Contemporary democracy has given primacy to thought. Building up institutions on thought and reasoned discourse excludes out human actions derived not from thought that one thinks. Ordinary life is visited by emotion and passion. Such actions of unknown origin are captured best in the drama. Indian theory and practice of drama and the poetics offer communion between the performer and the viewer. Blissful relish of the actions and the dialogues lift up the banal actions from the ordinary to a state (...) beyond simple event. Relishing thus resides in cognition. Drama in theory and in its practice thus offers foundation to institutions that could embrace independent actions as well. In relish there is cognition and reasoning alone cannot lay claim. Folk life and folk actions thus could be emancipatory. (shrink)

A hypertext learner navigates with a instinctive feeling for a knowledge. The learner does not know her queries, although she has a feeling for them. A learner’s navigation appears as complete upon the emergence of an aesthetic pleasure, called rasa. The order of arrival or the associational logic and even the temporal order are not relevant to this emergence. The completeness of aesthetics is important. The learner does not look for the intention of the writer, neither does she look for (...) significance. Lexia has a suggestive power and she is suggested in the arrival of aesthetics. Hypertext learning does not depend on communication. The learner in her pleasure transgresses the bounds of space-time to be in communion with several writers/learners. Hypertext learning does not appear to be fundamentally different from the analog learning; however, in performance, as in navigation, the learner assumes a mental state that helps her in her emergence into aesthetic bliss, of an arrival to the completed lexial navigation. This completeness is owing to aesthetics and is not owing to either the semantics or the query-fulfilling qualities. (shrink)

Bhāvanā, “bringing into being,” is one of Mīmāṃsā’s hallmark concepts. It connects text and action in a single structure of meaning. This conjunction was crucially important to Mīmāṃsā’s own interpretive enterprise, and functioned— controversially but influentially—in a broader theory of language. The goal of this paper is to outline bhāvanā’s major contours as it is developed by Kumārilabhaṭṭa and some his followers (Maṇḍanamiśra, Pārthasārathimiśra, Someśvarabhaṭṭa, Khaṇḍadeva, and Āpadeva) and to examine some of the arguments they marshaled in support of it. (...) Bhāvanā is shown to open up, for these Mīmāṃsakas, an understanding of the “deep structure” of Vedic injunctions and the vocabulary for systematically representing it; it accounts for both what people do when they perform an action that is enjoined (ārthī bhāvanā) and what the injunction itself does when it motivates people to performance (śābdī bhāvanā). Bhāvanā has resonances with, and relevance to, contemporary discussions of the nexus of language, understanding, and action, and its value as a carefully-elaborated concept of hermeneutical significance should not be overlooked. (shrink)