with forms or things other than itself, and could be compared with the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle or the agent of the "pure act" of classical philosophy. It is to be considered as intermediate and neutral between mind and matter, as with the Thinking Substance of Spinoza. Structurally speaking, the Self-image is to be placed at the "O"-point of intersection of the vertical and horizontal axes, where the two cones of mind and matter could be said to meet: On the lower or negative side of the schema could be placed the chariot itself, representing the material aspect of the situation. The horses representing the senses could be imagined as spread out fanwise; restrained and guided by their reins, above the horizontal axis on the positive side of the schema. On the negative side, below the Self-image could be placed the physical basis of the Self as the libido. The libido is to be seen as more or less strongly tinged by sex, which is in any case an essential factor in the situation. As a counterpart to the libido, we have the "master of thinking powers" on the positive side, belonging to the realm of pure consciousness.

The use of such an image to illustrate this highly complex subject is a familiar one on Indian soil, and is to be found also in Katha Upanishad. (third valli, verses 3-6), in Svetasvatara Upanishad ³ (2-9) and in the second prapathaka of the Maitri Upanishad.⁴ We shall refer continually to this kind of non-verbal language when dealing with aesthetics.

The word "aesthetics" is derived from the Greek verb aisthanomai, "to perceive." In the Bhagavad Gita and in the commentaries of Sankara, perception is considered as a tri-basic phenomenon, involving the seer, the sight and the seen. These three factors could be seen as distinct and pluralistic entities when viewed horizontally, but are without reality as such when viewed vertically sub specie aeternitatis.

The appreciation of beauty could be seen as involving two counterparts, the Self and the non-Self, which have to be cancelled out vertically one against the other. As Nataraja Guru would state, "Reach out to the Beauty that is within you." Beauty is neither wholly without, on the side of the non-Self, nor wholly within, on the side of the Self, but could be equated rather with the cancellation of these two factors. They are known in Sanskrit as brahman and atman respectively, as referring to the Absolute. The Absolute is described in terms of ananda (high value) or saundarya (beauty), as well as of sat (existence) and cit (subsistence).

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EROTIC MYSTICISM

In the Indian tradition, Absolute Beauty is referred to as a goddess, whether known as Sakti, Parvati or Saraswati. This tradition can be traced in the 3rd Kanda of Kena Upanishad; ⁶ where the Absolute is revealed to the assembled vedic gods in the form of Uma Haima-vati, a young woman of extraordinary beauty.

In the works of Kalidasa we also find the Absolute described in terms of a dancing girl, as in Malavikagnimitra; ⁷ or as the goddess of the Kumarasambhava. ⁸ In the Dasakumaracarita ⁹ of Dandin we find the image of a temple dancer playing with a ball representing desire (ananga, the "limbless one"). Sankara's Saundarya Lahari is one of the most celebrated examples of this kind of contemplative literature, and the traditional theme is treated in modern times in the Kali Natakam ¹⁰ of Narayana Guru.

Thus, the question of erotics associated with the female form is central in any discussion of aesthetics. We have already referred to objects of perception forming a graded series along which the chariot could be seen as progressing. This series could extend between two poles representing values of an ontological or negative order and more positive or hypostatic ones. Bread and freedom could be two such counterparts. Throughout a man's life he is confronted progressively with such values, each age having its corresponding interests as stated in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa. ¹¹ However, it could be seen that eroticism occupies a central and preponderant position in such a series. In terms of physiology or biology even, life itself could not exist without eroticism. Eroticism participates equally on the necessary side of human existence, that of bread, and on the side of freedom or contingence, where aesthetic emotions and pleasures are situated. From infancy, where the child's universe is described by Freud as "pan-erotic," to old age, eroticism is a constant factor in life. In this light we could refer to the Bhagavad Gita where in Verse 2 of Chapter VII, the Absolute as Krishna is identified with Kama or passion.

At this point we must state again that this paper has to be viewed in the context of the Vedantic tradition, and that consequently the values we are considering have to be seen not only as academic or scholarly, but as involving Understanding with a capital U. Thus our examination of aesthetics and its erotic aspect might be seen to become indistinguishable from that of erotic mysticism, as understood in the Indian contemplative context.

