Three theories that live in one paragraph

Claim (verbatim)

Classical Sanskrit aesthetics remembers three great theorists of rasa whose own works are entirely lost. Bhatta Lollata held that rasa is produced (utpatti) and resides in the depicted hero; Sri Sankuka held that it is inferred (anumana) in the actor; Bhatta Nayaka, author of the lost Hrdayadarpana, held that it is savoured (bhukti) through a special generalizing power. Not one line of their books survives in independent transmission. They exist only because Abhinavagupta, in the Abhinavabharati on Natyasastra 6.31, stages all three as the graded purvapaksa he must defeat before presenting the manifestation theory he inherits from Anandavardhana, and later manuals such as Mammata's Kavyaprakasa and Visvanatha's Sahityadarpana recite the same set-piece. The prediction is that their entire textual afterlife is spatially collapsed: almost every trace of the three names in the whole corpus sits inside one recurring rasa-doxography, quoted as a bundle, never as free-standing bodies of thought. A lost theorist preserved by his refuter is pinned to the very page that refutes him, and the concentration ratio measures how narrow that page has become.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: string-searching the names Bhatta Lollata, Sri Sankuka and Bhatta Nayaka (with orthographic variants) across the GRETIL and SARIT alamkara and natya corpus, at least 80 percent of all attestations of the three will fall within rasa-sutra doxography contexts (the Abhinavabharati on Natyasastra 6.31 and the parallel rasa-discussions of the Kavyaprakasa and Sahityadarpana), and in a majority of those contexts the three are co-cited as an ordered set; the at-least-80-percent positional concentration is the deciding clause. Secondarily, Bhatta Nayaka, engaged most seriously because closest to the winning view, leaves more distinct verbatim fragment-material than Lollata and Sankuka combined. The test voids for coverage if the Abhinavabharati rasa passage is absent from the searched e-texts.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the GRETIL and SARIT e-texts of the Natyasastra with the Abhinavabharati (Gaekwad's Oriental Series edition), Mammata's Kavyaprakasa and Visvanatha's Sahityadarpana, string-locating every occurrence of the three theorists' names and binning each by its passage context, with the fragment tally controlled against Sheldon Pollock's A Rasa Reader (Columbia University Press, 2016).

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The primary clause restates a textbook fact of the discipline: that Lollata, Sankuka and Bhatta Nayaka survive as theorists only through the rasa-sutra doxography - Abhinavagupta's graded purvapaksa sequence in the Abhinavabharati on Natyasastra 6.31, recited as an ordered set-piece in Mammata's fourth ullasa and Visvanatha's third pariccheda - is stated in De and Kane, edited and translated in Gnoli, and anthologized with the fragments in Pollock's Rasa Reader. Pollock's collection also already assembles the larger Bhatta Nayaka fragment-mass the secondary clause predicts. Only the corpus-wide 80-percent string-count is new, and it is share-arithmetic over a concentration the handbooks assert as the survival mechanism itself.

• S. K. De, History of Sanskrit Poetics, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1960)
• P. V. Kane, History of Sanskrit Poetics, 4th ed. (Delhi, 1971)
• R. Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience according to Abhinavagupta, Serie Orientale Roma XI (Rome, 1956)
• S. Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York, 2016)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.