Abhinavagupta on Śānta Rasa: The Logic of Emotional Repose

Abstract

This chapter explores the ways Abhinavagupta, an eleventh-century Kashmirian polymath, establishes the experience of serenity (śānta) as one of the appraised emotions called rasa. Beyond the issue of whether serenity can be the savoring of rasa, this chapter explores various models from classical Hindu and Buddhist philosophies that establish serenity in order to contextualize the phenomenology of experiencing serenity. For Abhinava, this experience is not a mere negation of emotions but a positive experience. And to establish his argument, Abhinava explores the ways absence is analyzed in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. One of the central problems of aesthetics that overlaps metaphysics is whether the experience of serenity is identical to the experience of liberation. Abhinava paves his path through the middle, without collapsing this experience to the mystical experience of the Brahman or to common everyday experiences. By rejecting the argument that serenity is a product of cessation or that dispassion evolves into serenity, Abhinava argues that serenity emerges from self-awareness.