Mālinīślokavārttika

Two kinds of Śaivism shared tenth-century Kashmir and read the same revealed scriptures in opposite ways. The Śaiva Siddhānta, the dualist school of the orthodox, kept the soul and Shiva distinct for ever; the Trika and its allied lineages taught that there is only one consciousness. Abhinavagupta wrote this work, a vārttika or commentary in verse, on the Mālinīvijayottara, the scripture he took to be the heart of the Trika and the essence of all Śaiva revelation. Its closing verse says he composed it in Pravarapura, the old name of Kashmir's capital, as a commentary on the scripture's first sentence, and it never goes much further. What the opening needed, in his reading, was a defence of the scripture itself. He argues for what Alexis Sanderson, the Oxford Indologist, calls a supreme nondualism: an absolute consciousness free enough to show itself as many things and as one, so that the dualist's world of distinct souls and the monist's single reality are both its own self-presentations. On that reading the Trika does not refute the Siddhānta so much as contain it. The verses work through how anything can be known, by perception, by inference and by the testimony of scripture, and the closing lines say he had argued all this to establish the authority of his own tradition's revelation. It is the earlier of his two great Trika books; the Tantrāloka, composed later, builds the same scripture into a complete system. The Sanskrit was printed at Srinagar in 1921, and in 1998 the German Indologist Jürgen Hanneder published an edition and English translation of its first 399 verses as Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Revelation.