What is sthayi-bhava?

We are talking about rasa a lot, and an understanding of the terms is important. As one progresses in knowledge and experience, such understanding is likely to undergo refinement. I was just asked to clarify some terms, so here is a short article doing so.

āgamenānumānena dhyānābhyāsa-rasena ca |

tridhā prakalpayan prajñāṁ labhate yogam uttamam ||

There are three roads to wisdom: hearing from the wise, sharpening one's reasoning skills, and relishing the taste of repeated practice of meditation. One who cultivates this threefold wisdom attains the ultimate yoga.

The jñāna-mārga (the path of philosophical knowledge) has three divisions to its practice: śravaṇam (hearing from a knowledgeable source), mananam (contemplating what one has heard), and nididhyāsanam (intense meditation on the conclusion of one's intellectual processes). There is rasa in the practice of meditation, which is called śānta-rasa, about which an article is following shortly. 

The experience of rasa, which is famously difficult to translate (Cf. "mellows", "aesthetic rapture," etc.) is dependent on something called the sthāyi-bhāva, which can be translated literally as "permanent mood."

Sthāyi-bhāva is an ongoing subject that is dealt with on the blog many times because of its importance in bhakti. But because the term is derived from the millennial tradition of poetics, etc., a lot of discussion about various subtle points  is necessary. The sthāyi is the basic raw material out of which the creation of rasa becomes possible.

In one sense, sthāyi-bhāva really means the global personality of an individual based on his or her emotional makeup, refined or unrefined. There are eight of these sthāyi-bhāva in the traditional depiction starting with Bharata's Nāṭya-śāstra. These are rati (love), hāsa (laughter), śoka (grief), krodha (anger), utsāha (enthusiasm), bhaya (fear), jugupsā (disgust), vismaya (astonishment). Each of these is related to a rasa, i.e., when the fundamental or permanent mood of an individual is excited by hearing a relevant story, etc., then that mood is awakened and experienced directly. At that point what happens is called rasa.

Let's take śoka, or grief as an example. Grief resides within us as a potential emotional state. Through life experience one experiences losses and in accordance with the intensity of the experience, one's unconscious impressions are formed and become a part of one's makeup.

Thus when one hears or watches a cultural, artistic or entertainment product (poem, novel, film, play, music, work or art, etc.) then this provokes an emotional or, more accurately, sentimental response. In this case (śoka), one experiences the rasa known as karuṇa, which is often translated as "the pathetic sentiment." Actually this translation does not convey adequately the meaning; compassion is probably better.

It just means that when you watch a sad story and are able to identify with the situation and the characters -- partly because of natural human instinctual empathy, and partly because of personal human experience -- your eyes well up with tears, your heart feels heavy and goes out to those who suffer, indeed this (temporarily) becomes a universal experience of identification that makes you sympathetic to all human suffering and inclined to alleviate it.

This is of course an ideal kind of situation, because sentiments are manipulated for propaganda purposes like crazy. You could even say that rasa theory was originally intended as a tool in the service of religious propaganda to induce people follow the path of the straight and narrow. So "compassion" can also be manipulated for political purposes and converted into one of the other sentiments -- anger, fear, disgust, heroism, the "male" rasas, are most popular in this process.

In Rupa Goswami's concept, the sthāyi-bhāva concept is a bit different. In the original description of Bharata, love or rati is the main rasa, and that is pretty much agreed upon by all the followers of the poetic tradition. But "love" starts to get subdivided into different categories, which some people try to bring into the rasa category, especially bhakti and vātsalya, which are the respectful love of a subordinate to a protector (child to parent, servant to employer, subject to ruler, etc.) and the reverse of that, respectively.

Bharata also discusses a sthāyi-bhāva called nirveda (disinterest) or śama (pacification of desire) which leads to the rasa called śānta or peace.

Rupa Goswami says that bhakti means love for the supreme object, Krishna, who is ultimately the object of all the kinds of love (akhila-rasāmṛta-mūrti). He says there are five kinds of loving relationship, with numerous subdivisions of each. These are: śānta, dāsya, sakhya, vātsalya and madhura. These are the customary names we are used to hearing. The technical terms Rupa Goswami uses in Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu are a bit different.

Although the different kinds of love are common to human experience, it is not common to direct that kind of love towards Krishna, nor indeed to have any specific feeling to God, especially not in the form of Krishna.

This can only happen when one hears from and gets the grace of a devotee who is the seat (āśraya) of this kind of love. As a result, it is an important point in Vaishnava philosophy to say that bhakti and its mature development into the sthāyi-bhāva of love is a result of a descending process of the internal potency into the heart of a person, who then becomes a devotee. Through hearing about Krishna from a devotee, one's feelings for Krishna are aroused and one experiences rasa. The first purpose of sādhanā is thus to cultivate a particular sthāyi-bhāva or relation (sambandha) with Krishna.