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From Vasugupta to Abhinavagupta, and What Happened After

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From Vasugupta to Abhinavagupta, and What Happened After

The literature has a shape that can be followed. The Shiva Sutras, revealed to Vasugupta in the ninth century by the tradition account, are the root text, and the Spanda Karikas that accompany them state the doctrine of the pulse of consciousness. Somananda then wrote the Shivadrishti, and his student Utpaladeva the Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika, which turned the recognition teaching into formal philosophy capable of arguing with Buddhist logicians on their own terms.

Abhinavagupta, working around the year 1000, is the figure who holds the whole together. The Tantraloka is his enormous synthesis of the tantric material, the two Pratyabhijna commentaries are his philosophical work, and he wrote on aesthetics as well, where his account of how an audience tastes an emotion is still read by scholars of Sanskrit poetics who have no interest in his theology. His student Kshemaraja wrote the short Pratyabhijnahridayam, which is where most readers now begin.

What happened afterwards is a matter of transmission rather than of argument. The valley tradition thinned, its texts went south and east and were absorbed into Shaiva Siddhanta, into the Shrividya tradition and into later Hindu tantra, often without the name attached. A householder lineage continued in Kashmir into the twentieth century around Swami Lakshman Joo, whose teaching and the scholarly editions of the same period are why the material is available in English at all.

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