In the realm of the senses divine - Hindu and Buddhist arts - Between the Visible and the Invisible

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1990 by Romain Maitra

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TRADITIONAL Indian art is primarily religious. Everything in it has a divine meaning and no aspect of life is treated for its own sake. People, trees, flowers, birds and other features of the natural world are all depicted in painting and sculpture, but their beauty is not intrinsic, it lies in the divine idea which is impressed on those human minds which are in a suitably receptive state.

The earliest Indian treatise on the theory of the beautiful is the Natya Shastra, which was written around the sixth century BC. In it the sage-priest Bharata set forth the important concept of aesthetic flavour or rasa. In a famous passage, Bharata says that a rasa is a strong and lasting emotion which may be kindled by transitory feelings of pleasure and pain. He describes the main rasas which are aroused by the arts as erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious, and marvellous.

To taste rasa the spectator must be in that state of freedom which comes from detachment from the self. His or her mind must be in a pure and balanced state (sattric). Egoism and desire must be forsaken before vision and delight are possible. Through glimpsing a divine vision, the real nature of the soul is set free. Unlike the katharsis of Greek tragedy, rasa does not involve the idea of emotional relief alone. The spectator does not experience the unpleasant or agreeable effects of his or her reactions but resolves them into a blissful state of consciousness.

While the ultimate aesthetic consciousness is purely contemplative, the steps prescribed to achieve it through the artistic process are marked by a high degree of concentration and purity of mind. Aesthetic activity is like a yoga, a seeking of truth, a spiritual exercise involving the cultivation of a disinterested feeling. The emotions aroused by a work of art do not belong to any one person, neither to artist, actor or spectator. They have no location in time and space. As Ananda Coomaraswamy has pointed out, "all knowledge and all truth are absolute and infinite, waiting not to be created, but to be found".

When depicting the gods, Indian sculptors and painters did not use the Hellenic models whereby the gods are imagined in human form. They sought to attain their goal through conceptual insight or intuition rather than by observation and analysis of physical features. A deity symbolically represents a unified set of spiritual ideas and his body, therefore, should be regarded as merely a vehicle for the eternal expression of that particular set of spiritual ideas. Thus the many-headed gods and many-armed goddesses of Hindu art represent eternal abstract ideas of beauty and have no exact counterparts in nature.

One ideal of the divine form is based on the ancient notion of the Indian hero, the superman. The Mahabharata describes this ideal form as that of a mighty hunter who became invincible after vanquishing the king of beasts in many conflicts and acquired a lion-like body with broad chest and shoulders, long, massive arms, a thick neck, and a very slim waist. In Indian art this leonine body became the symbol of physical strength. Nimbleness, another essential quality for success in the chase, was symbolized by legs like those of a deer or a gazelle, a feature which is prominent in the Buddhist cave-paintings at Ajanta in northern India and in the Buddhist sculptures at Amaravati.

In both Hindu and Buddhist art, gods who had acquired divine powers by ascetic practices are not represented like human ascetics with bodies emaciated by hunger and thirst, with protruding bones and swollen veins. Instead they are portrayed with smooth skin and rounded limbs. Their veins and bones are always concealed, they have strong necks, massive shoulders and narrow waists. Whereas the divinities of the Far East appear to dwell in a fair garden of peace filled with delicate springtime blossoms, the Indian ideal of beauty seems to be set among the celestial solitudes of a Himalayan skyscape hinting at the infinite.

A special feature of the Indian concept of the beautiful is based on the distinction between pleasure and bliss (ananda), which is stated in the Bhagavad Gita as being at the core of beauty. Pleasure is selfish and individual, phenomenal and relative, whereas bliss is absolute and infinite. Pleasure is transitory, but bliss is unalloyed and related to composure and peace. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata do not end with the vanquishing of the unrighteous and the victory of the righteous. They move on towards the fulfilment of a life after life. The goal is not the attainment of an earthly throne but the attainment of perfection. Sensuality and spirituality seem to be merely the inner and outer aspects of the same life. The Ajanta paintings enchantingly depict a civilization in which the conflict of matter and spirit hag been beautifully resolved.