Poetry and the Play of the Goddess: Theology in Jayaratha’s Alaṃkāravimarśinī

Abstract

The beginning of Jayaratha’s commentary on Ruyyaka’s Alaṃkārasarvasva contains a long digression on the nature of the goddess Parā Vāc, “Highest Speech,” referred to in Ruyyaka’s benedictory verse. This is an unusual choice in a text on poetics, and attention to Jayaratha’s religious context reveals that the digression is based closely on Abhinavagupta’s Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, a tantric commentary. Jayaratha models his opening passage on this text in order to bolster an argument he wants to make about poetry, namely that poetry is the appearance of the goddess Highest Speech, who has split herself into both poet and reader in order to blissfully interact with herself. He does this, I suggest, in order to mark the discussion that will follow—an extremely detailed and polemical analysis of the nature and mechanisms of various rhetorical figures, with very little explicit theology—as a discussion that takes place squarely within a Śaiva universe, one which can only be fully understood in Śaiva terms even though, or perhaps precisely because, the language of theology is not necessary for analyzing any individual rhetorical figure.

Some time around 1150 CE, in Kashmir, Ruyyaka completed his groundbreaking new study of poetic tropes, the Alaṃkārasarvasva. Ruyyaka’s text marked a return to the tradition of Sanskrit tropology after several centuries of marginalization, during which theorists had been much more concerned with debating how poetry communicates information, particularly emotional information. Ānandavardhana’s famous theory of “poetic manifestation” [dhvani], modified by Abhinavagupta’s later innovations, eventually won out in these debates, and Ruyyaka, like so many others, accepted it, and even defended it extensively in some of his works. But in the Alaṃkārasarvasva he mentions it only briefly before moving on to discuss tropes at great length—their classifications and subtypes, their cognitive and linguistic mechanisms, their distinctions from each other, and so forth. He seems to have considered the debate on poetic manifestation closed, and to have felt the time was right for new explorations. His ideas about tropes went on to become very influential, despite an almost immediate attack and alternative compilation written by another Kashmirian, the Alaṃkāraratnākara of Śobhākara.¹

Around 50 or 75 years after Śobhākara’s attack, the very first commentary on Alaṃkārasarvasva was written, also in Kashmir. It is called Alaṃkāravimarśinī, and its author, Jayaratha, unlike Ruyyaka, was not known primarily for his work on literary theory.² He was and is much better known as a theologian, most famous for his authoritative commentary on the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta’s massive summa of Śaiva theology and ritual practice, though he also wrote a commentary on a Śaiva tantra called the Vāmakeśvarīmata. The Alaṃkāravimarśinī was Jayaratha’s sole work on literary theory. It seems to have been intended, in large part, to defend Ruyyaka’s theories and models against Śobhākara’s intervening attacks, as this is what Jayaratha spends the bulk of the text doing.

At the very beginning of Alaṃkāravimarśinī, however, Jayaratha does something unusual. Ruyyaka had begun his text, as tradition generally demanded, with benedictory verse, and for this benediction he chose to honor to the Goddess Parā Vāc, Highest Speech: “Having bowed to the Goddess Highest Speech, whose division is three-fold / The purport of [my] own sūtras is stated by means of a brief commentary [vṛtti].”³ This goddess was an important figure in non-dual Śaivism at this time, and Ruyyaka himself was a non-dual Śaiva,⁴ but the Goddess plays no explicit role in Alaṃkārasarvasva after receiving this short bow. In the Alaṃkāravimarśinī, however, Jayaratha takes this reference as an opportunity to give an extensive gloss on the nature of this goddess, beginning with a discussion of the famous “levels of speech” into which this goddess devolves, and culminating in a long etymology [nirukta] of the word for goddess itself, “devī,” with all its different connotations.

In the Sanskrit tradition of literary theory, even in its highly theologized Kashmirian strain, these kinds of extensive and explicitly theological digressions are only occasional, and usually brief. An etymological analysis of the word devī is even rarer. In fact, I can find no other example of it in Sanskrit literary theory, not even in the other commentaries on Alaṃkārasarvasva. Even outside of literary theory the etymological analysis of this term is not common. Why, then, did Jayaratha choose to do this at the beginning of this particular text? And what did he expect readers to make of it? As with many other aspects of Kashmirian literary theory in this period, answers are available, but only by paying close attention to the larger context of religious ideas in which the authors are working, often tacitly.

