Utpaladeva

Utpaladeva was a Shaiva tantric philosopher, theologian and poet from Kashmir who lived from about 900 to 950 CE. He belonged to the Trika Shaiva tradition and was a leading thinker of the Pratyabhijna school of monistic idealism; his Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika, Verses on the Recognition of the Lord, became a central text of that school. He was also a tantric guru and a devotional poet, and his collection of hymns to Shiva, the Shivastotravali, remains popular among Kashmiri Shaivas. He studied under Somananda and went on to influence the later exegete Abhinavagupta, whose work the Indologist Raffaele Torella has described as largely a development of ideas Utpaladeva had already set out.