somananda e-book

The Ubiquitous Śiva

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{ PART I }

Introduction to the Translation

1. Introduction

By the end of the eighth century, and possibly as early as the late seventh century,1 the beginnings of a rich and diverse post-scriptural tradition of philosophical, yogic, and ritual exegesis that was based in, but reached beyond, the confines of the myriad scriptural sources of the esoteric Śaiva tantras had emerged in the Indian sub-continent.2 The Brahmins who authored these works sought to interpret and explain the vast canon of tantric scripture through the production of a wide array of reflections on those esoteric scriptures. These post-scriptural works served a variety of ends. Some sought primarily to engage mainstream Hindu and Buddhist philosophical schools; others sought to codify and explain yogic practice; still others constructed philosophical expressions of the religious principles of scripture; and, finally, some sought to explain tantric ritual by mapping the proper manner of its performance and by offering theoretical explanations to account for its efficacy, meaning, and significance. Along the way, the post-scriptural authors regularly departed significantly from the focus of their sources by marginalizing the culture of visionary experience found in the tantric scriptures in preference of teachings more

1The earlier date points to the writings of Sadyojyotis and Bṛhaspati, the earliest of the known post-scriptural authors of the Śaiva Siddhānta. There is no evidence that these authors were Kashmiri, however.

2The reader should note that I use the term “post-scriptural” only to describe works that define themselves as having been composed subsequent to scripture. The term should not be understood to suggest that post-scriptural works postdate the entire corpus of Śaiva tantric scripture, as many scriptural sources postdate one or another of the “post-scriptural” works (though of course a given post-scriptural work can only refer, directly or implicitly, to historically antecedent scriptural sources).

closely associated with liberating gnosis (jñāna), which could reasonably be expected to find greater support in mainstream social circles.3

A landmark in the development of the post-scriptural writings may by identified with the composition of the Śivadṛṣṭi (ŚD) by one Somānanda (fl. c. 900–950), the Brahmin and Śākta Śaiva tāntrika who is the subject of the present book. Living and writing in Kashmir, then a major center of tantrism,4 Somānanda not only founded the highly influential Pratyabhijñā school, the philosophical tradition most commonly associated with “Kashmiri Shaivism,”5 but he was also a pioneer of the post-scriptural Trika, a tradition of exegesis that is closely tied to the writings of the great polymath Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025),6 Somānanda’s great-grand-disciple through a preceptorial lineage passing from Somānanda through Utpaladeva (fl. c. 925–975) and Lakṣmaṇagupta (fl. c. 950–1000) to Abhinavagupta himself.

With the production of his ŚD was born a dramatic, and new, interpretation of the nature of the divine, and the relationship of the divine to the manifested universe in which humans struggle to navigate their way through saṃsāra, the world of transmigration. Not only was Somānanda’s vision among the very first tantric post-scriptural expressions of a philosophical non-dualism, but it was a radical form of non-dualism that imagined and articulated, in vivid terms, the presence of an active, engaged God—Śiva—who personally and directly enacted the activities of the universe. Śiva was said both to embody the very nature of all the various agents found in the universe and to perform through them the innumerable human and other acts occurring in the world as we know it. The work, then, as we shall see, was strictly and thoroughly pantheistic. It denied the existence of any difference whatsoever in the nature of Śiva, the universe, and the agents acting within it. This view was developed, moreover, via the innovation of a theory that conceptualized, in a novel manner, the universe as a flow of power (śakti) that was controlled by Śiva himself. And while

3See Sanderson 20071: 241.

4The Kashmir Valley was host to a great tantric tradition with significant social standing and influence from as early as the ninth century, and both of the two main subgroups of post-scriptural, tantric Śaiva authors—the dualist Śaiva Siddhānta, on the one hand, and the various branches of the non-dual, rather more goddess-centered “Śākta Śaiva” traditions, on the other—were active by the beginning of the tenth century. Indeed, both the scriptures of the Śaiva Siddhānta and the non-dual Trika must have been known in the court of Cippaṭa-Jayāpīḍa as early as the beginning of the ninth century. See Sanderson 20071: 425.

5This term is a misnomer, being both overly specific geographically and overly general doctrinally. See Dyczkowski 1987: 222–223, fn. 12.

6Sanderson goes so far as to identify Abhinavagupta’s Trika-influenced exegesis with the Trika postscriptural school, for which see Sanderson 20071: 371. This formulation leaves out, however, the Trika exegesis of Somānanda, in particular his lost Parātriṃśikāvivṛti (PTVi), which is a Trika post-scriptural work that predates Abhinavagupta, although in Sanderson’s defense the work is only known through the surviving quotations of it that are preserved in Abhinavagupta’s Parātriṃśikāvivaraṇa (PTV).

philosophical arguments, superficial manner.9 Somānanda’s magnum opus, then, holds a curious place in the history of post-scriptural thought. As the first work of the Pratyabhijñā, the ŚD may be identified as the root text of an influential and important philosophical tradition. Yet the work is poorly understood and rarely read by contemporary scholars or students of Hindu tantrism, just as it was quickly passed over in preference to the ĪPK in the history of the tradition itself.

