Anandavardhana
820 – 890 CE) was a Kashmiri court poet and literary critic, honored with the title of Rajanak during King Avantivarman's reign. Anandavardhana authored the Dhvanyāloka, or A Light on Suggestion (dhvani), a work articulating the philosophy of "aesthetic suggestion" (dhvani, vyañjanā). Ānandavardhana is credited with creating the dhvani theory. He wrote that dhvani (meaning sound, or resonance) is the "soul" or "essence" (ātman) of poetry (kavya)." "When the poet writes," said Ānandavardhana, "he creates a resonant field of emotions." To understand the poetry, the reader or hearer must be on the same "wavelength." The method requires sensitivity on the parts of the writer and the reader.
Anandavardhana
- Born
- 820
- Died
- 890
- Nationality
- India
- Occupation
- philosopher · poet
- Languages
- Sanskrit
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In this article
Dhvanyāloka
Dhvanyāloka
The complete Dhvanyāloka together with Abhinavagupta's commentary on it has been translated into English by the Sanskritist Daniel H.H. Ingalls and his collaborators. Ānandavardhana is mentioned in Kalhana's Rajatarangini. He was noted to not have cited or commented on Daṇḍin's work, instead preferring Bhamaha or Udbhata.
Anandavardhana classifies three categories of poetry: • Dhvani kavya (prominence of suggestion) • Gunibhuta vyangakavya (secondary place of suggestion) • Chitra kavya (portrait like - absence of suggestion) He categorizes Dhvani kavya as the best form of poetry, Gunibhuta vangiya kavya as the second class and the third or lowest class is said to be Chitra kavya. The philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950 – 1016 CE) wrote an important commentary on Dhvanyāloka titled the Locana, or The Eye.
Assessment by Modern Sanskritists
Assessment by Modern Sanskritists
Modern Sanskritists have a very high opinion of Ānandavardhana. Commenting on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka, P.V. Kane writes that "the Dhvanyāloka is an epoch-making work in the history of Alaṅkāra literature. It occupies the same position in poetics as Pāṇini's Aṣtādhyāyī in grammar and Śaṅkarācarya's commentary on Vedānta". Daniel H.H. Ingalls calls Ānandavardhana "the most brilliant of all Sanskrit critics". Sushil Kumar De, along with Kane, considered there to be no work similar to the Dhvanyaloka in the corpus of Sanskrit literature. Franklin Edgerton and Louis Renou also considered the work to ge exceptional in its treatment of poetic theory and aesthetics. Lawrence McCrea considers the Dhvanyaloka to be influenced by Mīmāṃsā, particularly by how it approached an exegesis of the Vedas.
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
The full dated record · 2 entries
820
Anandavardhana born.
890
Anandavardhana died.
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The biographical narrative on this page is based on the Wikipedia article Anandavardhana, revision 1362332752 (EN edition), by its contributors. VALÉORINE has edited that text and built its own documentary record around it. The reused material is available under CC BY-SA 4.0, and this page's reuse of it is offered under the same licence. Everything else on this page — the chronology, the holdings, the evidence, the plates and the connections — is VALÉORINE's own record. Sources and licences.
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Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Premnath, Devadasan. Ways of Being, Ways of Reading: Asian American Biblical Interpretation. Chalice Press. 11. 15 November 2006. 978-0-8272-4254-8.
- 2.Harvard Oriental Series. The Dhvanyaloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta.
- 3.K. Kunjunni Raja. Anandavardhana. Sahitya Akademi. 2017. 978-81-7201-802-3.
- 4.Bronner, Yigal, and Whitney Cox, 'Sanskrit Poetics through Dandin’s Looking Glass: An Alternative History', in Yigal Bronner (ed.), A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters (New York, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 23 Mar. 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197642924.003.0006. accessed 8 Dec. 2023.
- 5.Kulkarni, Digambar S. Dhvanyaloka by Anandavardhana: A Critical Reading of the Theory of Suggestion in Poetry. Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research. 5. 3. 322. March 2018.
- 6.P. N. K Bamzai, "Kashmir—The Home of Sanskrit Language and Literature". Kashmiri Overseas Assoc.
- 7.Harvard Oriental Series. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry. 48.
- 8.Masson, J. Moussaieff. The Dhvanyāloka and the Dhvanyālokalocana: A Translation of the Fourth Uddyota, Pt. I. Journal of the American Oriental Society. 97. 3. 285–304. 1977. 0003-0279.
- 9.McCrea, Lawrence J. The teleology of poetics in medieval Kashmir. Harvard University Press. 2008. 978-0-674-03273-6.
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