The traditional account of the Shiva Sutras' origin is precise about circumstance and vague about anything a historian could verify independently. Vasugupta, a teacher living in Kashmir in the early ninth century, is said to have been instructed in a dream by Shiva to go to a particular rock, on a hill sometimes identified with Mahadeva near Harwan, where he would find a teaching already written. He went, found the aphorisms inscribed on the rock exactly as promised, and transmitted them from there. The story gives the text an authority no claim of ordinary authorship could match: not a philosopher's argument but a found scripture, discovered rather than composed.
Modern scholarship has generally treated the discovery narrative as the tradition's own frame for the text rather than as a claim to be tested, and has focused instead on what the aphorisms actually do: they set out, in extremely compressed form, the nature of the individual self, the workings of ordinary bound consciousness, and the embodied disciplines by which contracted awareness can loosen into recognition of its identity with Shiva, providing the seed philosophy that both the Spanda school and, later, Abhinavagupta's far larger synthesis in the Tantraloka would build out at length.
Whether Vasugupta himself composed the aphorisms, drawing on oral teaching already current in Kashmiri Shaiva circles, or genuinely believed he had found rather than written them, is not a question the surviving evidence can settle, and the atlas records it as open rather than resolved.