हँसी · The laugh that goes round
Lightness at its full brightness. The training is not to keep it down. It is to pass it round.
If something white is near you, a thread or a cloth, tie it on your wrist. White is Bharata's colour for hāsya. Or begin as you are.
First the body, later the voice, later still only inside. Any of them, any time; nothing is locked.
It went round, and came back to you.
Every road ends at śānta, the centre. That road is there for another time.
Why this
Bharata shows a feeling in four ways, the four abhinayas: by the body (āṅgika), by the voice (vācika), by what is worn (āhārya) and from within (sāttvika) (Abhinayadarpaṇa 38; Ghosh 1957). This practice goes through them from the outside in.
Bharata says laughter is of two kinds: when a man laughs himself, and when he makes others laugh (the prose before VI.49). The circle is the second kind. He names six laughs, from the slight smile in which the teeth do not show to the laughter that holds its sides (VI.52 to 59). The inside door is the first of them.
Hāsya's deity in Bharata is the Pramathas, Śiva's own hosts (VI.44 to 45), its colour white (VI.42 to 43), its tempo medium (XIX.58 to 59), and its notes madhyama and pañcama, so the circle laughs on Ma and Pa. It arises from śṛṅgāra (VI.39).
A laugh that does not come is not missing: the circle goes round anyway. How quick counts as quick is ours. Nothing you do here is kept or sent.