Abhinavagupta: Nothing Has to Be Obtained

The central claim, and it is worth getting exactly right.

Pratyabhijna means recognition, and specifically re cognition: knowing again something you already knew.

The standard example the tradition uses

A woman has heard about a man for a long time and has formed an idea of him. Then she meets a man, and does not connect them. Then somebody says, this is he.

And nothing new is added. She already knew about him. She was already looking at him. What happens at that moment is that the two things she already had come together.

That is the model for liberation in this tradition.

What follows from it

One. Nothing has to be obtained.

You are not deficient in something that must be acquired by effort. You are Shiva, which is to say the one conscious reality, and you have forgotten, and forgetting is the only problem there is.

Two. Therefore no amount of accumulation helps directly.

Merit, austerity, learning, ritual: all of these are useful for various reasons, and none of them can produce recognition, because recognition is not a thing that can be produced. It happens or it does not.

Three. The world is not an illusion.

And this is where the tradition parts company with Advaita Vedanta, sharply.

Shankara's Advaita: the world as perceived is maya, a superimposition, and liberation involves seeing through it. Brahman is real, the world is not.

Kashmir Shaivism: the world is Shiva's own self expression, produced by his svatantrya, absolute freedom, and it is as real as he is. There is nothing to see through.

The technical difference: for Advaita, maya is a beginningless ignorance that has to be removed. For the Trika, maya is one of Shiva's own powers, deliberately exercised, by which he limits himself for the pleasure of it.

Which changes everything downstream. If the world is Shiva expressing himself, then:

• The body is not an obstacle
• The senses are not the enemy
• Enjoyment is not intrinsically opposed to liberation
• The householder's life is not a lower category
• There is nowhere else to go

Four. Spanda.

Spanda means vibration, throb, pulsation.

The claim: reality is not static. It is a continuous self referring movement, a pulse, and everything that exists is that pulse in some particular configuration.

And the practical form: the moments when the pulse is most accessible are the junctures, the points of transition, where one state gives way to another.

The tradition names them: the moment between waking and sleep, the moment between two breaths, the moment between two thoughts, the moment of sudden fright, the moment of intense joy, the moment at the end of a sneeze, the moment when you first see something beautiful.

In each of those the ordinary machinery stops for an instant, and the tradition says that is where the gap is.

Five. Aham.

The most technical and the most striking of his positions.

Aham means I.

And Abhinavagupta's analysis is that the I is not a problem to be dissolved. In the Buddhist analysis and in much of Vedanta, the sense of being a self is the error.

Here, the I is the highest mantra. The complete I, unrestricted, without an object opposed to it, is what Shiva is, and the individual's sense of being an I is a contracted version of exactly that, not a mistake.

The work is therefore not to get rid of the I but to notice what it actually is when the limits come off.

The most practically useful thing he wrote, and it is a taxonomy of methods arranged by how much machinery they require.

The principle: different people are at different distances from recognition, and the appropriate method is the one that fits. The higher methods are not better in a moral sense; they are simply for people who need less scaffolding.

And the order runs from no method to the most elaborate.

Anupaya

No means.

What it is: recognition without any method at all, because there was never any distance to cross.

Who it is for: the very small number of people for whom a word, or a moment, or nothing in particular, is enough.

And the tradition's own caution: anupaya is not a technique you can adopt. Deciding that you are beyond method is the most common self deception in this area, and it is worth knowing that the tradition says so explicitly.

Shambhavopaya

The means of Shambhu, Shiva. The way of iccha, will.

What it is: recognition through a direct movement of the will, without any object of meditation and without any technique.

In practice: attention resting on the awareness itself, with nothing in it. The teacher points, and the student sees.

It is the most direct method that is still a method, and it depends almost entirely on the teacher.

Shaktopaya

The means of Shakti. The way of jnana, knowledge.

What it is: working with the mind, using thought against thought.

In practice:

• Vikalpa samskara: the purification of thought. Take the thoughts you actually have and progressively replace the ones that assume limitation with ones that do not
• Contemplation of statements about reality until they stop being statements
• Mantra, understood as meaning rather than as sound
• Watching the arising and disappearing of thoughts to see where they come from

This is where most serious practitioners actually work.

Anavopaya

The means of the individual, from anu, the limited being. The way of kriya, action.

What it is: everything that uses the body, the breath, objects, time and place.

In practice:

• Breath: attention to the breath, the junctures between breaths, the movement of prana
• Uccara: working with the sound of the mantra as sound
• Karana: postures and physical practices
• Sthana kalpana: contemplation using place, image, external object
• Ritual: puja, the whole apparatus

And the crucial point: anavopaya is not inferior. It is the appropriate method for most people most of the time, it works, and Abhinavagupta spends a very large proportion of the Tantraloka on it.

