Abhinavagupta

At the very end of the Tantrāloka, his great work on the Tantra, when thirty-six chapters on the ways to Śiva were finished, Abhinavagupta stopped and told who he was. He began not with himself but with the land his family came from.

In all the wide country of Bhārata, he says, the greatest region is the one where the śāstras are the people's eyes. That was the middle country, the land between the rivers, and he calls it the home of all the śāstras. There, long before him, a man was born from whom his whole family came.

निःशेषशास्त्रसदनं किल मध्यदेशस्तस्मिन्नजायत गुणाभ्यधिको द्विजन्मा ।

कोऽप्यत्रिगुप्त इति नामनिरुक्तगोत्रः शास्त्राब्धिचर्वणकलोद्यदगस्त्यगोत्रः ॥

niḥśēṣaśāstrasadanaṃ kila madhyadēśastasminnajāyata guṇābhyadhikō dvijanmā ।

kō'pyatrigupta iti nāmaniruktagōtraḥ śāstrābdhicarvaṇakalōdyadagastyagōtraḥ ॥

The middle country, they say, is the home of every śāstra. There a twice-born man was born, richer in virtues than others:

one Atrigupta, whose very name declared his clan, and who rose like one of Agastya's line in his gift for drinking up the ocean of the śāstras.

Atrigupta's name told his lineage: he was of the clan of the sage Atri. And he was learned in the way Agastya was mighty. Agastya, the old story says, once drank the whole ocean in a single draught. Atrigupta drank the ocean of the śāstras.

Then a king took notice of him. Lalitāditya, the great king of Kashmir, was so eager in his affection for this learned man that he brought him away to his own city, to Kashmir at the crown of the Himālaya, the country where Śiva, the beloved of Gaurī, makes his home.

When Abhinavagupta came to describe the country his ancestor had been brought to, he could not stop. Sages, he says, had made their dwellings in every corner of it, and the moon-crested Lord himself was present at every step. "So I think," he wrote, "that for one who longs for every attainment there is no place better than Kashmir for winning it, and for one whose life is already full, no city better for contentment." The goddess Śāradā lived there, white as the autumn moon, gracious from the loving service the sage Śāṇḍilya had paid her, and she gave all the people a share of her riches. The ground, he says, was strewn at every step with saffron flowers, their pale shoots opening into dark red petals, so that the whole land seemed a garden laid out for the worship of the three goddesses. Everyone there was a poet and a man of learning, even the warriors could speak well, the women of the town moved gently with faces like the moon, and there were yoginīs in that land in whom the sun and the moon had been swallowed up in the bright central path of the breath, and who were as clear as the open sky.

In that country stood the city of Pravarapura, built by King Pravarasena. Abhinavagupta tells the story that was told of it. When the king had installed an image of Maheśvara and finished its worship, he rose up into the sky; and as he went, he let fall the bell he had rung for the incense. Its ringing, swinging in the air as it came down, told everyone what a good king he had been. For things made of sound metal, he adds, even when they are thrown away, still ring out the virtues of their master.

Through that city ran the Vitastā, the river of Kashmir, which he says came down from Śiva's own weapon. The sages, the siddhas and ordinary people bathed in her waters and were washed clean of their sins, and along her banks stood the lingas that had arisen of themselves and the shrines of Maheśvara, so that the sandal and the flowers of their worship were always being carried down on her waves. She gave both the joys of this world and freedom from it, he says, and so she put to shame even the river of the gods, which gives only the joys.

There, on the bank of the Vitastā, the king made a home for the brahmin and gave him great wealth. It was a holy place, because it stood face to face with the shrine of the moon-crested Lord.

He told the same beginning once more, in fewer words, at the end of his commentary on the Parātrīśikā. There Atrigupta is "a brahmin of the first rank, born in the land between the rivers", who came into glorious Kashmir, "whose borders have been made holy by the moon-crested Lord coming down into them more times than anyone can count". And there he left the story of his family for the moment and turned to the line that came after.

Of the generations between Atrigupta and his own grandfather, Abhinavagupta says nothing. He goes straight from the founder to the two men nearest him, and of each he tells one thing that mattered to him above everything else.

तस्यान्वये महति कोऽपि वराहगुप्तनामा बभूव भगवान् स्वयमन्तकाले ।

गीर्वाणसिन्धुलहरीकलिताग्रमूर्धा यस्याकरोत् परमनुग्रहमाग्रहेण ॥

tasyānvayē mahati kō'pi varāhaguptanāmā babhūva bhagavān svayamantakālē ।

gīrvāṇasindhulaharīkalitāgramūrdhā yasyākarōt paramanugrahamāgrahēṇa ॥

In his great line there was one named Varāhagupta. At the hour of his end the Lord himself,

his crown washed by the waves of the river of the gods, pressed his highest grace upon him.

That is all he says of Varāhagupta: that when his time came, Śiva himself, the god whose head is washed by the Gaṅgā, gave him the highest grace, and pressed it on him as though he would not be refused. For Abhinavagupta that was the whole of a life worth telling. A man had died, and Śiva had insisted on blessing him.

Then he comes to his father.

तस्यात्मजश्चुखलकेति जने प्रसिद्धश्चन्द्रावदातधिषणो नरसिंहगुप्तः ।

यं सर्वशास्त्ररसमज्जनशुभ्रचित्तं माहेश्वरी परमलंकुरुते स्म भक्तिः ॥

tasyātmajaścukhalakēti janē prasiddhaścandrāvadātadhiṣaṇō narasiṃhaguptaḥ ।

yaṃ sarvaśāstrarasamajjanaśubhracittaṃ māhēśvarī paramalaṃkurutē sma bhaktiḥ ॥

His son was Narasiṃhagupta, known among the people as Cukhalaka, his understanding as clear as moonlight.

His mind was made bright by bathing in the savour of every śāstra, and devotion to Maheśvara was his highest ornament.

His name was Narasiṃhagupta, but everyone knew him by a homelier name, Cukhalaka, or Cukhala, or Cukhulaka, and that is the name his son uses for him again and again. He was a learned man who had steeped himself in every śāstra, and the steeping, his son says, had made his mind bright and clean. But what crowned him was not his learning. It was his love of Śiva.

तारुण्यसागरतरङ्गभरानपोह्य वैराग्यपोतमधिरुह्य दृढं हठेन ।

यो भक्तिरोहणमवाप्य महेशचिन्तारत्नैरलं दलयति स्म भवापदस्ताः ॥

tāruṇyasāgarataraṅgabharānapōhya vairāgyapōtamadhiruhya dr̥ḍhaṃ haṭhēna ।

yō bhaktirōhaṇamavāpya mahēśacintāratnairalaṃ dalayati sma bhavāpadastāḥ ॥

He thrust back the heaving waves of the ocean of youth and climbed hard and fast aboard the ship of dispassion;

and reaching Rohaṇa, the jewel mountain of devotion, he broke the troubles of worldly life to pieces with its jewels, his thoughts of the great Lord.

He had been a young man once, and the ocean of youth had its waves. He thrust them back. He did not drift into dispassion; he climbed aboard it, firmly and by force of will, and he sailed it to the jewel mountain of devotion. There, his son says, the jewels he found were his own thoughts of Śiva, and with them he broke all the troubles of this world to pieces.

In the commentary on the Parātrīśikā the son says it more plainly still: his father was "one who had turned his face away from the doings of the world, his mind on Śiva alone". And at the end of his longest commentary on the Recognition he tells where his father's own light had come from.

भट्टात्रिगुप्तकुलजातवराहगुप्तजन्माभवत् चुखुलकः शिवमार्गनिष्ठः ।

श्रीभूतिराजवदनोदितशम्भुशास्त्रतत्त्वांशुशातितसमस्तभवान्धकारः ॥

bhaṭṭātriguptakulajātavarāhaguptajanmābhavat cukhulakaḥ śivamārganiṣṭhaḥ ।

śrībhūtirājavadanōditaśambhuśāstratattvāṃśuśātitasamastabhavāndhakāraḥ ॥

Born of Varāhagupta, of the family of Bhaṭṭa Atrigupta, was Cukhulaka, settled in the way of Śiva,

all the darkness of whose becoming was cut away by the rays of the truth of Śambhu's teaching, as it came from the lips of Śrī Bhūtirāja.

So the father too had a teacher, Bhūtirāja, and the son would one day sit at Bhūtirāja's feet himself, and at his son's. But first, and before anyone else, the father was the son's teacher. At the beginning of the Tantrāloka, among the masters he honours one by one, Abhinavagupta comes to his father and calls him by the plainest and the highest name he could give: "my guru, the highest". "May Śrī Cukhulaka," he writes, "who crossed to the far shore of the meaning of every śāstra and rests in the bliss of fullness, my highest guru, grant me what I seek." There is an old saying that one ācārya outweighs ten teachers, and a father outweighs a hundred ācāryas, and those who later read his books remembered it here. At the opening of another of his books he says the same of his father in his own way.

गुरुभ्यो ऽपि गरीयांसं युक्तं श्रीचुखलाभिधम् ।

वन्दे यत्कृतसंस्कारः स्थितो ऽस्मि गलितग्रहः ॥

gurubhyō 'pi garīyāṃsaṃ yuktaṃ śrīcukhalābhidham ।

vandē yatkr̥tasaṃskāraḥ sthitō 'smi galitagrahaḥ ॥

I bow to the one named Cukhala, rightly weightier to me than my gurus themselves:

shaped by him, I stand with every clinging fallen away.