The etymology Jayaratha gives derives the noun devī, goddess, from the verbal root √div and then finds the different aspects of the Goddess’s nature in the different meanings of this verbal root. Jayaratha lists out the meanings of the root as follows: “the root √div [is used] in the sense of (1) play, (2) wanting to conquer, (3) illumination, (4) praise, (5) commerce [vyavahāra], (6) joy, (7) intoxication, (8) loveliness, (9) sleep, (10) motion.”⁵ Jayaratha then proceeds through each of these meanings and explains how the goddess Highest Speech behaves in all these ways in the realm of poetry, and in fact appears in the world as poetry:

(1) She is ‘playing,’ that is, springing up [samucchal] of her own will [svecchayā] from the essential nature [svabhāvāt] of connoisseurs [lit. “listeners”] and talented poets. (2) And the Goddess ‘wanting to conquer’ means that she has subordinated the word and the meaning expressed by it [to herself]. (3) And the Goddess ‘illuminating’ means that she is called “Manifestation” [dhvani], because illuminating and manifesting are synonyms. (4) And her ‘being praise-worthy’ means that she is to be adored by all because of being the soul of poetry. (5) And her ‘commerce’ means she circulates everywhere but stumbles nowhere. (6) And her ‘rejoicing’ means that she bestows the highest bliss simply from being heard. (7) Her ‘Intoxicating’ is that she produces a certain kind of self-awareness [ahaṃkara] in poets and connoisseurs by means of the making and cognizing [of poetry, respectively].⁶ (8) And her ‘being lovely’ means her being wished for by everyone.⁷

The basic list of meanings Jayaratha gives is almost an exact quote from the Dhātupāṭha, the traditional and authoritative compilation of verbal roots, which gives the same set of meanings for the root √div in a slightly different order.⁸ However, although the Dhatupāṭha may have been the source for Jayaratha’s list of meanings, his complex interests here go far beyond what the Dhātupaṭha hands down. For although the Dhātupaṭha gives a similar list of meanings for the root √div, it does not tie those meanings to the word devī, nor does it tell us, even by implication, that all these meanings are simultaneously present in things named by words derived from √div. The Dhātupāṭha, in other words, is not giving a theological etymology for the word for goddess, while Jayaratha very much is.

The theology of this passage, however, is not entirely original to Jayaratha. Many of its elements are found elsewhere, and actually in a place much more proximate to Jayaratha: the work of Abhinavagupta, specifically his text Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, which is itself a commentary on a Tantric scripture.⁹ An etymology for devī is also found near the beginning of this text, and also directly after a long digression about the levels of speech, just as in Jayaratha’s commentary. Like Jayaratha, Abhinavagupta tells us that one can understand the nature of Highest Speech by looking into the meanings of the verbal root √div, which he lists out,¹⁰ and also like Jayaratha he proceeds to explain how each of these meanings describes Highest Speech in some way.

So the fact that Jayaratha begins a commentary by analyzing (unusually, for the genre of literary theory he is working in) the goddess Highest Speech according to the four levels of speech and then giving a theological etymology for the word for goddess as derived from the root √div—a combination of factors found together only in one other text, the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, itself a commentary, written in Kashmir only a few generations earlier by a famous authority in Jayaratha’s own Śaiva lineage, and on whose Tantrāloka Jayaratha had also written an extensive and famous commentary—make it clear that although he does not name it or quote it directly, the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa is the source for Jayaratha’s decision to open his Alaṃkārasarvasvavimarśinī in such an unusual way.

The similarities, however, are not merely structural; there is a deeper coordination at work between the texts, and this can help us understand not only where Jayaratha got his ideas from, but why he transposed them to this new context. The Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa is largely a text about God’s self-division into dialectical pairs that produce further realities. The scripture it comments on, the Parātrīśikā, takes the form of a conversation between Śiva and Śakti, and it is mostly devoted to an explanation of the goddess Parā (iconographically and ritually distinguished from Parā Vāc but ultimately equated with her) and her mystical “seed” syllable “sauḥ.” But Abhinavagupta uses his commentary as an opportunity to give an extensive description of how the pure divine unity, which he equates with Parā Vāc, divides itself up into Śiva and Śakti in order to question and answer itself, producing the form of the text itself. He also takes time to explain how and why the interaction of the divine with itself leads to the emanation of the universe, and how and why this process can be reversed in order to attain liberation.