It is not possible for us to approach aesthetics without a general theory of perception, which in turn involves both the presuppositions of Vedanta and the presuppositions of High Aesthetic Value which have accompanied it. No theological bias is intended here. The use of a language of images on the one hand, and on the other the expression of the aesthetic experience itself which is of "most tender yet overpowering erotic content," be it at one level or another, which is of the experience of the contemplative, are to be kept in mind here. Such a lingua mystica is present in different regions and contexts, with a greater or lesser emphasis on one side or another. It can be seen in the Sufi poets of Islam, as particularly Hafez of Shiraz, ¹² or writers such as Ibn Hazm, author of "The Dove's Collar," ¹³ or in the Trouvere literature of France and Languedoc in the Middle Ages, which owed something at least to a parallel development in Muslim Spain. However, the tradition as present on Indian soil might be said to be at least as rich as any other in structural features, without which a dialectical or balanced approach is not possible.

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SANKARA'S "UPSURGING BILLOW OF BEAUTY"

The Saundarya Lahari of Sankara cannot be ignored in any account of Indian aesthetics which claims to be competent. These hundred verses in praise of the Absolute Goddess contain a structural language of ideograms. It could be said that medium and message were here one, in the context of McLuhanism. In his bhashyas (commentaries), Sankara used ordinary language and syllogistic reasoning, while here he employs a language of images and dialectics. Just as a theorem in geometry might be proved equally well by calculation or by cutting out paper triangles and measuring them, so in the same way proto-language is as valid as meta-language. In Sanskrit, dhvani would imply a second meaning beneath, as it were, the literal meaning. In the Saundarya Lahari, four such levels of meaning could be distinguished, from the actual through the virtual to third or fourth dimensional levels. Here we shall quote directly from the Guru's commentary to the Saundarya Lahari, which exists at present only in typescript.

"The title of this century of verge itself underlines its unique characteristic. Each verse, when properly understood, will be seen to contain two distinct sets of value counterparts; if one of them could be called physical, then the other could be called metaphysical. When they cancel out against each other through a complementarity, compensation or reciprocity which could be recognized as implied between these two counterparts, the resultant is always an upsurge of an experience which could come either from the inner or outer pole of the total Absolute Self. This resultant could even be called a constant, and thus an absolute belonging to a particular discipline and department of life. To give a familiar example, when heat and cold cancel out, climatic conditions can yield the possible absolute constant of that particular context. When heavenly values and earthly values cancel out by complementarity, alternation or split-second cancellation, we can also experience another kind of beauty, bliss or high value-factor. When viewed in its proper absolutist perspective, such a constant amounts to attaining the Absolute. Such an attainment of the Absolute would be tantamount to the merging of the Self with the Absolute in Upanishadic parlance, and could even in principle amount to becoming the Absolute itself. Sankara has named his work a lahari, which suggests an upsurging or overwhelming billow of beauty experienced at the neutral meeting point of the inner sense of beauty and its outer counterpart. We have to conceive the whole subject matter always in its four-fold polyvalence to be able to experience this overwhelming joy or bliss, to produce which each word or phrase or image of these verses consistently strives, in its attempt to give a high value-content to the Absolute. There is no mistaking that the present work is perfectly in keeping with the same Advaitic doctrine that Sankara has laboriously stood for in all his other writings. "Cancellation of counterparts is therefore one of the main features of this work. It is neither a god nor a goddess that is given a unilateral importance here; it is an absolute, neutral or normative value emerging from the cancellation or neutralization of two factors, named Siva and Sakti respectively, that is noticeable consistently throughout this composition. If Siva is the vertical reference, Sakti is the horizontal referent. Understood in the light of each other, the non-dual in the form of Beauty becomes experienced. Next to the principle of the quaternion (referred to above) there are two parameters of reference, the vertical and the horizontal, which have to be clearly distinguished within the structure of the Absolute, which latter would otherwise be merely conceptual or empty of content. The phenomenal and the noumenal have to verify each other for the Absolute Value to emerge into view. It is the absolute character of the value of Beauty that justifies Sankara's use of the term lahari."

It could be seen as we have suggested that cancellation could take place at a fourth dimensional level which would be structural or purely schematic, and at concrete or earthy levels where cancellation and the value-content, beauty or lahari, would be of a more down to earth or apodictic order. At all levels, however, there would be an erotic content, overt or covert.