The word he uses, saṃskāra, is the word for what a craftsman does to his material and what a rite does to the one who receives it. His father had worked on him and shaped him; and what his father made, he says, was a man who stands with all his clinging gone.

Then, in the closing verses of the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta comes to himself, and the first thing he says after his own name is that he lost his mother.

तस्यात्मजोऽभिनवगुप्त इति प्रसिद्धः श्रीचन्द्रचूडचरणाब्जपरागपूतः ।

माता व्ययूयुजदमुं किल बाल्य एव दैवं हि भाविपरिकर्मणि संस्करोति ॥

tasyātmajō'bhinavagupta iti prasiddhaḥ śrīcandracūḍacaraṇābjaparāgapūtaḥ ।

mātā vyayūyujadamuṃ kila bālya ēva daivaṃ hi bhāviparikarmaṇi saṃskarōti ॥

His son is the one known as Abhinavagupta, made pure by the pollen of the lotus feet of the moon-crested Lord.

His mother was parted from him while he was still a child; for what is destined shapes a man for the work that lies ahead of him.

He does not say how she died, or how old he was, beyond that he was a child. He says only what he came to make of it. In the very next verse he turns the loss over and looks at it the way a man looks at something he has carried a long time.

माता परं बन्धुरिति प्रवादः स्नेहोऽतिगाढीकुरुते हि पाशान् ।

तन्मूलबन्धे गलिते किलास्य मन्ये स्थिता जीवत एव मुक्तिः ॥

mātā paraṃ bandhuriti pravādaḥ snēhō'tigāḍhīkurutē hi pāśān ।

tanmūlabandhē galitē kilāsya manyē sthitā jīvata ēva muktiḥ ॥

People say a mother is the closest of all kin, and love pulls the bonds very tight.

When that root of all his bonds fell away, liberation, I think, stayed with him while he was still alive.

It is a hard thing to say of one's own mother, and he says it gently. Everyone says a mother is the nearest of all kin; and that, he says, is the very reason love for her ties the knots of this world tighter than any other. When she was taken from him, the root of all his ties was cut. He does not say he was glad. He says that destiny was preparing him for the work to come, and that, he thinks, the freedom others spend their lives seeking had stayed with him from then on, while he lived.

He never named her in his books. But at the beginning of four of them, the Tantrāloka, the commentary on the Parātrīśikā, the verse commentary on the Mālinīvijaya and the Tantrasāra, he set one and the same verse.

विमलकलाश्रयाभिनवसृष्टिमहा जननी भरिततनुश् च पञ्चमुखगुप्तरुचिर् जनकः ।

तदुभययामलस्फुरितभावविसर्गमयं हृदयम् अनुत्तरामृतकुलं मम संस्फुरतात् ॥

vimalakalāśrayābhinavasr̥ṣṭimahā jananī bharitatanuś ca pañcamukhaguptarucir janakaḥ ।

tadubhayayāmalasphuritabhāvavisargamayaṃ hr̥dayam anuttarāmr̥takulaṃ mama saṃsphuratāt ॥

The mother, resting on the stainless kalā, her splendour a creation ever new; the father, full in every part, his light guarded by five faces:

may the heart that springs from the two in union, made of the outpouring of being, the kula of the nectar of anuttara, shine out in me.

On its face it is a prayer to Śiva and his Śakti, the Father and the Mother of all things, and to the heart that springs from their union, which is consciousness itself. It is one of the densest verses he ever wrote, and it was meant to be. But those who came after him, the commentators who knew his family's story, heard something more in it. His mother's name, they said, was Vimalā, and she is there in the verse's first word, vimala, "stainless". The words that follow, abhinavasṛṣṭimahā, they read as "she whose great festival was the birth of Abhinava", and they remembered the old verse sung at the birth of a son who would love Śiva: "His fathers rejoice, his grandfathers rejoice: today a devotee of Maheśvara is born, and he will carry us across." And the father is there too. The five-faced one is the lion, and pañcamukhagupta, "guarded by the five-faced", is Siṃhagupta, a short form of Narasiṃhagupta, as Bhīma is short for Bhīmasena.

They heard more than names. The verse speaks of a heart born of the two in union, and of the outpouring of their joy. The scriptures of his tradition taught that when a husband and wife come together as Śiva and Śakti, each holding the other as god and goddess and with no worldly thought in them, the child conceived of that union is called a yoginībhū, one born of a yoginī, a vessel of knowledge from the womb. That, the tradition after him said, is what Abhinavagupta was quietly saying of himself: that he had been a vessel of knowledge from the first, and so was fit to gather the whole teaching of the Trika into one book.

He carried a name that was already a meaning. Abhinava is "new", and gupta, the family name of his line, is "guarded" or "hidden". He played on it more than once. Near the end of his commentary on the Gītā, and again at the end of a short commentary on the Parātrīśikā, he turned his own name into a prayer to Śiva and Śakti together, in the same words with which the verse at the head of his books speaks of the heart born of the two in union.

अभिनवरूपाशक्तिस्तद्गुप्तो यो महेश्वरो देवः ।

तदुभययामलरूपमभिनवगुप्तं शिवं वन्दे ॥

abhinavarūpāśaktistadguptō yō mahēśvarō dēvaḥ ।

tadubhayayāmalarūpamabhinavaguptaṃ śivaṃ vandē ॥

Śakti is she whose form is ever new; the god Maheśvara is he who is guarded by her:

to Śiva, Abhinavagupta, whose form is the two of them joined as one, I bow.

And he says, at the start of the Tantrāloka, that his gurus had given him a name of their own.

अभिनवगुप्तस्य कृतिः सेयं यस्योदिता गुरुभिर् आख्या ।

त्रिनयनचरणसरोरुहचिन्तनलब्धप्रसिद्धिर् इति ॥

abhinavaguptasya kr̥tiḥ sēyaṃ yasyōditā gurubhir ākhyā ।

trinayanacaraṇasarōruhacintanalabdhaprasiddhir iti ॥

This is the work of Abhinavagupta, to whom his gurus gave the name

'he who won his renown by contemplating the lotus feet of the Three-eyed One'.

In later centuries other stories grew around the name. One told that the boys at his school were as afraid of his sharp mind as of a snake, and that his teachers in those early days called him Abhinavaguptapāda, "the new snake", since a snake is the creature whose feet are hidden; and that the name stayed. Another, told among the dancers of the south who still dance by the old rules of Bharata, made him an incarnation of Śeṣa, the serpent who bears the world and who had once been born as Patañjali, the master of grammar. Both are the kind of story people tell about a man whose learning seems more than human. He himself only says, once, that his gurus gave him a name that spoke of the lotus feet of the Three-eyed One.

His father was his first teacher, and his father began him, as learned boys were begun, with grammar. Abhinavagupta remembered his schooling, years later, in a single verse, and he remembered it as a journey through country that grew more and more beautiful, until something else altogether took hold of him.

पित्रा स शब्दगहने कृतसंप्रवेशस्तर्कार्णवोर्मिपृषतामलपूतचित्तः ।

साहित्यसान्द्ररसभोगपरो महेशभक्त्या स्वयंग्रहणदुर्मदया गृहीतः ॥

pitrā sa śabdagahanē kr̥tasaṃpravēśastarkārṇavōrmipr̥ṣatāmalapūtacittaḥ ।

sāhityasāndrarasabhōgaparō mahēśabhaktyā svayaṃgrahaṇadurmadayā gr̥hītaḥ ॥

His father led him into the thicket of grammar. His mind was washed clean by the spray off the waves of the ocean of logic. He gave himself to the rich savour of literature.

And devotion to the great Lord took hold of him, the wilful devotion that seizes whom it pleases.

Grammar in Sanskrit is no small matter. It is the science on which every other science rests, and its great books are famous for their difficulty; he calls it a thicket, a forest without paths, and it was his father who took him in. Then came logic, which he pictures as an ocean, and its spray, he says, washed his mind clean. Then came literature, sāhitya, the poems and the plays, and here he lingered, because he loved them. The word he uses for what he found there is rasa, savour, the taste that a poem leaves in a reader's heart, and he was to spend a good part of his life explaining what that taste is.

At the end of his longest work on the Recognition he named the three disciplines his mind had been trained in, as a learned man of his time would: words, sentences and the means of knowing, that is, grammar, the reading of scripture, and logic. Every one of them shows on every page he wrote. He could meet the grammarians on their own ground, and the ritualists who read the Veda sentence by sentence, and the logicians of every school.

For poetry and drama he went to the best teachers of his day. One was Bhaṭṭa Indurāja. When Abhinavagupta came to write his commentary on the Dhvanyāloka, the Light of Suggestion, the book that had taught Kashmir how a poem means more than it says, he named Indurāja at the very start.

भट्टेन्दुराजचरणाब्जकृताधिवासहृद्यश्रुतो ऽभिनवगुप्तपदाभिधो ऽहम् ।

यत्किञ्चिद् अप्य् अनुरणन् स्फुटयामि काव्यालोकं स्वलोचननियोजनया जनस्य ॥

bhaṭṭēndurājacaraṇābjakr̥tādhivāsahr̥dyaśrutō 'bhinavaguptapadābhidhō 'ham ।

yatkiñcid apy anuraṇan sphuṭayāmi kāvyālōkaṃ svalōcananiyōjanayā janasya ॥

I, who bear the name Abhinavagupta, whose learning grew lovely by dwelling at the lotus feet of Bhaṭṭa Indurāja,

echoing a little, make the Light of Poetry clear for people by setting my own eye to it.