It is this text from which Jayaratha draws the etymology of the noun devī. But Jayaratha’s etymology is not purely theological in the way Abhinavagupta’s is. Rather, it blends the theological and the poetic, explaining the ways that the Goddess appears as poetry, each meaning of her name linked to a particular aspect of the best sort of poetry, which Jayaratha calls dhvani and equates with the Goddess herself. For Jayaratha, this is not merely a metaphor—he gives every indication that the Goddess is to be simply and literally equated with the best sort of poetry, erasing the line between poetry and divinity.¹¹ The Goddess is, herself, poetry.

But the line between poetry and the Goddess is not the only line Jayaratha erases. Notice that the first of the meanings, kṛīḍā, “play,” is glossed as follows: “she is ‘playing’, that is, springing up [samucchalantīm] out of her own will, from the essential nature [svabhāvāt] of connoisseurs and talented poets.” The verb √samucchal, literally, to spring up or jerk up, is something of a technical term in non-dual Śaivism in this period. Along with its close relatives √ucchal and √procchal it shows up many times in Abhinavagupta’s corpus, and a few times in Jayaratha’s commentary on the Vāmakeśvarīmata. The term is mostly used to describe the way that the feminine side of the divine couple takes on appearance as this or that limited element of the universe.¹² To give just a few examples: in Tantrāloka vs. 3.128–129 Abhinavagupta says "Awareness springs up in the form of the knower and the known…"¹³ Jayaratha glosses this as “awareness appears outwardly in the form of knower and known…”¹⁴ This matches what Abhinavagupta says in his gloss on the “play” aspect of the Goddess’s name in Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa: “…due to her play, which is essentially the bliss of her own self-reflection [vimarśa] across the order of creation beginning with paśyantī [the first, most subtle level of outward existence into which the Goddess herself devolves] and ending with external objects such as [the color] blue,” meaning that the Goddess’s self-reflection, her vimarśa, takes form as all things, from the subtlest to the grossest.¹⁵ Most interestingly, in Tantrāloka 3.93, Abhinavagupta tells us that this “springing up” happens as a result of the intermixture of elements that the divine plenum has divided itself into,¹⁶ and Jayaratha glosses this intermixture as saṃghaṭṭa—a term for joining together that has clear sexual connotations in Abhinavagupta’s writings, and which signifies the interaction, or more literally, the “banging together” of a dialectical pair so as to produce something new.¹⁷

Back to Jayaratha’s Alaṃkāravimarśinī, where he says that the Goddess “springs up” from the nature of readers and poets—it is now clear, given his other writings on the subject, that at the very least, Jayaratha is saying here that when poets and readers interact, their interaction, or saṃghaṭṭa, causes the appearance of the Goddess Highest Speech in the world. And this makes sense. Through the dialectical relation of poet and reader, a third term appears: poetry, the play of language, whose existence is ultimately inseparable from the existence of writers and readers.

However, this cannot be all that Jayaratha is saying, because he makes sure to tell us that the Goddess does this “of her own will,” and this is not consistent with the idea that poets and readers bring a goddess into the world when they choose to be poets and readers. That would make the Goddess subject to their willpower; she would come into being only when they choose to enact these roles. But actually, Jayaratha tells us, it is the other way around. She chooses to come into being on her own. What exactly, then, is going on?

The answer can be found in the connection to the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa itself, because in the context of the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, it is clear that the productive intermixing or saṃghaṭṭa of two elements is always the saṃghaṭṭa of elements that were originally a unity, and which chose to divide itself in order to productively interact with itself. This is how dialectics works in the non-dual Śaiva universe. It is the case with the dialectic of Śakti-the-questioner and Śiva-the-answerer that produces the text of the Parātrīśikā, as well as with the intermixture of divine elements that produces the universe in Abhinavagupta’s broader cosmogony.¹⁸ Thus, by modelling his comments on the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, Jayaratha is strongly suggesting that Parā Vāc divides herself into poet and reader and then productively and blissfully intermixes with herself, giving rise to a further level of her own being. And this, it is implied, is parallel to how Parā Vāc takes form as Śiva and Śakti and converses with herself to make scripture, or how she takes on the form of the limited universe and interacts with herself through its differentiation. She rises up from poet and reader of her own free will because she splits herself into them in the first place. In practical terms, this must mean that neither the poet nor the reader is ultimately in control in the dialectic of creation and reception. Both are subject to larger processes of language that inhabit them and speak through them, or play as them, and they take their place and receive their roles within a larger meaningful totality that exists as them.

