your bridge home
The Great Arguments
You feel the grief genuinely. It is simply not yours, and there is nothing whatever you must do about it.
Why does a sad play feel good?
That is the question, and it is not a trivial one. If you watch a tragedy properly you suffer, real grief, real dread, and yet you go, and you pay, and you would go again. Nobody chooses to be actually bereaved. Everybody chooses to watch a bereavement.
Abhinavagupta gave the answer that Indian aesthetics has used ever since.
Abhinavagupta lived in Kashmir, roughly 950 to 1016 CE, in a Kanyakubja Brahmin family that had come to the valley from Kannauj.
His mother died when he was two. His father taught him grammar, logic and literature himself, and then he went out and studied under about fifteen teachers, Vaishnava, Buddhist, Shaiva, Trika. He learned from Buddhists at a time when Buddhists were the opposition.
Even his name is not quite a name. Abhinavagupta was a title given by a teacher, meaning something like competence and authority.
He wrote the Tantraloka, an enormous synthesis of the whole Trika Shaiva system, and the Ishvarapratyabhijna-vimarshini, his commentary on Utpaladeva. Those made him the great systematiser of Kashmir Shaivism, the tradition holding that everything is the play of a single consciousness, Shiva, and that liberation is recognising this.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.