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WorkAbhinavagupta

Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vimarśinī

A defence of the lasting self against Buddhist logic, argued line by line through the verses of Abhinavagupta's teacher's teacher.

by Abhinavagupta424 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Overview

The Buddhist logicians who followed Dharmakīrti, the seventh-century theorist of knowledge, denied that there is any lasting self: each moment of awareness arises and vanishes, and memory is explained by traces one moment leaves on the next. Utpaladeva, a Kashmiri Śaiva of the early tenth century, answered them in a short book of Sanskrit verses, the Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā, the "verses on the recognition of the Lord". This is Abhinavagupta's commentary on them, and the verses stand inside it. He had learned the work from Lakṣmaṇagupta, Utpaladeva's pupil, and he calls himself the pupil's pupil at the start. The argument runs on memory. To remember is to join a past perception to a present one, and the two moments, each shut up in itself, cannot do that joining; something must hold both, a single knower that persists. Examined, that knower turns out to be the one free consciousness the Śaivas call Shiva, so release from suffering means recognising, not acquiring, one's own identity with the Lord. The verses argue from experience and inference, and turn to scripture only near the end; Abhinavagupta reads the whole treatise as one formal inference in the five steps laid down by Nyāya, the Brahmanical school of logic. Along the way, the Indologist Alexis Sanderson notes, it rejects the dualism of the Śaiva Siddhānta, the doctrine of Vedānta that the world is illusion, and a Buddhist idealism with nothing to unite its moments of awareness. At the end of the seventeenth century the Kashmiri scholar Bhāskarakaṇṭha wrote a commentary on it, the Bhāskarī; it was printed with the Vimarśinī at Allahabad between 1938 and 1954, alongside K. C. Pandey's English translation. Abhinavagupta called the work a short commentary; his longer one explains Utpaladeva's own prose gloss on the verses, a text now largely lost.

Key concepts

What does 'recognition' mean in the title of these verses?

Recognition, pratyabhijñā, is the everyday act of seeing someone and knowing them again: 'this is that Caitra I met before'. It joins a past perception to a present one in a single judgement. The treatise turns the same act on the self. Nothing new is learned; a person realises that the knowing and acting they already do are the Lord's own powers, and so knows themselves as the Lord.

What are prakāśa and vimarśa?

Prakāśa is light: the bare shining by which anything shows up at all. Vimarśa is that light's grasp of itself, its awareness that it is shining, which the commentary likens to an unspoken 'I'. A lamp has the first without the second, which is why it knows nothing of what it lights. Consciousness, on this view, is always both together, and the second is what makes it a subject.

What is an ābhāsa, or 'appearance', in this book?

An ābhāsa is anything that shows up in awareness: a colour, a shape, a 'here', a 'now'. The commentary treats objects as combinations of such appearances, which attention or a practical interest can pull apart again; a pot is its colour, its shape and its place, held together as one. Since appearances exist only within awareness, the object is real, but never outside consciousness.

Why is the 'I' not a concept like 'pot' or 'blue'?

A concept works by exclusion: to think 'pot' is to set it apart from everything that is not a pot. That is the Buddhist account, and the commentary accepts it for ordinary concepts. But the 'I' that knows has no real opposite, since whatever might stand against it would itself have to appear to it. With nothing to exclude, the awareness of 'I' is not a concept but the direct self-awareness of consciousness.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Memory Needs a Knower

If awareness is only a chain of moments, each gone before the next arrives, who is it that remembers? The Buddhist logicians had an answer, and the commentary sets out to show that it fails.

On the Buddhist account, each moment of awareness leaves a trace that colours the next, and memory is nothing more. Utpaladeva's verses, and Abhinavagupta's reading of them, reply that a trace can at most repeat an old impression; it cannot know the impression as past, or set it beside what is seen now. To say 'this is the same one I met before' takes a single knower present to both moments. Concepts, which sort, compare and exclude, depend on that same unifying subject.

  • memory
  • personal identity
  • self
  • subjectivity
  • time
  • cognition
  • conceptual thought
  • perception
  • epistemology
  • causation

Enter a dialogue

Light That Knows Itself

What separates awareness from a lamp that shows things but knows nothing? Consciousness, the commentary answers, is not only a light but a light that grasps itself.

Two words carry the system. Prakāśa is the light in which anything appears at all; vimarśa is that light's reflexive grasp of itself, close to an inner speech that says 'I'. Without the second, consciousness would be no different from a jar, which is lit but knows nothing. Objects are appearances held within that light, and nothing inert can appear by itself. The world is therefore neither a dream to be dismissed, as some Vedāntins held, nor a crowd of separate things standing outside awareness.

  • consciousness
  • self-awareness
  • appearance
  • manifestation
  • language
  • unity and plurality
  • illusion
  • maya
  • metaphysics
  • nondualism

Enter a dialogue

Recognising the Lord as Oneself

If each person is already the Lord, what is missing? Only recognition, the commentary replies, and recognition changes nothing in the world while changing everything for the one who sees.

The Lord is defined by two powers, knowing and acting, and every ordinary person uses both in each perception and each deed. Release is therefore not gaining something new but recognising what is already being exercised. The verses compare this to a lover brought to a woman by her own entreaties, who stands beside her unrecognised, like any other man, and gives her no delight until she knows him. Abhinavagupta reads the whole treatise as one formal inference built to bring that recognition about.

  • self-recognition
  • recognition
  • liberation
  • freedom
  • agency
  • divine agency
  • action
  • knowledge
  • inference

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
424
distinct concepts
275
by passages held, corpus-wide
#176

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “consciousness” and “perception”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessperception54
agencyconsciousness33
consciousnessmemory29
causationconsciousness28
epistemologyperception28
consciousnessself-awareness27
cognitionperception25
consciousnessepistemology24
causationperception16
cognitionconsciousness15
cognitionepistemology14
memoryperception14
agencycausation13
cognitionmemory12
epistemologyself-awareness9
epistemologymemory8
memoryself-awareness6
cognitionself-awareness5
perceptionself-awareness5
agencymemory4
agencyself-awareness4
causationepistemology4
causationmemory4
agencyperception3
agencycognition1
agencyepistemology1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vimarśinī you are here SA
  2. Mālinīślokavārttika

    The earlier of his two great Trika works, written at Pravarapura before the Tantrāloka, and a verse commentary that stays with the opening of its scripture, the Mālinīvijayottara, for its whole length.

     SA
  3. Paramārthasāra

    His teaching in its most compact form: a poem of about a hundred verses, with an eleventh-century commentary by Yogarāja.

     SA
  4. Parātrīśikā-vivaraṇa (Parātriṃśikāvivaraṇa)

    On Sanderson's dating it falls between his two great Trika works. It is the longer of his two commentaries on the Parātrīśikā, and the one where his philosophy of language is worked out in full.

     SA
  5. Paryantapañcāśikā

    Among the minor works ascribed to him: a verse primer of the whole system, unprinted until 1951 and still known from a single manuscript.

     SA
  6. Tantrāloka

    Abhinavagupta's largest work and the fullest statement of the Trika, composed after the Mālinīślokavārttika; he later condensed it into the Tantrasāra, and Jayaratha's twelfth-century commentary became the way it was read.

     SA
  7. Tantrasāra

    Abhinavagupta's middle-length statement of the Trika: the Tantrāloka set out again by its author in plain prose, and digested further in two still shorter works.

     SA
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