“Dramatically cleaner and infinitely more explicit” code is beautiful, and here, enhanced function follows from form. But letting go of object state and embracing events requires some effort and imagination. During another blog discussion about event-sourcing code, a user more familiar with the old-style methods of storing current state remarked, “Yes, this code is beautiful, really beautiful. And my … brain almost blew up when I tried to understand the process.”³¹

As I learned about the beauty of event sourcing, I was reminded of other discussions of identity-over-time that had bent my mind. The Buddhists of the Yogachara school (fourth century CE) were among the proponents of the doctrine of “no-self,” arguing: “What appears to be a continuous motion or action of a single body or agent is nothing but the successive emergence of distinct entities in distinct yet contiguous places.”³² There is no enduring object state, there are only events. To this, Abhinavagupta — whom we’ve already seen commenting on Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka—responded with the assertion that there could be no connection between sequential cognitive states if there were not a stable connector to synthesize these states across time and place.³³ There may be no persistent object state, but there needs to be an event-sourcing system to integrate events into current state. For Abhinavagupta, memory is the preeminent faculty of the self: “It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists. I am free because I remember.”³⁴

And, according to Abhinavagupta, it is memory from which literature derives its powers.

7 THE CODE OF BEAUTY: ABHINAVAGUPTA

The most prominent of Anandavardhana’s successors in the field of rasa-dhvani theory was the towering polymath Abhinavagupta (literary critic, aesthetic philosopher, metaphysical philosopher, theologian, poet, musician, and — according to his late-tenth-century contemporaries — a realized yogic master). In his commentaries on the Natyashastra and Anandavardhana’s Dhvanyaloka, Abhinavagupta explored the role of memory in the psychology of rasa. Just as Anandavardhana had claimed a distinctiveness in the way vyanjana or suggestion worked in poetic language, Abhinavagupta claimed that the commonplace workings of memory, when directed by the poet, gave literature a power that was unique, an ability that was available nowhere else.

Abhinavagupta asserted that all minds contain infinite layers of samskaras and vasanas—“latent impressions” left by one’s experience and past lives; it is these impressions that are brought alive or manifested by dhvani. The aesthetic experience allows the viewer, this cognizing subject, to set these latent impressions in motion within itself, to conjure them up out of sub- or un-consciousness and render them active; the subject becomes a participant in the fictional event, it feels, it relives. Yet, according to Abhinavagupta, this event and its evoked emotions are, for the participating subject, free of all ego-driven considerations: “I am afraid, he — my enemy, my friend, anybody — is afraid.”¹ The viewer or reader, then, is able to engage with the specifics of the art in a way that is profoundly felt and is yet — paradoxically — removed.

So, to a playgoer who hears some lines about a hunted deer

there appears, immediately after the perception of their literal sense, a perception of a different order, an inner [mānasī] perception, consisting in a direct experience [sākṣātkāra] which completely eliminates the temporal distinction, etc., assumed by these sentences. Besides, the young deer … which appears in this perception is devoid of its particularity (viśeṣa), and at the same time the actor, who [playing the role of the deer] frightens [the spectators by appearing to] be afraid, is unreal (apāramārthika). As a result, what there appears is simply and solely fear — fear in itself, uncircumscribed by time, space, etc. This perception of fear is of a different order from the ordinary perceptions … for these are necessarily affected by the appearance of fresh mental movements … consisting of [personal, egoistic] pleasure, pain, etc., and just for this reason are full of obstacles (vighna). The sensation of the fear above mentioned, on the contrary, is the matter of cognition by a perception devoid of obstacles (nirvighna) and may be said to enter directly into our hearts, to dance (viparivṛt) before our eyes: this is the terrible rasa. In such a fear, one’s own self is neither completely immersed (tiraskṛ), nor in a state of particular emergence (ullikh) … As a result of this, the state of generality involved is not limited (parimita), but extended (vitata).²

This generalization, this trans-personalization, sadharanikarana, is the essential basis of the aesthetic experience. The framing of an object as art produces this necessary detachment from the limited ego. For a viewer, “the tasting of pleasures, pains, etc., inhering in his own [limited] person” prevents the relishing of rasa.³ The attachment to limited self prevents universalization; if you are grieving over your own long-lost mother, you are not relishing the rasa of the tragic death scene in the movie you are watching.

The means of eliminating this obstacle are the so called theatrical conventions (nāṭyadharmi), which include a number of things not found in ordinary life, as, for instance, the zones (kakṣyā) dividing the pavilion (maṇḍapa), the stage (raṇgapīṭha); and … also the different dress of the actors — the headwear, etc. — by which they hide their true identity.⁴

It is the very artificiality and conventionality of the aesthetic experience, therefore, that makes the unique experience of rasa possible. Abhinavagupta observes:

In the theatrical performance there is on one hand the negation of the real being of the actor, and on the other — since the spectator’s consciousness does not rest entirely on the represented images — there is no rest on the real being of the superimposed personage; so that, as a result of all this, there is eventually just a negation both of the real being of the actor and of the real being of the character he is playing.⁵

And yet the spectator experiences the full panoply of emotion and thought induced by the action of the play, and simultaneously, the spectator’s perception of the aesthetic objects (the story, the actors, the stage) and of his or her own reactions is marked by wonder, chamatkara, and a willingness, an openness toward these perceptions. The result is pleasure that exists “through the suppression of our [usual] thick pall of mental stupor and blindness” as we encounter the aesthetic object. This pleasure consists of “the states of fluidity, enlargement, and expansion, and is also called ‘tasting,’ and is of a non-ordinary [alaukika] nature.”⁶ So, rasa is a supra-mundane mental state that is “not a form of ordinary cognition, nor is it erroneous, nor ineffable, nor like ordinary perception, nor does it consist of a super-imposition.”⁷ Rasa differs from “both memory, inference and any form of ordinary self-consciousness.”⁸

During the experience of rasa, according to Abhinavagupta, “what is enjoyed is consciousness itself.”⁹ That is, the aesthetic object, through the process of generalization, allows us to experience the emotional and cognitive fluctuations within ourselves without attachment, without obstacles, with a harmonious density (ekaghana) that we cannot find in the chaos of ordinary life. When we watch characters experiencing grief, for instance, we have