WorkAbhinavagupta

Paramārthasāra

About a hundred short verses that take an older Vaiṣṇava primer on the soul's release and rewrite it as Śaiva nondualism.

by Abhinavagupta15 passages held

Sanskrit, the original language

Original language: Sanskrit

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Overview

Śeṣa, the serpent on whom the world rests, is also called Ādhāra, "the Support", and a Vaiṣṇava work in verse, devoted to Vishnu, was ascribed to him: the Ādhārakārikā. Abhinavagupta names it at the start of his poem. A pupil, worn out by the round of suffering that runs from the womb to death, asked the Lord Ādhāra what the highest truth was; Ādhāra answered in those verses; and Abhinavagupta now retells their essence, he says, as Shiva's teaching sees it. This is therefore an independent poem built on another's, and its title means "the essence of the highest truth". Its claim is that there is one consciousness, Shiva, and that it becomes each embodied person without ceasing to be itself, the way a clear crystal takes on the colours placed beside it, or the moon's reflection seems to move whenever the water moves. Bondage is that consciousness forgetting itself; liberation is its recognition, and it can come in this life, which the Indologist Lyne Bansat-Boudon calls the poem's central theme. The last verse counts the poem at a hundred verses in the āryā metre, a round number for the 105 that stand here. In the eleventh century the Kashmiri scholar Yogarāja wrote a commentary that sets its teaching beside Vedānta, Buddhism and the other schools of his day. The British Orientalist L. D. Barnett published an English translation in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1910, six years before the Sanskrit was printed at Srinagar; Lilian Silburn put it into French in 1957, and Bansat-Boudon and Kamalesha Datta Tripathi published it with Yogarāja's commentary in 2011. Its closing verses hold out a promise even to the reader who falls short of the discipline: honour among the gods, and in a later birth, Shiva's own state.

Key concepts

What is māyā in the Paramārthasāra, if not illusion?

Māyā is Shiva's own power to hide himself from himself. The poem calls it the supreme freedom of the Lord, able to bring about what seems impossible: the unlimited becoming limited. It is not a veil thrown over Shiva from outside, and not a false world, but his freedom used to conceal. Under its sway, pure awareness becomes a bound soul, the way the poem says a seed sits inside its husk.

What are the 'sheaths' that make a soul feel small?

They are six layers of limitation, māyā and five coverings it brings: limited power to act, limited knowledge, attachment, fixed order, and time. Together they produce a feeling the poem puts into words: 'only now, only a little, only this do I know.' Inside them pure awareness takes itself for a particular person. The sheaths are inner layers; the body of senses and elements is the outer one.

What is the 'fourth state' beyond waking, dream and deep sleep?

Turīya, 'the fourth', is pure awareness itself, in which waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep appear and pass. Waking is awareness spread out among differences, dream is its own light shining with images, and deep sleep is knowledge gathered into a mass. The fourth is not a further state alongside them but the one in which all three show up, never covered by any of them, just as the world's creation and dissolution show up in it.

What does 'liberated while still in the body' mean?

It means freedom arrives at the moment of knowledge, not at death: the knot of ignorance is cut, doubt is gone, merit and sin are used up, and the person is free while still embodied. The body lingers on old momentum. The poem's image is the rice grain separated from its husk: even if the husk is laid back around it, the grain is never joined to it again.

Themes of the book

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

One Light in Many Bodies

How can one consciousness be a god, a person, an animal and a plant without becoming any less itself? The poem answers almost entirely in images.

A clear crystal takes the colour of whatever is set beside it and stays clear. The moon's reflection seems to travel when the water moves. A mirror holds a whole town without being cut into streets. Shiva becomes every embodied being the same way, wrapped in layers of limitation like a rice grain in its husk, and the error that follows is a rope taken for a snake, frightening enough to kill. Consciousness winds itself in its own net, and by its own knowledge it unwinds.

consciousness
self
nonduality
manifestation
embodiment
ignorance
maya
individuality
cosmology
elements
senses
mind
shiva
emotions

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Free in This Life

Does liberation wait for death, or for a heaven after it? Neither, the poem answers: it is no place and no journey, only a knot untied, and it can come while the body still breathes.

Knowledge burns past actions as fire burns a seed, which can then sprout no more. The one who knows fears nothing and grieves for nothing; eating whatever comes, dressed in whatever is at hand, dying in a holy place or in an outcaste's hut with memory gone, he is free. Worship survives, turned inward: the body is the temple, and every distinction is an offering poured into the fire of awareness. Even the one who falls short is promised honour among the gods and, in a later birth, Shiva's state.

liberation
self-realization
karma
rebirth
death
knowledge
ritual
devotion
yoga
meditation
contemplation
pilgrimage
spiritual practice
scripture

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Within this work

passages held: 15
distinct concepts: 32
by passages held, corpus-wide: #797

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: “karma” and “liberation”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 5 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 24 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
karma	liberation	4
liberation	self-realization	4
consciousness	liberation	3
consciousness	nonduality	3
consciousness	self-realization	3
karma	self-realization	3
nonduality	self-realization	3
liberation	nonduality	2
consciousness	karma	1
karma	nonduality	1

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.

Īśvarapratyabhijñā-vimarśinī
Commentary on a book by his teacher's teacher, Utpaladeva, whose verses it carries; the shorter of his two works on that treatise, and the one later scholars in Kashmir and Tamil Nadu chose to explain.
SA
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
Paramārthasāra you are here SA
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
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
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
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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