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Arts-śāstra — Beauty and Form
before this →Purāṇa — Narrative Memory
The last application is the one that shapes experience. The arts-śāstras are not rules for decoration; they are the precision by which a form is made to mean.
Rasa — flavour as content
Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra
Drama and dance are governed by rasa: the spectator’s tasting of an emotion. Eight or nine rasas, each produced by a precise combination of character, action, and gesture. The performance is not the expression of feeling but its manufacture — in the audience.
the theory travelThe same analytic habit runs through the whole arts complex:
poetics (dhvani, suggestion), architecture (vāstu), and iconography
(tālamāna, the proportion that makes a mūrti fit to be dwelt in).
STHĀYI-BHĀVAthe durable emotion
VIBHĀVA · ANUBHĀVA · VYABHICĀRIcause · sign · transient
RASAthe flavour tasted by the audience
Form as vehicle
A temple is not a building that happens to be sacred; its plan is the cosmos, and its proportions are doctrine. An icon is not a likeness; it is a support the presence is invited into. The arts-śāstra is the knowledge of how to make a form that can carry what it signifies.
introduces →nāṭyarasavāstuśilpaalaṅkāraiconography