Culture, Arts and Vision : Samskriti, Kala aur Drishti part 2

The relation between dreams, myths and truth is amply clarified in Puranas and Epics. The importance of invoking dhyanmantra, visualization, worship, penance at solitary place is linked to sudden flash of idea in dream. This is important insight for an artists, mantrin and yogin. (many times they were considered as one) All knowledge is directly available to a concentrated mind, when senses are not intervening. Every stroke or line is seen, by imagination, first before it actually comes in reality. The prerequisites for a shilpin are given as follows: he should have knowledge of Atharvaveda, 32 shilpshastras, Vedic mantras, should wear sacred thread and kusha, worship god and be faithful to wife., etc. A painter was expected to be a good human being, not given to anger, holy, learned, charitable, self controlled, devout, should work in solitude, trained by father and member of a guild, protected by king and not anxious for competition…Vision of beauty is enjoyed by those who are competent to do so, pictures, poetry and any work of art produces effect on those who are prepared to received it. Both the examples of shilpin and painter above show that art was expected to be a passage for a higher life. Aesthetic experience is beyond good and evil, beyond a definite moral purpose, that is why puritanists are afraid of arts. All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it. All music is what awakens in you when you are reminded of it by instruments, The true critic, rasika perceives the beauty of it, of which artist has exhibited the signs. Preparation is necessary to appreciate it. The nearest explanation of the significant form should be such as to exhibit the inner relation of the things. Or which reveals the rhythm of the spirit in the gestures of the living things. He explained that if beauty awaits discovery everywhere, it means that it waits upon our recollection, in aesthetic contemplation as in love and knowledge. We momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality. There are no degrees of beauty and civilized art is not more beautiful than the savage art according to him. If such is the case then why there is decline in the arts. How even great art or artists do not always have great succession? Dr. Koomarswami then explained that there cannot be continuous progress in art. As soon as a given intuition has attained its perfectly clear expression, what follows and remains is only attempt to multiply and repeat this expression. This repetition may be desirable for many reasons, but it almost invariably involves a gradual decadence because we soon begin to take the experience for granted. He ended his masterly analysis of Kala and Sanskriti with an observation: ‘The vitality of a tradition persists so long as it is fed by the intensity of imagination.’