He called his commentary the Locana, the "Eye", and he could not resist the play. The book he was explaining was called a Light, and at the end of one chapter he asked what use light is, even moonlight, without an eye to see it; that, he said, was why Abhinavagupta had opened this Eye. At the end of the whole book he played on his name once more: the eye he had set to work was abhinava, new, and gupta, hidden from others.

It was from Indurāja too that he learned the Bhagavad Gītā. When, much later, he wrote his own short commentary on the Gītā, he said so at the beginning.

भट्टेन्दुराजादाम्नायं विविच्य च चिरं धिया ।

कृतोऽभिनवगुप्तेन सोऽयं गीतार्थसंग्रहः ॥

bhaṭṭēndurājādāmnāyaṃ vivicya ca ciraṃ dhiyā ।

kr̥tō'bhinavaguptēna sō'yaṃ gītārthasaṃgrahaḥ ॥

With the tradition from Bhaṭṭa Indurāja, and having sifted it long with his mind,

Abhinavagupta has made this summary of the meaning of the Gītā.

His other great teacher of poetics was Bhaṭṭa Tota, who taught him the Nāṭyaśāstra, the old book of Bharata on drama, dance and music. He wrote a commentary on the whole of it, and he opened it by naming the teacher from whose lips he had heard it.

सद्विप्रतोतवदनोदितनाट्यवेदतत्त्वार्थमर्थिजनवाञ्छितसिद्धिहेतोः ।

माहेश्वराभिनवगुप्तपदप्रतिष्ठः संक्षिप्तवृत्तिविधिना विशदीकरोति ॥

sadvipratōtavadanōditanāṭyavēdatattvārthamarthijanavāñchitasiddhihētōḥ ।

māhēśvarābhinavaguptapadapratiṣṭhaḥ saṃkṣiptavr̥ttividhinā viśadīkarōti ॥

The true meaning of the Veda of drama, as it came from the lips of Tota, a good brahmin, so that those who seek it may have what they wish,

the devotee of Maheśvara who stands in the name of Abhinavagupta makes clear, by way of a short commentary.

Throughout that commentary he calls Tota simply upādhyāya, "my teacher", and he quotes him again and again. He closed the first chapter with a prayer that what he called "Abhinavagupta's speech", made clear by the grace that comes from always praising the lotus feet of the Three-eyed One, might shine in the hearts of the wise.

Poetry was in his family too. His father's brother, Vāmanagupta, wrote verse, and in that same commentary, explaining how laughter can go astray, Abhinavagupta set down a verse of "our uncle Vāmanagupta". It asks what is to be said if the world does not honour deeds that are beyond the world; but that the world should go loud with laughter at them, it says, is a thing that would make anyone laugh until his sides ached.

So the boy who had been led into the thicket of grammar became, in time, a master of poetry and drama. But that is to run ahead. Before he wrote a word of any of it, something happened to him that turned his life another way.

The verse in which he remembers his schooling ends, as his schooling did, with something no school had taught him: devotion to Maheśvara, "the wilful devotion that seizes whom it pleases". He did not go looking for it. It took hold of him, and once it had him, nothing else counted.

स तन्मयीभूय न लोकवर्तनीमजीगणत् कामपि केवलं पुनः ।

तदीयसंभोगविवृद्धये पुरा करोति दास्यं गुरुवेश्मसु स्वयम् ॥

sa tanmayībhūya na lōkavartanīmajīgaṇat kāmapi kēvalaṃ punaḥ ।

tadīyasaṃbhōgavivr̥ddhayē purā karōti dāsyaṃ guruvēśmasu svayam ॥

Becoming one with it, he took no account of any of the world's ways.

Only, so that his joy in it might grow, he served of his own accord in the houses of his gurus.

Nothing in the world's ways mattered to him any more. He did not set up house. He did not marry. In the last of his dated books, describing himself in the third person as he often did, he set it down in one line: a share of devotion to Śiva's lotus feet had been given him by the power of the Lord's Śakti, and so he never came to "the talk of wife and son and all such kin".

तज्जन्मदेहपदभाक् पदवाक्यमानसंस्कारसंस्कृतमतिः परमेशशक्तेः ।

सामर्थ्यतः शिवपदाम्बुजभक्तिभागी दारात्मजप्रभृतिबन्धुकथाम् अनाप्तः ॥

tajjanmadēhapadabhāk padavākyamānasaṃskārasaṃskr̥tamatiḥ paramēśaśaktēḥ ।

sāmarthyataḥ śivapadāmbujabhaktibhāgī dārātmajaprabhr̥tibandhukathām anāptaḥ ॥

Taking his birth and his body from him, his mind refined by training in grammar, in the reading of scripture and in logic,

given by the power of the supreme Lord's Śakti a share of devotion to Śiva's lotus feet, he never came to the talk of wife and son and all such kin.

What he did instead was go to teachers. Not to one, but to many, and not as a student who comes for an hour and goes home, but as a servant, living in their houses, doing whatever work there was to do. He says he did it so that his joy might grow. In his own tradition a disciple who goes from teacher to teacher was no fickle thing. Scripture itself, as he quotes it, compares such a disciple to a bee: "As a bee that wants fragrance goes from flower to flower, so a disciple who wants knowledge goes from guru to guru." And one of the old masters of his line, Kallaṭa, had said of himself: "I have a line of gurus from Tapana down to Moṭaka; I am the disciple of all of them, and I have never been poor in teaching."

Abhinavagupta went further than that. He went to teachers of other paths altogether, because he wanted to see for himself what they saw.

अहमप्यत एवाधःशास्त्रदृष्टिकुतूहलात् ।

तार्किकश्रौतबौद्धार्हद्वैष्णवादीन्नसेविषि ॥

ahamapyata ēvādhaḥśāstradr̥ṣṭikutūhalāt ।

tārkikaśrautabauddhārhadvaiṣṇavādīnnasēviṣi ॥

I too, for this very reason, and out of curiosity about the views of the lower śāstras,

sat at the feet of logicians, Vedic scholars, Buddhists, Jains, Vaiṣṇavas and others.

He was not ashamed to say that many of those he went to had little to give him. At the end of his commentary on the Parātrīśikā he looked back on those years with a rueful honesty.

बहुभिर् अपि सोऽहम् एव भ्रमितस् तत्त्वोपदेशकंमन्यैः ।

तत्त्वम् इति वर्णयुगम् अपि येषां रसना न पस्पर्श ॥

परमेश्वरः प्रपन्नप्रोद्धरणकृपाप्रयुक्तगुरुहृदयः ।

श्रीमान् देवः शंभुर् माम् इयति नियुक्तवांस् तत्त्वे ॥

bahubhir api sō'ham ēva bhramitas tattvōpadēśakaṃmanyaiḥ ।

tattvam iti varṇayugam api yēṣāṃ rasanā na pasparśa ॥

paramēśvaraḥ prapannaprōddharaṇakr̥pāprayuktaguruhr̥dayaḥ ।

śrīmān dēvaḥ śaṃbhur mām iyati niyuktavāṃs tattvē ॥

I myself was led round and round by many who thought themselves teachers of the truth,

men whose tongues had never touched even the two syllables of the word tattva.

The supreme Lord, who in his compassion to lift up those who come to him moves the heart of the guru,

the glorious god Śambhu, set me in the truth this far.

The teachers who had led him round in circles, he says, could not so much as get their tongues round the two syllables of the word tattva, "truth". And then Śiva himself, moving the heart of a true guru with compassion for one who had come to him, set him in the truth. Who those true gurus were, he would tell at length.

When he came to tell, in the closing verses of the Tantrāloka, whose houses he had served in, he named them in a rush, one after another, as if he wanted none of them forgotten.

First came Vāmanātha, son of the good teacher Erakavara, whom he calls the helmsman on the great ocean of the line called Ānanda. Then the son of Bhūtirāja, the sun in the wide sky of the line of Śrīnātha, who had his own father's grace. Bhūtirāja, as has been told, was the teacher of Abhinavagupta's father, and Abhinavagupta calls himself a bee at Bhūtirāja's own lotus feet; so he learned from father and son in that house, as his father had learned before him. At the end of his commentary on the Gītā he told who Bhūtirāja was: a brahmin of the family of Kātyāyana, the son of the learned Śauśuka, "by whom all these people, fallen into darkness, were lifted up, as if by the sun". At the opening of his verse commentary on the Mālinīvijaya, having bowed to his father as weightier to him than all his gurus, he went one step further: "Weightier still is glorious Bhūtirāja, the great-minded, bold in lifting up those who love the Lord." He was the teacher of his teacher, and so to be honoured above him.

Then, in one verse, the two who mattered most of all.

त्रैयम्बकप्रसरसागरशायिसोमानन्दात्मजोत्पलजलक्ष्मणगुप्तनाथः ।

तुर्याख्यसंततिमहोदधिपूर्णचन्द्रः श्रीसोमतः सकलवित्किल शंभुनाथः ॥

traiyambakaprasarasāgaraśāyisōmānandātmajōtpalajalakṣmaṇaguptanāthaḥ ।

turyākhyasaṃtatimahōdadhipūrṇacandraḥ śrīsōmataḥ sakalavitkila śaṃbhunāthaḥ ॥

Lakṣmaṇagupta, born of Utpala, who was born of Somānanda, who lay in the ocean of the Traiyambaka stream;

and Śambhunātha, who knew everything, from glorious Soma, the full moon over the great sea of the lineage called the Fourth.

