Concept
Natya Shastra
Overview
The Nāṭya Shāstra (Sanskrit: नाट्य शास्त्र, IAST: Nāṭya Śāstra) is a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts. The text is attributed to sage Bharata, and its first complete compilation is dated to between 200 BCE and 200 CE, but estimates vary between 500 BCE and 500 CE.
The text consists of 36 chapters with a cumulative total of 6,000 poetic verses describing performance arts. The subjects covered by the treatise include dramatic composition, structure of a play and the construction of a stage to host it, genres of acting, body movements, make up and costumes, role and goals of an art director, the musical scales, musical instruments and the integration of music with art performance.
The Nāṭya Shāstra is notable as an ancient encyclopedic treatise on the arts, one which has influenced dance, music and literary traditions in India. It is also notable for its aesthetic "Rasa" theory, which asserts that entertainment is a desired effect of performance arts but not the primary goal, and that the primary goal is to transport the individual in the audience into another parallel reality, full of wonder, where they experience the essence of their own consciousness, and reflect on spiritual and moral questions. The text further inspired secondary literature such as the 10th century commentary Abhinavabharati – an example of a classic Sanskrit bhasya ("reviews and commentaries") – written by Abhinavagupta. In April 2025, Bharat Muni's Nāṭya Shāstra manuscript was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
By reason of these affections the soul is at first without intelligence, but as time goes on the stream of nutriment abates, and the courses of the soul regain their proper motion, and apprehend the same and the other rightly, and become rational. The soul of him who has education is whole and perfect and escapes the worst disease, but, if a man’s education be neglected, he walks lamely through life and returns good…
Plato, Timaeus
States what Natya Shastra is.
He maintained a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony in music, to be the soul, and believed that, from the figure and nature of the whole body, various motions are excited, as sounds are from an instrument. He adhered steadily to his system, and yet he said something, the nature of which, whatever it was, had been detailed and explained a great while before by Plato.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cicero's Tusculan Disputations Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth
States what Natya Shastra is.
Art then, as well as Science, partakes in the regenerating influence which Positivism derives from its synthetic principle of Love. Both are called to their proper functions, the one to contemplate, the other to glorify Humanity, in order that we may love and serve her more perfectly. Yet while the intellect is thus made the servant of the heart, far from being weakened by this subordinate position, it finds in it…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
States what Natya Shastra is.
Philosophers who discussed Natya Shastra
Related ideas
- Deva (Hinduism)
- Abhinavagupta
- India
- Vedas
- Bhakti movement
- Moksha
- Bhashya
- UNESCO
- Performing arts
- Bhagavad Gita
- Sanskrit
- Sutra
- Shiva
- Advaita Vedanta
- Brahmana
- Puranas
- Yoga
- Rasa (aesthetics)
- International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
- Pāṇini
- Guṇa
- Dharma
- Bharata (sage)
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.