“Beauty is an integral quality of the soul and God. If God is beautiful, the entire universe has to be beautiful. There can be nothing ugly in the universe. ” (Hindu Janajagruti Samiti) Hinduism is the oldest of all living religions. It was not manmade and is based on a set of dogmas. Unlike Islam or Christianity, it was not started as a system. It was developed by the teachings of such teachers as Avataras, Rishis, Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and Itihasas. Hindus fundamentally believe that there is a peculiar and mysterious spiritual force that guides them. Hinduism is a religion of freedom.
It allows absolute freedom from the rational mind of man. It never requires any limits upon the freedom of human reason, the freedom of thought, feeling and will of man. It allows everyone to reflect, investigate, inquire and think deeply. (Swami Sivanada) This freedom to reflect, investigate, enquire and cogitate is what links the unique Indian forms of art, poetry and music to beauty. In the book of Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, it is said that any glorious or beautiful existence in this world should be understood to be but a fragmented manifestation of Krishna’s opulence.
Krishna is the most widely revered and popular Hindu deities. (Nilma Chitgopekar) The Indian poet Kalidas states,”That which appears fresher newer and more lustrous each moment is beautiful. ” The Upanishads state, “That which is pure and eternally blissful is beautiful. True beauty never withers away. The soul principal is the same as Brahma, God (Ishvar) or the individual soul is the only principle which as eternal existence, bliss and beauty. ” (What is the real beauty? ) Within the Hindu beliefs, beauty has been closely linked with godliness as in the concept if truth, goodness and beauty.
They compare experiencing delight in seeing a beautiful object is to come face to face with god. Goodness and beauty are linked with truth and the underlying idea that beauty is beyond the universal spirit. It also means that appreciating beauty fully and in the right manner is to have the joy of being one with the universal one. Saundarya is aesthetic activity and experience. It is thoughtful and deliberate experience of beauty stemming from art objects is knowledge, and is a preeminent and transforming experience.
In addition, there is a strong belief that what beauty is not only gives us joy and happiness, but can lead to emancipation. (Nilma Chitgopekar) Indian artistic renditions share their love for the most beautify and sensuous, especially pertaining to the physical body. The female form can be sin such figures as earth spirits (Yakshi-nis) and tree spirits (Shalabhanjinkas) that include well-endowed, full-bodied, voluptuous forms. They loved using ornamentation by adorning the hair and body with jewelry. Though norms of beauty are culturally created, they do vary from region to region.
The beauty of nature is as prevalent in Indian artistic renditions as the physical body. It can be found in minute details in the landscape and foliage carved in hewn stone and in their poetry. Indian poets, particularly the four Sangam poets, used beauty of landscapes to convey feelings of sorrow, love and other human emotions. (Nilma Chitgopekar) The ideal of beauty was a favorite theme with poets in ancient India. This theme is connected with the theory of sentiment or rasa, a unique part of ancient Indian poetry.
They seemed to write lengthy and elaborate verses on different parts of both male and female parts of the body. The poems were about humans as well as celestial beings. Art historians have claimed that religious Indian art is not focused on carnal beauty, but with higher spirituality. From the Indian poetry came many religious hymns that describe the physical beauty of the goddess. The Saundaryalahari, which is believed to have been in the eighth or ninth century by Shankaracharya, is a hymn celebrating the beauty of the goddess Tripurasundari.
The title of the hymn. Saundaryalahari, literally means waves of beauty. It clearly and vividly describes each of her physical features from head to toe. The title also means enjoyment of spiritual delight in the euphoric union with the Divine. (Nilma Chitgopekar) A very different view of beauty came from Immanuel Kant, an 18th century German philosopher whose work sparked changes in many fields including aesthetics. He holds our mental faculty of reason in high regard and believes that it is our reason that fills the world we experience with structure.
He argues that it is our capability of judgment enables us to have experience of beauty and grasp those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with purpose. (Douglas Burnham) Kant wrote, The Critique of Judgment, which themes have inspired two generations of formalist aesthetics as well as others since its publication centuries ago. He argued that judgments of taste or aesthetic judgments must have four key distinguishing features. First, they are disinterested.
He says that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it eautiful because we find it pleasurable. The second and third features are necessary and universal. It is an innate part of the activity to expect others to agree with us. We may say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, but instead we debate and argue about works of art and think something can actually achieve something from this. Kant insists that necessity and universality are product features of the human mind and labels this ‘common sense’, and that there is no objective property of an object that makes it beautiful. Douglas Burnham)
The fourth theme states that beautiful objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’ or more commonly thought of as ‘final without end. An object’s purpose should be according to which it was made. The object appears to have been made or designed, but it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues. He believes that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no specific purpose can be found. (Douglas Burnham) Kant’s thoughts on aesthetics were very different from others in his field.
Baumgarten, who invented the modern use of aesthetics’ in the 18th century, argued that all sense perception was merely ‘confused cognition, or cognition by way of sensible images. He argued that although beauty certainly appears to our senses, this by no means demonstrates that beauty is noncognitive. Baumgarten believed that it had more to do with rational ideas such as harmony, rather than physiological. (Douglas Burnham) Kant became aware that he was on the cutting edge back then and even now. He took the truism, ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ and discredited what had previously been thought as its meaning.