Why the taxonomy is useful

Because it tells you to stop reaching for the wrong shelf.

A very common problem in modern spiritual life is people attempting the highest method available, on the assumption that it is the best one, and getting nowhere for years.

The Trika answer: use the method that fits where you actually are. The one that works for you is, by definition, the appropriate one, and moving up happens by itself or does not.

And the corresponding warning: anybody who tells you that ritual, mantra and physical practice are for beginners and that you should skip to direct awareness has inverted the tradition's own advice.

The aesthetics

His other career, and it is why he is on university syllabuses that have nothing to do with religion.

The Abhinavabharati is his commentary on Bharata's Natyashastra, and the Dhvanyaloka Locana is his commentary on Anandavardhana, and between them they settle the central questions of Indian aesthetics for the next thousand years.

The problem he solves

Why do we enjoy watching a tragedy?

If a play makes you feel grief, and grief is unpleasant, why would anybody pay to attend?

His answer, and it is subtle:

Sadharanikarana, generalisation or universalisation.

What happens in the theatre is that the emotion is detached from your particular circumstances. You feel grief, but it is not your grief about your loss with your consequences. It is grief, generalised, without the personal stake.

And what that produces is not the emotion but the rasa: the tasting of the emotion, in a state of absorbed attention, free of the ordinary anxieties that come with it.

Camatkara

The word he uses for the resulting state: camatkara, wonder, the involuntary catch, the sound you make when something is suddenly good.

And the claim that makes him significant for religion: this state is a near neighbour of the state the contemplative traditions are aiming at.

Both involve: attention fully absorbed, the ordinary self interested machinery suspended, a bliss that is not caused by getting something, and a self luminosity in the experience.

The difference: aesthetic absorption depends on the object and stops when the play stops. The other does not.

But they are the same kind of thing, which is why the arts have never been in opposition to religion in India, and why Rupa Goswami five hundred years later could take this entire apparatus and apply it to devotion without having to invent anything.

What tantra actually is

A necessary section, because the word has been comprehensively misused.

What tantra means in this tradition:

• A category of scripture, the tantras and agamas, which are ritual and philosophical texts, parallel to and distinct from the Vedas
• A method that works with the body, the senses, energy, mantra, ritual and the world, rather than by withdrawing from them
• The position that nothing is excluded from the sacred, which follows directly from the claim that the world is Shiva's own expression

What the Kashmir Shaiva material consists of, in practice:

• Philosophy, in very large quantity
• Meditation
• Mantra
• Ritual worship
• Breath practices
• Analysis of consciousness and its states
• Aesthetics

On the Kaula practices

Stated plainly and briefly.

The Kaula transmission, which Abhinavagupta received from Shambhunatha and treats in the twenty ninth chapter of the Tantraloka, includes practices involving substances and, in some lineages, ritual sexual union, understood within an elaborate doctrinal framework.

What has to be said about that:

• It is a small part of a very large body of material, most of which is contemplative
• It was restricted, requiring long preparation and a qualified teacher, and the texts say so repeatedly
• The tradition's own major figures, including Abhinavagupta, insist that the practices are meaningless and harmful without the preparation
• And modern commercial tantra has essentially nothing to do with any of it. What is sold under that name in workshops and retreats is a twentieth century Western construction with almost no relationship to the Sanskrit material

And the safeguarding statement this series makes wherever it is relevant:

No legitimate teacher in any tradition requires sexual contact from a student. Any person citing tantric doctrine to justify sexual contact with somebody they teach is committing abuse, and the doctrine does not change that. The power imbalance makes meaningful consent very difficult, which is why every professional body in every field prohibits such relationships outright.

Police 112, women's helpline 181, Childline 1098 for anybody under eighteen, POCSO Act 2012 for any sexual offence against a child, free legal aid 15100, Tele MANAS 14416.

His end

The tradition's account: he walked into the Bhairava cave at Magam, near Beerwah in Budgam district, Kashmir, with a large number of disciples, reciting the Bhairava Stava, and did not come out.

The number given is twelve hundred, which is a conventional figure meaning many.

The cave is shown, and is a pilgrimage site.

How to hold it: it is a hagiographic account of a saint's end, and the historical fact is that he died in Kashmir around 1016 after a working life of perhaps sixty years.

Reading him

He is genuinely difficult and the order matters.

Do not start with the Tantraloka. It is thirty seven chapters, five thousand eight hundred verses, and with Jayaratha's thirteenth century commentary it runs to twelve printed volumes. It assumes you know the entire tantric literature.

Start here instead:

One. Paramarthasara.