Of those two there is much more to tell. And then the rest, named one after another: Candraśarman, Bhavabhakti, Vilāsa, Yogānanda, Abhinanda, Śivaśakti and Vicitranātha; and others too, Dharma, Śiva, Vāmanaka, Udbhaṭa, Bhūteśa and Bhāskara, "and others with them, great souls all". They live because a grateful student set them down.

At the beginning of the Tantrāloka he honours them in a different way, not by name but by line. He bows first to the old teachers of the line of Tryambaka, the line from which the Recognition came down, whom he likens to the rare pearls the river Tāmraparṇī yields, and calls them skilled helmsmen sporting on the waves of the ocean of the great śāstras. He bows to Śrīkaṇṭha, the one guru, famed on earth, and to the two he calls that guru's other forms: the blessed Maheśvara, and Bhūtirāja. Then come Somānanda, Utpala and Lakṣmaṇagupta; then his father; and then, last, as the place where all of it came to rest, Śambhunātha.

What did they give him? He says it in the verse that follows the list, the verse in which his student years end.

एते सेवारसविरचितानुग्रहाः शास्त्रसारप्रौढादेशप्रकटसुभगं स्वाधिकारं किलास्मै ।

यत् संप्रादुर्यदपि च जनान्नैक्षताक्षेत्रभूतान् स्वात्मारामस्तदयमनिशं तत्त्वसेवारसोऽभूत् ॥

ētē sēvārasaviracitānugrahāḥ śāstrasāraprauḍhādēśaprakaṭasubhagaṃ svādhikāraṃ kilāsmai ।

yat saṃprāduryadapi ca janānnaikṣatākṣētrabhūtān svātmārāmastadayamaniśaṃ tattvasēvārasō'bhūt ॥

These, their grace won by the love in his service, handed him their own authority, made lovely and plain by ripe instruction in the essence of the śāstras;

and because of that, and because he never turned his eyes towards people who were not fit ground, he lived delighting in his own Self, his joy, day and night, the service of the truth.

He had served them, and they had loved him for it; and out of that love, each of them handed him his own authority, the right to teach what he taught. They gave it, he says, made lovely and plain by a ripe command of what the śāstras are for. And from then on he lived as one who delights in his own Self, his only joy the service of the truth. The words have a quiet pride in them, but it is the pride of a servant whose masters were pleased.

One of the streams that met in him was the Recognition, the teaching that a man has only to recognise what he already is: that the Lord is not far off, but is his own Self. It had come down in Kashmir from teacher to student, from Somānanda to Utpaladeva, and from Utpaladeva to Lakṣmaṇagupta. Abhinavagupta received it from Lakṣmaṇagupta, and he said so again and again.

At the beginning of the Tantrāloka he bowed to the three of them together. Out of the awakened mind of Somānanda and of glorious Utpala, he says, came collections of the fragrance of consciousness that spread in every direction; and the mind of his guru Lakṣmaṇagupta, grown heavy with the taste of them, hums like a bee and enchants all who hear it. In the verse commentary on the Mālinīvijaya he goes on: "Victory to the words of my guru, glorious Lakṣmaṇagupta, who taught the Recognition that ends the round of birth and death, the words by which my bee of a mind, drunk on the wonder of tastes beyond counting, each one new, was filled with the enjoyment of the highest."

When he came to write on Utpaladeva's own verses, the Īśvarapratyabhijñā, the Recognition of the Lord, he put the whole chain into one line at the start.

तत्प्रशिष्यः करोम्य् एतां तत्सूत्रविवृतिं लघुम् ।

बुद्ध्वाभिनवगुप्तो ऽहं श्रीमल्लक्ष्मणगुप्ततः ॥

tatpraśiṣyaḥ karōmy ētāṃ tatsūtravivr̥tiṃ laghum ।

buddhvābhinavaguptō 'haṃ śrīmallakṣmaṇaguptataḥ ॥

I, Abhinavagupta, his disciple's disciple, make this short commentary on his sūtras,

having understood them from the glorious Lakṣmaṇagupta.

He calls himself a praśiṣya, a disciple's disciple. Utpaladeva was his paramaguru, his teacher's teacher; Somānanda, one step further back, he calls his parameṣṭhin, the grandfather of his line. When he came to Utpaladeva's last verse, which names its author as the son of Udayākara, he stopped to explain why a master should put his own name and his father's into his work: people take up a teaching more readily when they know whose it is, and so the naming is itself a kindness to them.

He wrote two commentaries on those verses. The first, the shorter, he called the Vimarśinī, the commentary that ponders. The second, much longer, was a commentary on Utpaladeva's own commentary, and of all his books that carry a date it is the last. At its opening he described himself once more, and this time he said something remarkable about the body he was writing in.

लब्ध्वानुग्रहम् ईश्वरान् निजमहःसंभारसंदीपिनो देहेऽस्मिन्नरसिंहगुप्तघटिते लब्धास्पदः पश्चिमे ।

श्रीमल्लक्ष्मणगुप्तदर्शितपथः श्रीप्रत्यभिज्ञाविधौ टीकार्थप्रविमर्शिनीं रचयते वृत्तिं प्रशिष्यो गुरोः ॥

labdhvānugraham īśvarān nijamahaḥsaṃbhārasaṃdīpinō dēhē'sminnarasiṃhaguptaghaṭitē labdhāspadaḥ paścimē ।

śrīmallakṣmaṇaguptadarśitapathaḥ śrīpratyabhijñāvidhau ṭīkārthapravimarśinīṃ racayatē vr̥ttiṃ praśiṣyō gurōḥ ॥

Having received grace from the Lord, who sets ablaze the wealth of his own light, and having found his place in this body, the last, which Narasiṃhagupta fashioned,

shown the way in the Recognition by the glorious Lakṣmaṇagupta, the disciple of the guru's disciple composes a commentary that ponders the meaning of the gloss.

"This body, the last": he means that he will not be born again. The body his father had fashioned was the last he would wear. He had found his place in it by the Lord's grace, and he was writing, as he says in the closing lines of the same book, as one whose mind had been trained in grammar, scripture and logic, and whose understanding of the Recognition had been shown him by Lakṣmaṇagupta. Among the many gurus at whose feet the lotus of his awareness had opened, it was "the feet of Lakṣmaṇagupta, made by the maker of the śāstra" that had shown him the truth of Śiva's non-duality and made him proud of it.

If Lakṣmaṇagupta gave him the Recognition, it was Śambhunātha who gave him rest. Of all his teachers, this is the one of whom he speaks with the most open love, and the one he sets last when he bows to them in turn, as the place where all the rest came home.

In the verse that names his two great gurus together, Śambhunātha is the full moon over the great sea of the line called the Fourth, and he knew everything. Of where Śambhunātha's own teaching came from, Abhinavagupta speaks in two ways. In that verse he says it came to him from Śrī Soma. Elsewhere, setting down a meditation he had been taught, he names another master.

इत्येतत् प्रथमोपायरूपं ध्यानं न्यरूपयत् ।

श्रीशंभुनाथो मे तुष्टस्तस्मै श्रीसुमतिप्रभुः ॥

ityētat prathamōpāyarūpaṃ dhyānaṃ nyarūpayat ।

śrīśaṃbhunāthō mē tuṣṭastasmai śrīsumatiprabhuḥ ॥

This meditation, in the form of the first upāya, Śrī Śambhunātha set out for me, pleased with me;

and the lord Śrī Sumati had set it out for him.

The verse commentary on the Mālinīvijaya begins with three verses for this guru, before even his father is named. Victory to the guru, he says, by the rays of whose awakening, rising on every side, the lotus of our hearts has opened. He gave me floods of meaning, bright with the five streams of scripture and the Trika's insight, meanings vowed to break the poverty of those who have nothing.

श्रीमत्सुमतिसंशुद्धः सद्भक्तजनदक्षिणः ।

शम्भुनाथः प्रसन्नो मे भूयाद् वाक्पुष्पतोषितः ॥

śrīmatsumatisaṃśuddhaḥ sadbhaktajanadakṣiṇaḥ ।

śambhunāthaḥ prasannō mē bhūyād vākpuṣpatōṣitaḥ ॥

Made pure by glorious Sumati, kind to true devotees,

may Śambhunātha be gracious to me, gladdened by these flowers of speech.

A verse remembered in his line says that Sumati was a lord who lived at a holy seat in the southern country, Bhairava himself in the world, a maker of śāstras for all the five streams of scripture and the ways beyond them; and that his foremost disciple, glorious Śambhu, became famous from the holy seat of Jālandhara. That is all that is told of where Śambhunātha came from.

He did not teach alone. When Abhinavagupta wishes him victory at the beginning of the Tantrāloka, he wishes it to him and to his companion together.

जयताज् जगदुद्धृतिक्षमोऽसौ भगवत्या सह शंभुनाथ एकः ।

यदुदीरितशासनांशुभिर् मे प्रकटोऽयं गहनोऽपि शास्त्रमार्गः ॥

jayatāj jagaduddhr̥tikṣamō'sau bhagavatyā saha śaṃbhunātha ēkaḥ ।

yadudīritaśāsanāṃśubhir mē prakaṭō'yaṃ gahanō'pi śāstramārgaḥ ॥

Victory to Śambhunātha, who alone is able to lift up the world, together with Bhagavatī:

by the rays of the teaching he spoke, this path of the śāstras, deep as it is, has come into the light for me.

