The Recognition Lineage

Twice in this story, Śiva acts so that a teaching will not be lost. Once, as Kṣemarāja tells it, he comes in a dream to Vasugupta on Mahādeva mountain and sends him to a great rock, which turns over at the touch of his hand and gives up the Śiva Sūtras. Once, at the start of the Kali age, he comes down from Kailāsa to earth and charges the sage Durvāsas to make the secret teaching such that it can never be cut off; and from Durvāsas it passes through a cave called Tryambaka, fourteen siddhas and a marriage, to Kashmir and to Somānanda.

Those are the two beginnings. The rest is a chain of teacher and student. Somānanda taught Utpaladeva, who set out the Recognition of the Lord in verses bound by reasoning. Utpaladeva taught Lakṣmaṇagupta, and Lakṣmaṇagupta taught Abhinavagupta, who learned from many teachers and wrote a commentary on Utpaladeva's verses. Abhinavagupta taught Kṣemarāja, who wrote on Vasugupta's sūtras and on the Spanda verses, and drew the Recognition into a short book for those on whom grace had already fallen. In him the two beginnings meet.

This book tells the five of them, one after another, in that order. It tells them, as far as it can, in their own words. Vasugupta left his sūtras and is known by what was told of him. The other four, at the beginning or the end of a book, each said something of where his teaching came from, and those lines are set here in their own Sanskrit, with English beside them. Where the tradition tells a story two ways, the book gives both and says so. Where the masters are silent about their own lives, and they are often silent, the book is silent too, and says only that nothing more is told.

Read straight through, it is one story. Each chapter also stands alone.