Sthāyi-bhāva 

is an ongoing subject that is dealt with on the blog many times because of its importance in bhakti. But because the term is derived from
the millennial tradition of poetics, etc., there is a lot of discussion about various subtle points. It is the basic raw material that makes the creation of rasa
possible.

Sthāyi-bhāva really means the global personality of an individual based on his or her emotional makeup, refined or unrefined. There are eight of
these sthāyi-bhāva in the traditional depiction starting with Bharata's Nāṭya-śāstra. These
are rati (love), hāsa (laughter), śoka (grief), krodha (anger), utsāha (enthusiasm), bhaya (fear), jugupsā (disgust), vismaya (astonishment). Each of
these is related to a rasa, i.e., when the fundamental or permanent mood of an individual is excited by hearing a story, etc., then that mood is
awakened and experienced directly. That is called rasa.

Let's take śoka, or grief as an example. Grief resides within us as a potential emotional state. Through life experience one experiences losses and in
accordance with the intensity of the experience, one's unconscious impressions are formed and become a part of one's makeup.

Thus when one hears or watches a cultural, artistic or entertainment product (poem, novel, film, play, music, work or art, etc.) then this provokes an
emotional or, more accurately, sentimental response. In this case (śoka), one experiences the rasa known as karuṇa, which is often translated as "the
pathetic sentiment." Actually this translation does not convey adequately the meaning, compassion is probably better.

It just means that when you watch a sad story and you are able to identify with the situation and the characters -- partly because of natural human
instinctual empathy, and partly because of personal human experience -- your eyes well up with tears, your heart feels heavy and goes out to those
who suffer, indeed becomes (temporarily) a universal experience of identification that makes you sympathetic to all human suffering and inclined to
alleviate it.

This is of course an ideal kind of situation, because sentiments are manipulated for propaganda purposes like crazy. You could even say that rasa
theory was originally intended as propaganda, religious propaganda to make people follow the path of the straight and narrow. But "compassion" can
be manipulated for political purposes and converted into one of the other sentiments -- anger, fear, disgust, heroism, the "male" rasas, are most
popular in this process.

In Rupa Goswami's concept, the sthāyi-bhāva concept is a bit different. In the original description of Bharata, love or rati is the main rasa, and that is
pretty much agreed upon by all the followers of the poetic tradition. But "love" starts to get subdivided into different categories, which some people try
to bring into the rasa category, especially bhakti and vātsalya, which are the respectful love of a subordinate to a protector (child to parent, servant to
employer, subject to ruler, etc.) and the reverse of that, respectively.

Bharata also discusses a sthāyi-bhāva called nirveda (disinterest) or śama (pacification of desire) which leads to the rasa called śānta or peace.

Rupa Goswami says that bhakti means love for the supreme object, Krishna, who is ultimately the object of all the kinds of love (akhila-rasāmṛta-mūrti).
He says there are five kinds of loving relationship, with numerous subdivisions of each. These are the five kinds of loving relationship -- śānta, dāsya,
sakhya, vātsalya and madhura. These are the customary names we are used to hearing. The technical terms Rupa Goswami uses in Bhakti-rasāmṛta-
sindhu are a bit different.

But although the different kinds of love are common to human experience, it is not common to direct that kind of love towards Krishna, nor indeed to
have any specific feeling to God, especially not in the form of Krishna.

This can only happen when one hears from and gets the grace of a devotee who is the seat (āśraya) of this kind of love. As a result, it is an important
point in Vaishnava philosophy to say that bhakti and its mature development into the sthāyi-bhāva of love is a result of a descending process of the
internal potency into the heart of a person, who then becomes a devotee. Through hearing about Krishna from a devotee, one's feelings for Krishna are
aroused and one experiences rasa. The first purpose of sādhanā is thus to cultivate a particular sthāyi-bhāva or relation (sambandha) with Krishna.