Bhagavatī, those who knew the tradition said, was Śambhunātha's dūtī, his partner in the rites of the Kula, for in that way of worship nothing is done without the two together, and the teaching itself passes to the disciple through the woman's lips. A few verses later Abhinavagupta says that the knowledge he is about to set down came to him from "the two lotus feet of Śrī Bhaṭṭanātha and the two feet of Śrī Bhaṭṭārikā", the Lord and the Lady; and in the old reading of his line these are Śambhunātha and Bhagavatī, the guru and his companion, bowed to as equals.

It was Śambhunātha who taught him the Trika in its fullness, the teaching of the Mālinīvijaya that the Tantrāloka sets out, and he says so at the end of the shorter book he made from it.

इत्थं षडर्धक्रमसंप्रदायं सप्रत्ययाप्रत्ययभिन्नमाप्य ।

श्रीशंभुनाथात्करुणारसेन स्वयं प्रसन्नादनपेक्षवृत्त्या ॥

काश्मीरिकोऽभिनवगुप्तपदाभिधानः श्रीतन्त्रसारमकरोदृजुना क्रमेण ।

यत्तेन सर्वजन एष शिवं प्रयातु लोकोत्तरप्रसरशांभवतन्त्रसारम् ॥

itthaṃ ṣaḍardhakramasaṃpradāyaṃ sapratyayāpratyayabhinnamāpya ।

śrīśaṃbhunāthātkaruṇārasēna svayaṃ prasannādanapēkṣavr̥ttyā ॥

kāśmīrikō'bhinavaguptapadābhidhānaḥ śrītantrasāramakarōdr̥junā kramēṇa ।

yattēna sarvajana ēṣa śivaṃ prayātu lōkōttaraprasaraśāṃbhavatantrasāram ॥

Having received in this way the tradition of the Trika, in both its forms, with signs and without,

from Śrī Śambhunātha, out of the savour of compassion, pleased of himself and wanting nothing in return,

Abhinavagupta of Kashmir made the Tantrasāra, in plain order,

so that by it all these people may go to Śiva: the essence of Śiva's Tantra, whose reach is beyond the world.

"Pleased of himself, and wanting nothing in return": he taught for love. In another place, quoted by those who came after him, Abhinavagupta wrote that he had received the scripture "rightly, from the mouth of Śrī Śambhunātha, the great treasure-house of every śāstra". And at the start of both the Tantrāloka and the Tantrasāra he set the same small verse, in which his guru is the sun and his own heart the lotus that opens to it.

श्रीशम्भुनाथभास्करचरणनिपातप्रभापगतसंकोचम् ।

अभिनवगुप्तहृदम्बुजमेतद्विचिनुत महेशपूजनहेतोः ॥

śrīśambhunāthabhāskaracaraṇanipātaprabhāpagatasaṃkōcam ।

abhinavaguptahr̥dambujamētadvicinuta mahēśapūjanahētōḥ ॥

The sun is Śrī Śambhunātha; the light of his feet has fallen on it, and it is closed no longer:

search out this lotus, the heart of Abhinavagupta, for the sake of worshipping the great Lord.

He asks his readers to search out his heart, as if the book were nothing but that: a heart opened by a guru's light, offered to anyone who wants to worship the great Lord.

He was set in the truth, he says, and he says it the way one says a door was opened. In the verse that follows the one about the false teachers, he tells what it was like when the teaching of Somānanda, the old master of the Recognition, came to him.

तत्तत्त्वनिर्मलस्थितिविभागिहृदये स्वयं प्रविष्टमिव ।

श्रीसोमानन्दमतं विमृश्य मया निबद्धमिदम् ॥

tattattvanirmalasthitivibhāgihr̥dayē svayaṃ praviṣṭamiva ।

śrīsōmānandamataṃ vimr̥śya mayā nibaddhamidam ॥

It seemed to enter of itself into a heart that had its share in the clear abiding of that truth,

the teaching of Śrī Somānanda; I have pondered it, and set it down here.

He did not feel that he had grasped it. He felt that it had come in. And from that time on, as he says of himself in the Tantrāloka, he lived delighting in his own Self.

What that delight was like he did not put into his long books, which are careful and closely argued. He put it into hymns. A handful of them have come down, short songs to Śiva and to the goddesses, and they are the place where the master of the śāstras sings.

Two of them are dated, by his own hand, in the way Kashmir counted its years, in cycles of a hundred with only the last figures written. The Krama hymn, a song to the goddesses who are the phases of consciousness, he made on the ninth day of the dark fortnight of Mārgaśīrṣa in the year sixty-six, which was the winter of the year 990. Two years later he made a hymn of nine verses to Bhairava, the Lord in his awesome form, and in its last verse he gave the date as a riddle: vasu-rasa, the eight vasus and the six rasas, read backwards as the old reckoners read such numbers, sixty-eight, the winter of 992.

वसुरसपौषे कृष्णदशम्याम् अभिनवगुप्तः स्तवम् इमम् अकरोत् ।

येन विभुर् भवमरुसन्तापं शमयति जनस्य झटिति दयालुः ॥

vasurasapauṣē kr̥ṣṇadaśamyām abhinavaguptaḥ stavam imam akarōt ।

yēna vibhur bhavamarusantāpaṃ śamayati janasya jhaṭiti dayāluḥ ॥

In the year of the vasus and the rasas, in Pauṣa, on the tenth of the dark fortnight, Abhinavagupta made this hymn,

by which the Lord who is everywhere, in his kindness, at once cools the burning of people in the desert of becoming.

The hymn itself is a song of a man who has nothing left to be afraid of. "With a mind made of you," it begins, "I bow in my heart to Lord Bhairava, made of consciousness, the one, the endless, without beginning, who pervades all that moves and all that is still, the refuge of those who have no refuge." Then he turns and speaks to Death himself: "Death, do not set that terrible glance on me. I am steady in serving and thinking of Śaṅkara; I am made of the fearsome power of Bhairava." And near its end comes a verse that is pure joy.

नृत्यति गायति हृष्यति गाढं संविद् इयं मम भैरवनाथ ।

त्वां प्रियम् आप्य सुदर्शनम् एकं दुर्लभम् अन्यजनैः समयज्ञम् ॥

nr̥tyati gāyati hr̥ṣyati gāḍhaṃ saṃvid iyaṃ mama bhairavanātha ।

tvāṃ priyam āpya sudarśanam ēkaṃ durlabham anyajanaiḥ samayajñam ॥

It dances, it sings, it rejoices from the depths, this awareness of mine, Lord Bhairava,

now that it has found you, its one beloved, lovely to look on, hard for others to find, the knower of the covenant.

His awareness dances and sings, he says, because it has found the one it loves. That is the inner life of the man who wrote the Tantrāloka, and he did not hide it. In the old families of Kashmir it was remembered that this hymn was on his lips at the very end.

Another song, of only four verses, he called an offering of what he had lived. In it he speaks first to his guru. When a yogi's mind and breath have melted into the aim within, and he looks out with eyes that do not move, seeing and yet not seeing, that, he says, is the śāmbhavī mudrā, "and it comes to be by your grace, O guru". Then he speaks of himself.

शब्दः कश्चन यो मुखादुदयते मन्त्रः स लोकोत्तरः

संस्थानं सुखदुःखजन्मवपुषो यत्कापि मुद्रैव सा ।

प्राणस्य स्वरसेन यत्प्रवहणं योगः स एवाद्भुतः

शाक्तं धाम परं ममानुभवतः किन्नाम न भ्राजते ॥

śabdaḥ kaścana yō mukhādudayatē mantraḥ sa lōkōttaraḥ

saṃsthānaṃ sukhaduḥkhajanmavapuṣō yatkāpi mudraiva sā ।

prāṇasya svarasēna yatpravahaṇaṃ yōgaḥ sa ēvādbhutaḥ

śāktaṃ dhāma paraṃ mamānubhavataḥ kinnāma na bhrājatē ॥

Whatever sound rises from the mouth is a mantra beyond the world;

whatever posture the body takes, this body where pleasure and pain are born, is a mudrā;

the breath flowing on of its own accord is itself the wondrous yoga:

for me, as I live it, what is there that does not shine as the highest abode of Śakti?

Nothing more had to be added to make his life a practice. Every word he spoke was already a mantra, every way he sat already a mudrā, every breath already yoga, and everything shone for him as the abode of Śakti.

In twelve verses on the highest truth he spoke the same way: "Whatever lights there are have found their room in me, the highest sky, and in me, the greatness that never ends, they shine undivided. I am that." And in a hymn to the gods who live in the body he showed how such a man worships. The body is the temple, it begins, and one's own Self is the god who has always been. In the lotus of the heart Bhairava sits, and the mind and the senses are goddesses on its petals, each worshipping him with flowers of her own: the mind with its thoughts, hearing with sound, the skin with touch, the eye with form, the tongue with taste, and the nose with scent. Among those he bowed to was the true guru, "by the strength of whose understanding the whole world shines, for those who love the Lord, as the path to Śiva".

At the close of the Paramārthasāra, a hundred verses in which he gathered the essence of the teaching for others, he named himself in the same spirit.

आर्याशतेन तद् इदं संक्षिप्तं शास्त्रसारम् अतिगूढम् ।

अभिनवगुप्तेन मया शिवचरणस्मरणदीप्तेन ॥

āryāśatēna tad idaṃ saṃkṣiptaṃ śāstrasāram atigūḍham ।

abhinavaguptēna mayā śivacaraṇasmaraṇadīptēna ॥

This essence of the śāstras, deeply hidden, has been gathered into a hundred āryā verses

by me, Abhinavagupta, set alight by remembering Śiva's feet.