The Absolute is described as a goddess so as to permit eroticism, which is an inescapable part of experience, to be elevated to a status consistent with contemplation. Any system of spirituality or philosophy which does not take it into account cannot pretend to a correctly balanced approach.

Indeed, eroticism is frequently present in a more or less open manner in much of spirituality, be it that of the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages (particularly the female saints) or in the effusions of the Bhagavata cult of northern India. To the extent that such eroticism is not faced fully, it could be the source of endless confusion or guilt, making misfits in society or out of it. It is also in vain that one could search for such richness of structural content as in the Saundarya Lahari.

At this point we propose to examine a representative verse of the Saundarya Lahari in detail, so as to give the reader a more clear idea of what we are trying to say. It would be presumptuous for a disciple to compete with his Guru, so we will quote directly from the Guru's commentary.

Verse 7 deals with an image of the Goddess of Beauty which is a particularly structural, and which is not without parallel with the image of the chariot mentioned above. The verse reads:

Resounding with waist-belt of jingle bells, recumbent by breasts
Like the frontal bulges of a calf elephant, slim of waist, with autumnal full-moon face,
By hands, holding aloft bow with arrow, noose and goad,
O let her appear before us, that proud counterpart of the City-Burner.

The Guru comments:

"Verse 7 seems to imply a challenge by the author, and it is meant as a key to the structural dynamism applied to the content of Beauty, having both name and form at the core of the otherwise empty notion of the Absolute. Its position towards the end of the first series of ten verses is evidently meant to indicate the covering of the preliminaries in respect of this work. It is an appeal that apostrophizes directly the personification of Absolute Beauty, who is the central figure for the whole of the work. Let her appear before our eyes in as concrete and real a form as we could possibly accept. Beauty has to be given some kind of visible form, either as a Lakshmi or a Saraswati, or even a Kali, as conventionally known to the Indian mind, to confer on it tangible meaning at all. Such divinities have all to be fused together into one abstracted and generalised dynamic personal expression, in which all the levels and four-fold aspects implied in each of them could be brought into active inter play together under a universal concrete perspective. The three previous verses could be seen to have prepared the ground step by step for this verse. All the six previous ones are synthetically put together and summarily reviewed here to afford a firm basis for the further elaboration of the wisdom contained in the rest of the work. If we look at the eighth verse in advance, we can see there the emergence of a definite personality of a goddess, seated on a couch and represented in a form suitable for the contemplative purposes of an actual yogi. Here, however, the author takes his stand on a more neutral ground between matter and mind. Advaitic verity is neither real nor abstract, but is something that places itself at the core of consciousness, sometimes real, sometimes amorphous and abstract. The dancing Siva in his sinus movement represents the pure verticalized process of the cosmic flux of becoming. He is the City Burner who descends with all his burning glory on to a situation which is to be more ontologically understood at a lower level on the vertical axis....

"The first line refers to the sound of the jingling waist-belt as the starting-point conducive to make the vision appear to the reader in just that form intended by the author. The vision has only a schematic status, although it is dynamically presented here. Sound itself belongs to the conceptual side, while the schematic outline is a form. Thus the dance meant to be revealed before our eyes is, in principle, the same as the well-known Nataraja dance, conceived in a more normalized form, at a lower level. The sound of the waist belt bells is heightened when the dancing girl plants her feet as she enters the stage for her performance. By the sound of these bells, the onlookers are introduced at once into a world in which concepts and percepts cancel out into sheer beauty, expressed through the art of dancing. Touching terra firma first presents the ontological starting point of the dance where sound meets form, and brings in the horizontality of the earth into the total schematic situation. This is known in Sanskrit as jhunkara (sudden jingling) of the anklet bells at the point where ontology has its impact and participation as between the earth and mind.