In fact, this idea about poetry is not original to Jayaratha either. It is the extension of an idea that Abhinavagupta had hinted at in his own works, but about which he was rather coy. He was, of course, interested in the dialectics of poetry, but the dialectical relationships he preferred to focus on were, firstly, the poet’s own relationship to himself, in the form of the reflexive self-relishing that he calls rasa, or aestheticized emotion, and then secondly, the similar self-relishing that this triggers in the reader. However, at the beginning of his Dhvanyālokalocana, in the opening benedictory verse to the text, Abhinavagupta declares “Victory to the principle [tattva] of Sarasvatī, which is called ‘poet’ and ‘connoisseur,’ which spreads out a new reality not limited by causation, makes the stone-like world melt from the mass of its own rasa, and beautifies it with the successive flow of poetic imagination and speech.”¹⁹ Sarasvatī is the goddess of learning, but placed at the very beginning of a text like this she is a strong proxy for the Goddess, Highest Speech, and in fact the imagery and theology of these two goddesses overlap enough in non-dual Śaivism in this period that they can be equated.²⁰ Abhinavagupta is describing this goddess as an entity that exists as both the poet and the connoisseur.²¹ The fact that Abhinavagupta names Sarasvatī here rather than Parā Vāc may be because he is trying to maintain a genre distinction between poetics and theology, leaving their deeper connection merely suggested (or more accurately, “manifested” [vyaṅgya], in his terms). But his point is clear, and it is essentially the same suggestion that Jayaratha is making in his Alaṃkāravimarśinī. All Jayaratha is doing is taking this idea and giving it a fuller and more robust description, or ‘proof’, so to speak, by tying it more directly to theology, and to a particular theological text and tradition.

Finally, the religious context can perhaps also provide us with some of the reasons Jayaratha might have had for foregrounding theology like this. As I mentioned above, the bulk of the Alaṃkāravimarśinī, after this opening portion, is largely a defense of Ruyyaka’s analyses of rhetorical figures against attacks by Śobhākara. Recently, Somadeva Vasudeva has proposed, and has shown in some detail, that in the debates over rhetorical figures between Ruyyaka, Śobhākara, and Jayaratha, one of the main issues at stake is the cogency of Nyāya philosophy of mind.²² Śobhākara, who may have been a Naiyāyika, or who at least had some allegiance to the school, had criticized Ruyyaka largely from the standpoint of this school.²³ There are multiple places where Jayaratha, in his defense of individual theories of rhetorical figures in the body of his commentary, chooses not to dismiss Nyāya claims to truth, but rather to show that the Alaṃkārasarvasva accords with them. A significant portion of his text is therefore spent quoting and defending Nyāya views and synthesizing them with Ruyyaka’s.²⁴ Even when he has an opportunity to talk about Śaivism he demurs, such as when Ruyyaka invents an entirely new figure, ullekha, and bases it on a quote from the Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, the classic non-dual Śaiva theological treatise from this period.²⁵ Rather than telling us about the theology of this text, as we would expect from a theologian in that tradition, and as he would have had ample license to do, Jayaratha instead refers the reader here to Jayantabhaṭṭa, the Naiyāyika philosopher, using his ideas as justification for the figure.²⁶ And he does this specifically to defend the wording of Ruyyaka’s definition against Śobhākara’s earlier attack. In other words, what Jayaratha is choosing to do here is to defend Ruyyaka’s figure in the terms in which it was attacked, rather than in the terms of its creation.

There is nothing necessarily un-Śaiva about relying this much on Nyāya philosophy, especially in this context. Abhinavagupta himself had once claimed that on the worldly level (he calls it in this context māyāpada, “the plane of duality”) Nyāya philosophy works quite well.²⁷ So when dealing with poetics, one could, theoretically, take Nyāya as completely correct and still ultimately hold a non-dual Śaiva view. Still, Jayaratha would have been keenly aware that this “dualistic” plane was only part of a larger reality. At the very least, I find it likely, though here I am speculating, that he placed this long reference to the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa at the beginning of Alaṃkāravimarśinī in order to mark this, and to locate theoretically the entire “worldly” discussion that will follow. Yes, we can debate Nyāya categories and their cogency in explaining poetic cognitions. But we should remember that we are using these categories to describe what happens once a larger and more profound reality has already taken on a more limited form. Nyāya can describe, to some extent, what happens with poetry, but it takes Śaiva theology to see the whole divine, playful game in which poetry arises in the first place, without which one can never really fully understand what is going on. In this way, Jayaratha’s opening gloss is like a flag marking territory, placed in a part of the text that Sanskrit readers were trained to take seriously as setting the frame for an entire discussion. It is also one more example of the deep overlap between religion and poetics in Kashmir in this period, as well as being itself an explanation and analysis of what this overlap means.