"Set alight by remembering Śiva's feet": that was how he wished to be known. He wrote for others always, never for himself alone. The Bodhapañcadaśikā, fifteen verses on the whole of the teaching, he wrote, he says, for disciples who were young in understanding.

सुकुमारमतीन् शिष्यान् प्रबोधयितुम् अञ्जसा ।

इमे ऽभिनवगुप्तेन श्लोकाः पञ्चदशोदिताः ॥

sukumāramatīn śiṣyān prabōdhayitum añjasā ।

imē 'bhinavaguptēna ślōkāḥ pañcadaśōditāḥ ॥

To wake disciples of tender understanding, and to wake them quickly,

Abhinavagupta spoke these fifteen verses.

He had been one of those disciples once, led round in circles by teachers who did not know the word for truth. Now he wrote so that others might come to it quickly. At the end of a short book of fifty verses on the highest state, he bowed to the gurus of old: "Victory to the gurus of long ago, whose hearts were not other than Śambhu's, who reached the furthest wealth, a rest in him from which they never came back."

When his gurus had given him their authority, the first person he thought of teaching was his own brother.

सोऽनुग्रहीतुमथ शांभवभक्तिभाजं स्वं भ्रातरमखिलशास्त्रविमर्शपूर्णम् ।

यावन्मनः प्रणिदधाति मनोरथाख्यं तावज्जनः कतिपयस्तमुपाससाद ॥

sō'nugrahītumatha śāṃbhavabhaktibhājaṃ svaṃ bhrātaramakhilaśāstravimarśapūrṇam ।

yāvanmanaḥ praṇidadhāti manōrathākhyaṃ tāvajjanaḥ katipayastamupāsasāda ॥

Then, while he was setting his mind on giving grace to his own brother, Manoratha, who loved Śambhu and was full of the pondering of every śāstra,

a few people came to him.

Manoratha, or Manorathagupta, had given himself to Śiva too. Abhinavagupta wrote of him with plain affection at the end of the Parātrīśikā commentary.

भ्राता ममैव शिवशासनरूढचित्तः प्रेप्सुः परात्मनि मनोरथगुप्तनामा ।

यः शास्त्रतन्त्रमखिलं प्रविवेक्तुकामः प्राप्तुं परं शिवपदं भवभेदनाय ॥

bhrātā mamaiva śivaśāsanarūḍhacittaḥ prēpsuḥ parātmani manōrathaguptanāmā ।

yaḥ śāstratantramakhilaṃ pravivēktukāmaḥ prāptuṃ paraṃ śivapadaṃ bhavabhēdanāya ॥

My own brother, Manorathagupta by name, his mind grown firm in Śiva's teaching, longing for the supreme Self,

who wants to sift the whole body of śāstra and Tantra, to reach Śiva's highest state and break the bonds of becoming.

Manoratha was the younger of the two. When Abhinavagupta came to write the longest of his commentaries on the Recognition, he said at its opening that he had written it because his brother asked him to: yielding to the request of his own younger brother Manoratha, he wrote, he was making this path plain, so that people too, rising beyond the restless mind, might go by it to the abode of Śiva, which lies on no road the eyes of the bound can see.

But before he could turn to his brother, others came, and he names them one by one. The first was Karṇa, the son of Śauri.

श्रीशौरिसंज्ञतनयः किल कर्णनामा यो यौवने विदितशांभवतत्त्वसारः ।

देहं त्यजन् प्रथयति स्म जनस्य सत्यं योगच्युतं प्रति महामुनिकृष्णवाक्यम् ॥

śrīśaurisaṃjñatanayaḥ kila karṇanāmā yō yauvanē viditaśāṃbhavatattvasāraḥ ।

dēhaṃ tyajan prathayati sma janasya satyaṃ yōgacyutaṃ prati mahāmunikr̥ṣṇavākyam ॥

There was Karṇa, the son of the one called Śauri, who had known the essence of Śiva's truth while still a young man,

and who, when he left his body, showed people the truth of what the great sage Kṛṣṇa said about the yogin who falls from the path.

Karṇa had known the heart of Śiva's teaching while still young. In the commentary on the Parātrīśikā he is a young brahmin "who even in boyhood, and then in youth, put away his attachment to the things of the senses and took firm hold of the path of reflection that tears up the round of birth and death by the root". In the Tantrāloka his death is told, and Abhinavagupta tells it as a proof. In the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna what becomes of a yogin who falls from the path before his practice is complete: nothing good is lost; he is born again in a pure and blessed house, or into a family of wise yogins, and there he takes up again the understanding of his former body and goes on towards the highest. Karṇa, his teacher says, showed people that this was true. Whatever he had not finished in this life, he was not going to lose.

Then came Mandra, Karṇa's friend from childhood, a minister's son, on whom wealth and learning both sat easily, so gracefully that the goddesses of the two, who are rivals everywhere else, forgot to be jealous of each other. Then came five of Abhinavagupta's cousins, the sons of his father's brother: Kṣema, Utpala, Abhinava, Cakraka and Padmagupta, whose hearts were so full with the service of Śambhu that they thought their wealth no more than straw. Then Rāmagupta, who had mastered every rite and diagram of the Trika scriptures and whose whole path was taken up with service of his guru and of Śiva's teaching. And then others, of whom he says only that they were driven by the descent of Śiva's grace.

He did not turn any of them away. He says of himself that he had never learned how to refuse a request, and so the whole company became a field for his grace.

They wanted one thing of him. They pressed him, as their ācārya, to teach them the whole of the Tantra, completely and properly, all of it. And he agreed. It was what he wanted himself, he says; for one who longs to dance, the drum has already been set down. Besides, his own true gurus had commanded him to give grace, and that command was the first green shoot of everything good that followed. At the start of the book he wrote for them he said the same thing in other words: what the learned had never seen, for want of the living tradition, he would bring into the light "by the command of my lord and guru".

At the end of the Parātrīśikā commentary he set down the same circle of people another way, as the friends for whose sake that book was written. Śauri's father, he says there, was Vallabha, the first of the ministers of King Yaśaskara of Kashmir, a brahmin of the first rank. Vallabha's son was Śauri, a jewel mine of meditation on the feet of the moon-crested Lord, beloved of all for his goodness; and beside him he names Vatsalikā as Śauri's companion, a woman whose heart swelled with the praise of Śaṅkara, the dwelling of good conduct and of compassion for all the world; and their son was Karṇa. Then he names his own brother, and a learned devotee of Śiva called Rāmadeva. And he ends the list with these words, before signing the book: "Out of love for them, and wishing them well, I have made this, a showing of the way. May it bring everyone to Śiva."

इत्थं प्रपन्नजनतोद्धरणप्रवृत्तश्रीमन्महेश्वरपदाम्बुजचञ्चुरीकः ।

वृत्तिं व्यधात्त्रिकरहस्यविमर्शगर्भां काश्मीरिकाच्चुखलकादधिगम्य जन्म ॥

itthaṃ prapannajanatōddharaṇapravr̥ttaśrīmanmahēśvarapadāmbujacañcurīkaḥ ।

vr̥ttiṃ vyadhāttrikarahasyavimarśagarbhāṃ kāśmīrikāccukhalakādadhigamya janma ॥

So the bee at the lotus feet of glorious Maheśvara, who is ever at work lifting up those who come to him,

made this commentary, with the pondering of the Trika's secret at its heart; he took his birth from Cukhalaka of Kashmir.

To write the whole of the Tantra out for them, he needed quiet, and Mandra gave it to him.

विक्षिप्तभावपरिहारमथो चिकीर्षन् मन्द्रः स्वके पुरवरे स्थितिमस्य वव्रे ।

आबालगोपमपि यत्र महेश्वरस्य दास्यं जनश्चरति पीठनिवासकल्पे ॥

vikṣiptabhāvaparihāramathō cikīrṣan mandraḥ svakē puravarē sthitimasya vavrē ।

ābālagōpamapi yatra mahēśvarasya dāsyaṃ janaścarati pīṭhanivāsakalpē ॥

Then Mandra, wanting to keep from him everything that scatters the mind, asked him to stay in his own fine town,

where all the people, down to the children and the cowherds, live in the service of Maheśvara, as though they dwelt in a pīṭha.

It was a town where even the children and the cowherds lived in the service of Śiva, so that to live there was like living at one of the holy seats of the goddess. There he was given a house, and the woman who gave it was Vatsalikā, the wife of Mandra's uncle. Her name means "the tender one", and Abhinavagupta says she had been made by the Creator for that name. Her only ornament was the dust of the lotus feet of the moon-crested Lord, and she had let go of all the many-coloured cares of worldly life. When he came to describe her, he could only reach for one likeness after another.

मूर्ता क्षमेव करुणेव गृहीतदेहा धारेव विग्रहवती शुभशीलतायाः ।

वैराग्यसारपरिपाकदशेव पूर्णा तत्त्वार्थरत्नरुचिरस्थितिरोहणोर्वी ॥

mūrtā kṣamēva karuṇēva gr̥hītadēhā dhārēva vigrahavatī śubhaśīlatāyāḥ ।

vairāgyasāraparipākadaśēva pūrṇā tattvārtharatnarucirasthitirōhaṇōrvī ॥

She was like patience made flesh, like compassion that had taken a body, like the very stream of a good nature given a form;

like the full ripening of the essence of dispassion; a jewel mountain's earth, where the jewels of truth lay lovely.

