Abhinavagupta

Pratyabhijna, recognition, is the term the Kashmiri non-dual school uses for its central claim, and Abhinavagupta inherited rather than invented it, from his teacher's teacher Utpaladeva, whose Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika argued that liberation is not the acquisition of a new state but the recognition of the self's own always-present identity with Shiva, obscured by nothing more than a failure to notice it. Abhinavagupta's major philosophical contribution was to write the great commentary on Utpaladeva's work, the Ishvarapratyabhijnavimarshini, that made the argument rigorous enough to answer the Buddhist logicians of the day on their own technical ground, and then to fold that entire philosophical apparatus into the wider synthesis of the Tantraloka.

The claim has a specific shape worth stating carefully. It is not that the world is illusory in the sense of being unreal, and not that the practitioner must withdraw from ordinary experience to find the divine elsewhere. Shiva, on this account, is not other than the world; the world is Shiva's own free self-manifestation, vimarsha, the dynamic self-awareness by which pure consciousness knows itself as agent rather than remaining an inert light with nothing to illuminate. What obstructs recognition is not distance from the divine but a contracted, limited sense of selfhood, and what the Tantraloka's graded practices are for is loosening that contraction until the practitioner recognises, rather than attains, an identity that was never actually absent.

This is why Abhinavagupta treats even the most ordinary or embodied experience, including aesthetic and, in the Kaula current, ritualised sexual practice, as potentially revelatory rather than as an obstacle to be transcended: anything, approached rightly, can be the occasion on which the always-present recognition occurs.

Alongside the tantric philosophy for which Kashmir Shaivism remembers him, Abhinavagupta wrote one of the most influential works in the history of Sanskrit literary theory, a commentary called the Abhinavabharati on the Natyashastra, the foundational treatise on dramatic and aesthetic theory attributed to Bharata. His central contribution there was a fully worked account of rasa, aesthetic flavour or savour, arguing that the emotional experience a spectator has in the theatre is not the ordinary emotion of daily life transferred to the stage but a distinct, generalised, universalised savouring that occurs precisely because the spectator is not personally implicated in the events depicted the way the characters are.

The connection to his tantric philosophy is not incidental. The same vocabulary of a contracted, personally invested state of mind giving way to a wider, less bounded awareness runs through both fields, and later readers of Abhinavagupta, both within Kashmir Shaivism and in the modern academic study of Sanskrit aesthetics, have frequently argued that his theory of aesthetic experience and his theory of spiritual recognition are two applications of a single underlying account of consciousness rather than two separate interests that happened to occupy the same author.

This dual reputation, as the summit figure of a tantric philosophical tradition and as a foundational theorist of Sanskrit dramatic aesthetics, is part of why Abhinavagupta is read today by scholars who would not otherwise cross paths, one group interested in tantra and non-dual philosophy, the other in the history of literary theory, each finding in him the central account their field returns to.