Passage 6

Here, in truth, it will be concluded within the adhikāra, in the words “so will alone is being the cause, being the doer, action”, that for the Supreme Lord action is will alone: a will made of an unbroken parāmarśa of His own self, whose form is unobstructed svātantrya, and whose form is not facing towards anything other. For Caitra, Maitra and the rest too, the very inner will “I cook” is itself the action. And so, even when it is joined to the many movements of setting the pot on the fire and the rest, the “I cook” is not broken off for him. Rather, what has the form of will, “I cook”, is itself what shines as those movements; but in it, in truth, there is no sequence at all. In the same way, for the Lord too, the vimarśa that is will, in the form “I rule, I shine, I flash, I whirl, I hold in awareness”, whose whole truth is no more than this, “I”: in that there is no sequence. And this very thing is said in the sentence “let the sequence of the variety of pramātṛ and prameya spring up”; so here too there is no sequence. But just as the will “I cook”, when it has passed into movement reaching as far as the body, shines as overlaid with sequence, so then the will of the Blessed One, ending in the difference of pramātṛ and prameya, shines as embraced by that sequence, as the surface of a mirror shines embraced by the sequence of a broad river’s flowing stream. And here the only difference is that the mirror has no such will, while the Supreme Lord has it. So His śakti of action is twofold: the capacity to fashion action in the form of sequence, and being joined with the colouring of action in the form of sequence. The same is to be said of the sequence of space too. There, though, others call it His śakti of cit; here it is taken to be the śakti of action itself. This is the sense in sum.

But the sense word by word is this. “In that way”: marked by a difference of form, which makes the sequence of space, and by a difference of action, which brings about the sequence of time. The difference of the “knower”, the pramātṛ that is the void and the rest, from one another and from the known, and likewise of the pot and the rest from one another and from the knower, is made to shine by the Blessed One. That making it shine is “the śakti of fashioning”, the śakti of action, “of the Lord too”, and not merely an action of the void and the rest. And since He, “knowing”, knows without pause the varied difference of knower, known and action that He has fashioned, for it flashes in Him alone, for this reason too it is His śakti of action. So, although to a coarse view one would suspect that action cannot hold for Him, since there is no sequence because His shining is never broken off, “but” in this way His śakti of action holds good. This is how the words connect. So, all is well.

Here ends the first āhnika, named The Account of the Śakti of Action, in the Kriyādhikāra of the Īśvarapratyabhijñā composed by the venerable master Utpaladeva, with the commentary called the Vimarśinī made by the venerable master Abhinavagupta.

The second āhnika in the Kriyādhikāra.

We praise that Śiva who knows the truth of mantra, and who by His own will alone makes good contradiction and non-contradiction, difference and non-difference.

What was said, that the Blessed One has the śakti of fashioning because His capacity is unobstructed: to carry that very point through, by way of establishing the host of categories, action, relation, universal and the rest, which cannot be accounted for on the view of those who hold to outer things, in the passage that begins

“Action, relation, universal”

and so on,

“so there is no such error”