She had a brother, Śauri, who had once been a minister of the king. He gave that up, Abhinavagupta says, to become a minister of the Lord instead. In the Parātrīśikā commentary, as has been told, the same family is named in another order, and Vatsalikā stands beside Śauri as his companion; in the Tantrāloka, she is his sister. Either way, this was the household that took Abhinavagupta in.

Karṇa's wife lived there too, and Abhinavagupta tells her story with great tenderness. She had borne Karṇa one son, Yogeśvaridatta, "the gift of the Lord of yogins", a boy who lived up to his name. When she was still young she lost her husband, and in her grief, he says, the Three-eyed One himself took her into his grace through her devotion. "For people in whom a greatness to come is already stirring," he adds, "a misfortune truly draws a whole train of blessings after it." She wore no ornaments any more but the shiver of devotion on her skin, her bow to Śambhunātha for the mark on her forehead, and the hearing of Śiva's scripture for her earrings, and inwardly she carried a happiness greater than any she had known.

अम्बाभिधाना किल सा गुरुं तं स्वं भ्रातरं शंभुदृशाभ्यपश्यत् ।

भाविप्रभावोज्ज्वलभव्यबुद्धिः सतोऽवजानाति न बन्धुबुद्ध्या ॥

ambābhidhānā kila sā guruṃ taṃ svaṃ bhrātaraṃ śaṃbhudr̥śābhyapaśyat ।

bhāviprabhāvōjjvalabhavyabuddhiḥ satō'vajānāti na bandhubuddhyā ॥

She was named Ambā, and she looked on that guru, her own brother, with the eyes of Śambhu.

Her good mind shone with the power of what was to come, and she did not slight a true man by thinking of him as family.

That is as he says it: she looked on him, the guru, her own brother, with the eyes of Śambhu. Whatever else lies in the words, they say that she did what is hardest of all for family: she did not let kinship hide the teacher from her.

Her brother Abhinava was there as well, new, Abhinavagupta says with a play on the name, not only by name but by his good deeds, one whose thirst for the wine of knowledge only grew the more he drank. And there was one more, Lumpaka, whose heart's lotus had opened in the rays of Śiva's light, and who served the master in all his labours. "A good man," Abhinavagupta adds, "always lends a hand."

So, in that house, among those people, he sat down to write.

इत्थं गृहे वत्सलिकावितीर्णे स्थितः समाधाय मतिं बहूनि ।

पूर्वश्रुतान्याकलयन् स्वबुद्ध्या शास्त्राणि तेभ्यः समवाप सारम् ॥

स तन्निबन्धं विदधे महार्थं युक्त्यागमोदीरिततन्त्रतत्त्वम् ।

आलोकमासाद्य यदीयमेष लोकः सुखं सञ्चरिता क्रियासु ॥

itthaṃ gr̥hē vatsalikāvitīrṇē sthitaḥ samādhāya matiṃ bahūni ।

pūrvaśrutānyākalayan svabuddhyā śāstrāṇi tēbhyaḥ samavāpa sāram ॥

sa tannibandhaṃ vidadhē mahārthaṃ yuktyāgamōdīritatantratattvam ।

ālōkamāsādya yadīyamēṣa lōkaḥ sukhaṃ sañcaritā kriyāsu ॥

So he stayed in the house that Vatsalikā had given him and gathered his mind,

and turning over in his own understanding the many śāstras he had heard before, he drew their essence out of them.

From that he made this book, great in meaning, in which the truth of the Tantra is set out by reasoning and by scripture,

so that the world, finding its light, might walk with ease through the rites.

He says that he gathered his mind and went over, in his own understanding, the many śāstras he had heard before, and drew their essence out. The book that came of it is the Tantrāloka, the Light on the Tantras, thirty-seven chapters in verse, gathering the whole of the Trika and the scriptures behind it, its doctrine and its rites, its ways to Śiva and its worship, into one. At its beginning he had said why. There were many manuals in the many streams of scripture, he wrote, but for the way of the Trika in its fullness not one was to be seen; and so, asked again and again by good people, his own disciples and those who had studied beside him, he would write one, clear and complete.

Then, having told who he was and how the book came to be written, he asked the good to receive it kindly. And then he turned from his readers to the one listener he wanted.

इदमभिनवगुप्तप्रोम्भितं शास्त्रसारं शिव निशमय तावत् सर्वतः श्रोत्रतन्त्रः ।

तव किल नुतिरेषा सा हि त्वद्रूपचर्चेत्यभिनवपरितुष्टो लोकमात्मीकुरुष्व ॥

idamabhinavaguptaprōmbhitaṃ śāstrasāraṃ śiva niśamaya tāvat sarvataḥ śrōtratantraḥ ।

tava kila nutirēṣā sā hi tvadrūpacarcētyabhinavaparituṣṭō lōkamātmīkuruṣva ॥

Śiva, you who are all ears on every side, listen to this essence of the śāstras that Abhinavagupta has strung together.

This is your praise, for it is a dwelling on your own form; so, pleased with this new praise and with Abhinava, make the world your own.

He calls the whole of the Tantrāloka a hymn. It is long and learned, and it argues on every page; but it is praise, he says, because it is a pondering, over and over, of Śiva's own form. And with that he gave it back to the one it was about, and asked him, pleased with the new praise and with Abhinava, to make the whole world his own.

Great as the Tantrāloka was, it was one book of many, and he wrote them, by his own account, always for someone: for his disciples, for a friend who asked, for people who would otherwise have no way in. Where and when he wrote them he seldom says, but now and then a closing verse lets in a little light.

The verse commentary on the Mālinīvijaya, the scripture he held to contain all the others, he wrote at home in Kashmir, and he said exactly where.

प्रवरपुरनामधेये पुरे पूर्वे काश्मीरिको ऽभिनवगुप्तः ।

मालिन्यादिमवाक्ये वार्त्तिकम् एतद् रचयति स्म ॥

pravarapuranāmadhēyē purē pūrvē kāśmīrikō 'bhinavaguptaḥ ।

mālinyādimavākyē vārttikam ētad racayati sma ॥

In the town named Pravarapura, in its eastern quarter, Abhinavagupta of Kashmir

made this vārttika on the first sentence of the Mālinī.

When the Tantrāloka was finished, he wrote it again, short, and mostly in prose, and called it the Tantrasāra, the Essence of the Tantras. "The Tantrāloka is wide," he says at its beginning, "and not everyone can plunge into it. So listen to this Tantrasāra, made in plain words." And at the end of every chapter of it he did something unexpected for so learned a man: he set down, after a verse in Sanskrit, the same thought again in the common speech of his day, so that the heart of each chapter could be carried in the language people spoke at home.

His commentary on the Parātrīśikā, a short and secret scripture of the Trika, ends in prayer. At its end, after naming the friends for whom he wrote it, he turned to the goddesses who move in the wheel of the heart, full of bliss, the upward points of the trident of knowledge that cuts through all his bonds. His mind, his speech and his body, he told them, had been strung on them, and the fear of becoming had gone out of them; so let them come quickly into his heart and be gracious. And then he asked their pardon for having spoken at all.

व्याख्यादिकर्मपरिपाटिपदे नियुक्तो युष्माभिरस्मि गुरुभावमनुप्रविश्य ।

वाक्चित्तचापलमिदं मम तेन देव्यस्तच्चक्रचारुचतुरस्थितयः क्षमध्वम् ॥

vyākhyādikarmaparipāṭipadē niyuktō yuṣmābhirasmi gurubhāvamanupraviśya ।

vākcittacāpalamidaṃ mama tēna dēvyastaccakracārucaturasthitayaḥ kṣamadhvam ॥

It was you who set me in this office, the round of commenting and the rest, entering into the guru's state.

So, goddesses, you who abide, lovely and skilled, in that cakra, forgive the restlessness of my speech and mind.

It was they, he says, who had put him in the guru's place, and if his speech and mind were restless in the telling, that was theirs to forgive.

His short commentary on the Gītā he wrote because a friend asked him to. There were commentaries on the Gītā in plenty already, he admits; still, an effort to bring its hidden meaning to light was not out of place. At its close, after honouring Bhūtirāja and his line, he said who had asked.

तच्चरणकमलमधुपो भगवद्गीतार्थसङ्ग्रहं व्यदधात् ।

अभिनवगुप्तः सद्द्विजलोटककृतचोदनावशतः ॥

taccaraṇakamalamadhupō bhagavadgītārthasaṅgrahaṃ vyadadhāt ।

abhinavaguptaḥ saddvijalōṭakakr̥tacōdanāvaśataḥ ॥

The bee at his lotus feet, Abhinavagupta, made the Summary of the Meaning of the Bhagavad Gītā,

moved by the urging of Loṭaka, a good brahmin.

And he did not mind, he added, whether the learned thought his work right or wrong: it had been done for his own people.

Of the two commentaries on Utpaladeva's verses, the long one, the Vivṛtivimarśinī, he finished at the end of the month of Mārgaśīrṣa in the year ninety of the Kashmiri count, which was the winter of 1014, and he dated it twice over, by the Kashmiri year and by the years of the age.

इति नवतितमेऽस्मिन् वत्सरेऽन्त्ये युगांशे

तिथिशशिजलधिस्थे मार्गशीर्षावसाने ।

जगति विहितबोधामीश्वरप्रत्यभिज्ञां

व्यवृणुत परिपूर्णां प्रेरितः शम्भुपादैः ॥

iti navatitamē'smin vatsarē'ntyē yugāṃśē

tithiśaśijaladhisthē mārgaśīrṣāvasānē ।

jagati vihitabōdhāmīśvarapratyabhijñāṃ

vyavr̥ṇuta paripūrṇāṃ prēritaḥ śambhupādaiḥ ॥

So, in this ninetieth year, in the last part of the age,

the part that stands at four thousand one hundred and fifteen, at the end of the month of Mārgaśīrṣa,

he explained in full the Recognition of the Lord, which brings the world awake,

urged on by the feet of Śambhu.