More than the mere privilege of chronological primacy distinguishes the ŚD for sustained analysis, however, as its mere status as the original work of the Pratyabhijñā hardly suffices fully to justify its study. And the present volume is neither directed nor justified by any wish to discover the “original” or “true” form of Pratyabhijñā philosophy.10 Rather, the present book is shaped by the following pair of principles. First, a close study of the ŚD can shed light on a single moment in the intellectual history of Kashmir. Written at the turn of the tenth century, the ŚD was a pioneering work of non-dual tantric philosophy. It offered a novel philosophical vision, one that differed in important ways from the relatively few postscriptural tantric works that existed in Somānanda’s time. A study of the ŚD therefore helps to illuminate a formative moment in the development of tantric thought in Kashmir.

Second, a thoroughgoing study of the ŚD, when read next to the other, subsequent writings in the history of the Pratyabhijñā, will aid our understanding of how the tradition developed and changed over time. A comparison of the writings of the various authors of the Pratyabhijñā reveals the fact that these authors each made unique philosophical contributions, even if all the authors of the Pratyabhijñā subscribed to a common set of essential tenets and a shared spirit of the tradition. Attention to such diachronic developments in Pratyabhijñā thought will therefore help us to understand how this school of thought incorporated the individual perspectives of the particular authors who represented it. In other words, a close reading of the ŚD gives important insight into the development of a tradition that self-consciously understood its authors to furnish

9The quotations of the work may be said to be superficial because they almost exclusively quote Somānanda’s expression of commonly held principles of the Pratyabhijñā. The ideas that may be identified as particular to the ŚD are rarely invoked in the various quotations of the text. These quotations are found, for the most part, in selections from the first chapter of the work, though the seventh chapter is also quoted with some frequency. I say this on the basis of a survey of the quotations found in the Spanda literature and in Abhinavagupta’s works, in particular the Parātriṃśikāvivaraṇa (PTV), the

Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī (ĪPV) and Īśvarapratyabhijñāvivṛtivimarśinī (ĪPVV).

10Being first confers on a given work or author neither an intrinsic significance nor an innate authority that, a priori, supersedes the authors and works that follow in the tradition or traditions in question. One therefore must look to other reasons to justify the study of materials situated, as is the ŚD, at the beginning of a long and important intellectual tradition.

A second challenge relates to the manner in which Somānanda’s thought has been understood and interpreted in the secondary literature. Simply, the ŚD has regularly been read through the lens of the ĪPK and its commentaries, because of which a nearly perfectly synchronic presentation of Pratyabhijñā thought has dominated our understanding of the school’s philosophy to date. Thus, for example, Gnoli suggested that “the doctrine set out in the Śivadṛṣṭi does not differ from the theories established by Utpaladeva in his [Īśvarapratyabhijñā-]kārikās,” a statement that has essentially remained unchallenged in the more than five decades since it was made. This is so despite the fact that it is true only with regard to the spirit of the authors’ works and not with regard to Somānanda’s and Utpaladeva’s individual formulations of Pratyabhijñā philosophy.12

In an effort judiciously to disaggregate our understanding of Somānanda’s Pratyabhijñā from that of his more renowned disciple, the present work therefore includes an unbroken translation of the accompanying passages of Utpaladeva’s ŚDVṛ, none of which have been translated into any European or Indian language prior to the present rendering. It also includes a critical analysis of the similarities and differences between the writings of the two authors, the latter spoken of primarily in terms of Somānanda’s unique contributions. The full history of the development of the Pratyabhijñā remains to be written, however, for although extensive reference is made to the ĪPK and ĪPVṛ in the present analysis of the differences between the writings of Utpaladeva and Somānanda, the ways in which and degree to which Abhinavagupta and those who follow him in the lineage of the Pratyabhijñā adopt the ideas of one or the other of the

12See Gnoli 1957: 17. Torella 1994: xx notably recognizes that the ĪPK contains “important novelties, not so much in the basic doctrine as in the far more aware and acute determination of the aims proposed, the ways of attaining them and the ambit addressed.” Though he acknowledges innovations in the writings of Utpaladeva, he neither identifies the ideas of Somānanda that are essentially dropped by Utpaladeva nor recognizes those that are reinstated, in some degree, in Abhinavagupta’s œuvre. Torella should not be faulted on this point, however, for his excellent introduction is meant to contextualize his translation of Utpaladeva’s ĪPK and ĪPVṛ, and thus neither the writings of Somānanda nor of Abhinavagupta were his primary concern.

Dyczkowski, before him, identified a novel concept in Utpaladeva’s writings, namely, that of the notion of an absolute ego that grounds the individual, limited ego of the bound individual. In doing so, he recognized that Somānanda, contra Utpaladeva, wished not to establish any internal subject-object dichotomy, but instead posited the existence of a single active agent, Śiva. This idea is linked to the notion of reflective awareness (vimarśa) and the absence of a fully formed conception of such reflective awareness in the ŚD (see sections 5 and 6, below). As such, Dyczkowski recognized an important element of innovation in the writings of Utpaladeva. See Dyczkowski [1990] 2004: 29–49, esp. 40, and Dyczkowski 19921: 42. Despite the contributions of this pair of scholars, however, no comprehensive diachronic treatment of the Pratyabhijñā yet exists, and Somānanda’s unique contributions have not been thoroughly examined prior to the present study.