Abhinavagupta and the taste of art
Around the year 1000, in Kashmir, a philosopher named Abhinavagupta wrote two kinds of book. One kind was tantric: the Tantraloka, an enormous map of ritual and contemplative practice. The other was about theatre and poetry. He did not think he was changing the subject.
Rasa, or flavour
The older Natyashastra, the classical treatise on drama, said that a good performance produces rasa in its audience. The word means juice, essence, taste. You do not merely watch a tragedy; you taste sorrow, transformed into something you can savour.
The classical list names eight rasas, and Abhinavagupta argued hard for a ninth:
| Rasa | Flavour |
|---|---|
| Shringara | Love, longing |
| Hasya | Laughter |
| Karuna | Compassion, grief |
| Raudra | Fury |
| Vira | Courage |
| Bhayanaka | Terror |
| Bibhatsa | Disgust |
| Adbhuta | Wonder |
| Shanta | Peace |
Why the ninth matters
For Abhinavagupta, shanta, the rasa of peace, sits underneath all the others. When we taste any emotion in art, we taste it without the personal stake that makes it painful in life. The grief on stage is not my grief. For a moment, the small self that usually owns every feeling steps aside.
That moment, he said, is a glimpse of the same freedom the tantric practitioner works toward. The cultivated viewer, the sahridaya, literally “one with a heart”, is already halfway there. He called the experience camatkara: a kind of astonished relishing, the mind savouring its own awareness.
Art is the rehearsal. Practice is the performance that never closes.
In the studio
I think about this when a painting is going well. There is a point where I stop making decisions and start tasting them, where the colour on the brush is not mine but simply happening. It never lasts. But Abhinavagupta gave me a vocabulary for it, and a reason to believe it is not an accident.