"Urged on by the feet of Śambhu": it is the last thing he says of himself in any book that bears a date. From the Krama hymn in the winter of 990 to this, his dated works span nearly a quarter of a century. How many more he wrote than have come down, no one knows. Some are named in his own pages and are lost; others were remembered by his disciples.

Through all of them, whether he was explaining a poem or a rite or the nature of the Self, he signed himself in the same few ways: as the son of Cukhala, as the disciple of Lakṣmaṇagupta and of Śambhunātha, as Abhinavagupta of Kashmir, and as one set alight by remembering Śiva's feet.

Abhinavagupta never described his own face, or the place where he taught, or how his disciples sat around him. That picture comes from someone else: a wandering yogin called Madhurāja, the man of Madhurā, which is Madurai in the far south, who came to him and became his disciple. Madhurāja wrote a poem of praise to his teacher, the Gurunāthaparāmarśa, Remembering the Lord my Guru, and in it he told what he had seen. It is a disciple's poem, and the picture is his.

He tells first of himself, a little. He was a yogin with nothing but a staff, a water-pot, a begging bowl and a patched cloak, whose body was all the family he had, and who wandered from shrine to shrine. He was old, in his seventies, when he wrote, and he could not resist a play on his teacher's name: what he had received from his father in childhood, he says, had lain hidden, gupta, all those years, and now in his old age it shone out as if new, abhinava.

Then he paints the scene. In the middle of a garden of vines, he says, there was a pavilion of crystal, lovely with paintings, heavy with the scent of garlands, incense and lamps, sprinkled with sandal and the rest, and always ringing with music, songs and dancing. It was crowded with yoginīs and siddhas. In it, on a golden seat with the softest of cushions, under a canopy hung with strings of pearls, sat the master. All his disciples, Kṣemarāja and the others, sat close about his feet, their hearts intent, writing down whatever he said. Two women of the circle stood at his sides, holding a cup of Śiva's nectar and a box of betel, with a citron and a blue lotus in their other hands.

And the master himself: his eyes swayed with bliss. On the middle of his forehead was a bright mark of holy ash. Rudrākṣa beads glowed at his ears. His thick hair was bound up with a garland, and his beard hung long. His body was ruddy, his throat dark with fragrant paste, his sacred thread hanging loose; he wore silk as white as moonlight, and he sat in the hero's posture of the yogins.

जान्वासक्तैकहस्तः स्फुटपरमशिवज्ञानमुद्राक्षसूत्रो

वामश्रीपाणिपद्मस्फुरितनखमुखैर्वादयन्नादवीणाम् ।

श्रीकण्ठेशावतारः परमकरुणया प्राप्तकश्मीरदेशः

श्रीमान्नः पातु साक्षादभिनववपुषा दक्षिणामूर्तिदेवः ॥

jānvāsaktaikahastaḥ sphuṭaparamaśivajñānamudrākṣasūtrō

vāmaśrīpāṇipadmasphuritanakhamukhairvādayannādavīṇām ।

śrīkaṇṭhēśāvatāraḥ paramakaruṇayā prāptakaśmīradēśaḥ

śrīmānnaḥ pātu sākṣādabhinavavapuṣā dakṣiṇāmūrtidēvaḥ ॥

One hand rests on his knee, plainly showing the jñānamudrā of Paramaśiva and the rosary;

with the bright nail-tips of his lovely left lotus hand he plays the vīṇā of nāda.

He is the Lord Śrīkaṇṭha come down, who out of the highest compassion reached the land of Kashmir:

may the glorious god Dakṣiṇāmūrti himself, in the body of Abhinava, protect us.

Dakṣiṇāmūrti is Śiva as the silent teacher, the guru of all gurus, who sits at the foot of the banyan tree and teaches by the sign of his hand. To Madhurāja, his teacher was that same Lord, Śrīkaṇṭha, who had taken a body in Kashmir out of compassion. "Glorious Abhinavagupta is truly Śrīkaṇṭhanātha himself," he wrote in another verse. "Accept it; how else could he teach as he does?"

He told, too, of a day when the masters gathered and recognised him.

यो मेलने क्वचन देशिकयोगिनीना-

मद्यप्रभृत्यखिल एष गुरुक्रमौघः ।

त्वय्येव सङ्क्रमित इत्युपलालितो भू-

त्तस्मै नमोऽभिनवगुप्तगुरूत्तमाय ॥

yō mēlanē kvacana dēśikayōginīnā-

madyaprabhr̥tyakhila ēṣa gurukramaughaḥ ।

tvayyēva saṅkramita ityupalālitō bhū-

ttasmai namō'bhinavaguptagurūttamāya ॥

Once, at a gathering of masters and yoginīs,

he was caressed with the words: 'From this day the whole flood of the line of gurus

has passed into you alone.'

Homage to him, Abhinavagupta, best of gurus.

It was not one school that honoured him, but all of them.

सिद्धान्तवामभैरवयामलकौलत्रिकैकवीरविदाम् ।

अभिनवगुप्तः श्रीमानाचार्यपदे स्थितो जयति ॥

siddhāntavāmabhairavayāmalakaulatrikaikavīravidām ।

abhinavaguptaḥ śrīmānācāryapadē sthitō jayati ॥

Among all who know the Siddhānta, the Vāma, the Bhairava, the Yāmala, the Kaula, the Trika and the Ekavīra,

glorious Abhinavagupta stands in the seat of the ācārya, and is victorious.

The rest of the poem is a disciple's love poured out in one image after another. What Abhinavagupta wrote, Madhurāja says, is written on the heart; what other authors wrote is written on water. By his grace his disciples saw the Self in their own hearts and needed no image of wood or stone or metal to worship; and how could thoughts of taking what belonged to others, or words that wound, ever arise in them? He was the old physician who healed the sickness of the world by teaching the practice of Śiva's non-duality. He had made a short work of fifty verses, a wishing-creeper bringing the final fullness, to set people on the path of non-duality; and a book on the art of debate, so that his people might hold their own against those who argued. "The guru is Śiva, who gives Śiva's state," Madhurāja sang. "Śiva is the guru, who has taken a body out of compassion; how else could the noose that binds the soul be cut?"

Abhinavagupta said nothing of his own death. He told of his grandfather's last hour, and of Karṇa's; of his own he left no word. His own account of himself ends where his books end, with a prayer to Śiva to listen, and to make the world his own.

Kashmir remembered the rest. In the old Pandit families of the valley, and in the old Muslim houses of the villages near the place, the same story was told. One day, when he felt his work was done, Abhinavagupta walked into the Bhairava cave with twelve hundred of his disciples, and was never seen again.

The cave is there. It lies in the hills about five miles from Magam, which is halfway between Srinagar and Gulmarg, and the village below it, the stream that runs past the foot of the hill, and the cave itself are all called Bhiruva, after Bhairava. Its mouth is high up on the face of the rock, and from below it looks like nothing more than a crack. It is narrow, and drops away at once into the dark, and a man must crawl to go in at all. Inside there are passages leading off to places where a person can sit undisturbed, and one round chamber large enough for forty or fifty people, with a chink open to the sky high above it, though the sunlight never reaches down. Further in, the people of the place point out a hole that only a child could pass through, and they say that is the way he went. They say, too, that it was much wider once, and has been closing slowly, year by year, ever since.

It was remembered also that he went in with a hymn on his lips. It was, the old families said, the hymn to Bhairava he had made in the winter of 992, the hymn that tells Death not to look his way, and whose awareness dances and sings because it has found the one it loves.

An old Muslim of that country, long-bearded, bent nearly double and walking with a stick, was once asked what he knew of the cave. He said that he had heard it from his grandfather: that Abnācārī, as he called him, went into it with twelve hundred disciples, and never came back. Asked if there was anything more, he said that was all he had heard, and that his love of truth would not let him add a word to it.

He left his books, and he left his disciples. One of them, Kṣemarāja, carried his teaching on, and wrote at the end of his own books that he was the one "to whom the great devotee of Maheśvara, the teacher Śrī Abhinavaguptanātha, gave his teaching". Through him, and through those who came after him, the teaching went on.

But what he left most of all was what he had been given. He had been given grace by a line of gurus who loved him for his service, and he spent his life handing it on, to a brother, to friends, to cousins, to a household that took him in, to a yogin from the south, and to anyone, as he kept saying, who wanted it. He had never learned how to refuse a request.

He had said what all of it came to, years before, in the hymn to Bhairava.

त्वन्मयम् एतद् अशेषम् इदानीं भाति मम त्वदनुग्रहशक्त्या ।

त्वं च महेश सदैव ममात्मा स्वात्ममयं मम तेन समस्तम् ॥

tvanmayam ētad aśēṣam idānīṃ bhāti mama tvadanugrahaśaktyā ।

tvaṃ ca mahēśa sadaiva mamātmā svātmamayaṃ mama tēna samastam ॥

All of this now shines to me as made of you, by the power of your grace;

and you, great Lord, are always my own Self, and so for me the whole of it is made of my Self.

And at the very end of the Tantrāloka, having told everything he chose to tell, he turned from his readers to Śiva, who hears everything, and gave the whole of it back.