Anubhava (Hindu thought)

In Hindu thought, Anubhava or anubhavah (Sanskrit: अनुभव) refers to personal knowledge or aesthetic experience.

The term anubhava or anubhavah (Sanskrit) is a compound of:

Anubhava has a wide range of possible translations:

Several related words express the mental state which can be communicated to others or represented (अभिनय – 'acting'), either verbally or physically or emotionally, in one or different contexts:

Anubhāvas are not causes, but aesthetic experiences and important ingredients of Rasa. Anubhavah is not a sense-experience.

Anubhavah refers to poetic, narrative or ritual experience, enjoyment, relish or delight resulting, for the devotee or the seeker after truth, in the ecstatic experience of the divine; it is a means to understand during one’s own life-time the true nature of one’s own self which is the real nature of the Atman by experiencing the sublime delight of the unity with the Supreme Self .

Cognition is said to be of two kinds – smrti ('reproductive') which is other than re-cognitive perception requiring disposition, and anubhavah ('productive') which involves a kind of awareness not derived from disposition alone. The difference between the waking state and the dreaming state becomes known through anubhava ('perception').

The sage of the Mundaka Upanishad declares:

स यो ह् वै तत्परमं ब्रह्म वेद ब्रह्मैव भवति – "Verily he becomes Brahman, who knows Brahman. " – (Mundaka Upanishad III.ii.9)

This is so because Brahman is of the nature of experience (anubhuti) and to have the anubhava of Brahman is to become Brahman, thus this revelation, a moment ago non-existing, is realized as existing eternally. Vijñānam is anubhava, and anubhava is realization of the identity of the individual self and Brahman, which experience does not depend on any process, neither produced by any process nor as an effect to any cause and is the highest state of development.

With regard to the origination of things, Badarayana declares:

जन्माद्यस्य यतः "That (is Brahman) from which (are derived) the birth etc., of this (universe)." - (Brahma Sutras I.i.2)

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