"After marking the horizontal bottom limit thus, in the very first line, the poet refers us to the heavy breast region, which is to be imagined as a horizontal line, schematically understood, on the numerator side of the situation. We know also at once that when it comes to their principle function of the necessity of feeding a newborn baby, the breasts of a woman are better when they are big and ponderous, although the breasts of a young maid before her maturity need not have the same ponderousness as in later years of full maternity. These two versions are reciprocal. Time is telescoped here, and intervals tend to be abolished in terms of an eternal present or moment. That is why the author does not stop the dance movement at the transition point, in passing from the recumbent form of the goddess to the one in which her breasts are compared to the frontal knobs of an elephant. This last reference is to lift the status of the breasts into a more hypostatic level of value-content. There is a beautiful sinus curve and a torsion as well as inside-outside transposal to be imagined by us in this transition from numerator breasts to their own denominator aspect. This figure-of-eight, which results from contraction, transposal and torsion between right and left, front and back, independent of big or small, near or far, can even be accentuated further. The dancing girl's beauty on the stage is meant to fill the whole field of vision intended to be summoned to our view here. Dancing consists mainly of bending and stretching, where the hips and breasts of a woman fuse themselves into a structural Yin-Yang model, both bright and dark at the same time. The dynamism is meant to be of increased voltage until an absolute limit is reached, passing necessarily through the second and third dimensional perspectives to the full status of the fourth dimensional version recognizable in the last lines. Here, the dancer and the goddess attain to the maximum vertical height that it is possible to reach from the ontological side of the situation.....

"When the tempo or voltage of this dance attains to higher levels of expression, we pass from a third dimensional level to a fourth dimensional one. Weak reactions in nuclear physics similarly pass thus, when influenced by the cyclotron, to express themselves in a perspective that is more fully verticalized, just as magnetism can do as it passes into electromagnetism. Thus the Yin-Yang structural pattern, with its vestige of duality between the two aspects, can progressively become abolished when electricity prevails more and more over the horizontal expression of weak magnetic fields. Both the frontal bulges of the calf elephant and the recumbent breasts could thus become absorbed into a central structural lotus radiating light equally, from all around the circumference....

"After getting so far in our vision of the content of the Beauty of the Absolute in three dimensional terms, the remaining task is for Sankara to make this vision fully fourth dimensional, or even multi dimensional in its status. The fourth dimensional status is revealed in the third line where the conventional monomarks of Indian iconography are attributed to the goddess intended in this verse, conforming to the norms of a well-accepted iconographic language, which has been fully developed through the ages and shaped finally by the successive contemplatives who revised and revalued the basic ideogram. The hands holding aloft the bow and arrow, noose and goad, are meant to mark the horizontal and vertical structural dimensions of the goddess, now viewed together in a fully fourth dimensional perspective. The bow and arrow have the target of making Siva fall for her, but the goad and noose have between them a fully verticalized function of normalizing the movement of something of a dark and spatial or earthy order, like an elephant. They are thus the four regulative principles in the grand flux of becoming, to be imagined as taking place within the context of time and space in a fourth dimensional universe.

"Finally in the last line it is indicated that although she is a feminine goddess belonging to the so-called weaker sex, she is still capable of attaining high vertical heights in the same way as her husband, by means of her direct affiliation to him. They have equality of status in every respect, as we shall see maintained throughout this work...."

We are aware that such quotations, however long, when taken out of the context of a whole work, can but provide some indication of the nature of the question. Readers are referred to the Guru's translation and commentary, which it is hoped will soon be in print.

We hope to have faithfully conveyed something of the Guru's teaching in this short paper. For future Conferences, we propose to continue research on the subject and present an amplified and more detailed paper.

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REFERENCES

1. Narayana Guru, "Atmopadesa Satakam," translation and commentary by Nataraja Guru, Gurukula Publishing House, 1969, p. 211.

2. Hume, R, E., The Thirteen Principle Upanishads, Oxford, 1968, p. 351.

3. ibid., p. 398.

4. ibid., p. 414.

5. ibid., p. 334.

6. ibid., p. 337.

7. Kalidasa, "Malavikagnimitra," trans. Kale, Motilal Banarsidas, 1967.

8. Kalidasa, "Kumarasambhava," trans. Kale, Motilal Banarsidas, 1958.

9. Dandin, "Dasakumaracarica," trans, Kale, Motilal Banarsidas, 1964.

10. Narayana Guru, "Kali Natakam," translation and commentary by Nataraja Guru, "Gurukulam Magazine" (English Appendix), Narayana Gurukula, Varkala, Kerala; June through August, 1972.

11, Kalidasa, "Raghuvamsa," trans. Kale, Motilal Banarsidas, 1970.

12. Hafeze Shirazi Diwan, Ketabhaye Partoo, Tehran, 1971.

13. Ibn Hazm, "Le Collier de la Colombe," trans. Pierrard. Universite Libre del Bruxelles, 1970.

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