A hundred and five verses, summarising the whole system. It is short, it is complete, and it exists in several translations with commentary. This is the single best entry point.

Two. Bodhapanchadashika.

Fifteen verses. Shorter still.

Three. The Shiva Sutras and the Spanda Karika.

Not by Abhinavagupta, but they are the foundational texts of the tradition and they are short. Kshemaraja's Pratyabhijnahridayam, twenty sutras with his own commentary, is the standard short summary of the whole system and is the other obvious starting place.

Four. Tantrasara.

Abhinavagupta's own prose abridgement of the Tantraloka, which he wrote precisely because the Tantraloka was too long. Much more manageable.

Five. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.

Again not by him, but it belongs in the tradition and is unlike anything else: a hundred and twelve short meditation techniques, presented as a list, with almost no doctrine.

It is one of the most practically useful texts in Indian religion, the techniques require no initiation, and the list includes things as ordinary as watching the moment between two breaths, looking at the sky, listening to a sustained sound, and the moment before a sneeze.

Six. Then the Tantraloka, if you are going to, and with a guide.

Modern access

• Swami Lakshman Joo, 1907 to 1991, is the figure through whom most modern readers reach this material. His lectures, translations and published transcripts are widely available
• Substantial scholarly work exists in English by Alexis Sanderson, Mark Dyczkowski, Bettina Baumer, Lilian Silburn, Jaideva Singh, Navjivan Rastogi and others
• Jaideva Singh's translations of the Shiva Sutras, Spanda Karikas, Pratyabhijnahridayam and Vijnana Bhairava, with commentary, are the standard accessible English editions
• Hindi and Sanskrit editions are extensive

Places

• Srinagar, where he lived and worked
• The Bhairava cave at Magam, Budgam district
• Check current travel advisories and follow official guidance before planning a visit to Kashmir, which is practical advice and not commentary

One. Nothing has to be obtained.

The whole system rests on it. You are not deficient in something to be acquired by accumulation. You have forgotten something you never stopped being, and the work is recognition.

What that changes in practice: the question stops being what am I missing and becomes what am I not looking at.

And it removes the anxiety of accumulation that most religious practice generates: the sense of needing more merit, more austerity, more of anything at all.

Two. The world is not an illusion.

This is the tradition's sharpest departure from Advaita Vedanta and it has practical consequences.

If the world is Shiva's own self expression rather than a superimposition to be seen through, then the body is not an obstacle, the senses are not the enemy, enjoyment is not intrinsically opposed to liberation, and the householder's life is not a lower category.

There is nowhere else to go.

Three. The four means.

Use the method that fits where you actually are. Ritual, mantra and physical practice are not for beginners; they are the appropriate method for most people most of the time, and Abhinavagupta spends most of the Tantraloka on them.

And the warning: deciding you are beyond method is the commonest self deception in this area, and the tradition says so in its own texts.

Four. Spanda, and the junctures.

The gaps are where the pulse is accessible: between waking and sleep, between two breaths, between two thoughts, at sudden fright, at intense joy, at the first sight of something beautiful.

Which is a usable instruction. Not a practice you have to schedule. A place to look, several times a day, in moments you are already having.

Five. Camatkara.

His account of why art works is that in the theatre the emotion is detached from your own stake in it, so what you get is the taste of it rather than the trouble of it, in a state of absorbed attention.

And that state, he says, is a near neighbour of the one contemplatives are after.

Which is worth knowing because it means the moment when a piece of music stops you, or a line of poetry does, or a view does, is not a distraction from practice. It is a related event, and the tradition treats it that way.

Six. And the correction about tantra.

What is sold commercially under that name is a twentieth century construction with almost no relationship to this material. The actual literature is philosophy, meditation, mantra and ritual, in very large quantity.

And no legitimate teacher requires sexual contact from a student. Police 112, women's helpline 181, Childline 1098.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Om Namah Shivaya
• One Vijnana Bhairava technique, tried for a few days, from the hundred and twelve
• The junctures, noticed: the moment between two breaths, once today
• And the Paramarthasara, a few verses at a time, which is a hundred and five verses containing the entire system

A closing thought

A man in Srinagar who lost his mother at two, never married, and lived in his family house with his students, spent his life going to teachers of every tradition available, including ones he thought were wrong, and learning their systems well enough to state them better than they could.

Then he wrote thirty seven chapters organising the whole of it, and a separate book explaining why watching a play about somebody else's grief makes you feel better rather than worse.

And the thing he was arguing throughout, in all of it, was that you are not trying to get somewhere. You are already there, and have forgotten, and everything in the enormous apparatus he described is scaffolding for a moment of noticing.