Paryantapañcāśikā

Some fifty verses, known from one palm-leaf manuscript, that end by telling the seeker to let go of every method.

Sanskrit, the original language

Original language: Sanskrit

Overview

One palm-leaf manuscript in Malayalam script, kept at Trivandrum, carried this poem, and V. Raghavan, a Sanskrit scholar at the University of Madras, edited it from that copy in 1951; when the Indologist Mrinal Kaul searched for others in 2010, he found none. It is an independent poem of some fifty Sanskrit verses, not a commentary, and its title means "fifty verses on the ultimate". The word for "ultimate" appears in its fourth verse, which places the state of Bhairava, the poem's name for Shiva as the highest reality, at the end of all the Tantras and beyond words. Its opening claim takes in even its own opposition: every god is Bhairava, knowledge and ignorance alike are made of him, and so is the opponent's position in any debate. A teacher then speaks to a pupil, calling him "child", and shows how one consciousness, by its own will, shrinks into the bound creature that Śaiva doctrine calls paśu, "the tethered animal". He also shows the ways back: withdrawing thought on every side and dwelling on "I"; holding oneself to be Shiva, who creates, sustains, withdraws, conceals and bestows grace; tracing how the world unfolds from the first vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet and descends through four levels of speech. The last instruction is to cling to none of these means, because one's own awareness, which the seeker is to enter, already contains them all. Raghavan's annotated edition appears in his book Abhinavagupta and His Works, printed in 1981.

Key concepts

Who is Bhairava in this poem?

Bhairava is the poem's name for Shiva as the highest reality, the one consciousness that everything is made of. Elsewhere the name belongs to a fierce form of Shiva, but here it names the whole: every god, every kind of knowing and not knowing, and every position in an argument are Bhairava appearing in one form or another.

What does 'the ultimate' in the title refer to?

Paryanta means the furthest point, the end beyond which nothing lies. An early verse uses it for the state of Bhairava, which stands at the end of all the Tantras, the Śaiva scriptures, and lies beyond what words can reach. The fifty verses are about that end point and about how a seeker comes to rest in it.

What is a paśu, the 'tethered animal'?

Paśu is the Śaiva word for the bound soul, a person who feels small, separate and tied to one body and one history, as an animal is tied to a post. In the poem nobody else ties the rope: the one consciousness, by its own will, narrows itself into such a creature, which is why it can also loosen the knot.

What are the four levels of speech?

They are the stages through which, in this tradition, a word descends from consciousness into sound. At the highest, word and meaning are not yet apart. Then comes a seeing in which the meaning is grasped whole, then an inner word ordered in thought, and last the spoken word others hear. The poem traces the world itself coming forth along this path.

Themes of the book

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

The Ultimate Beyond Every Means

If everything, error included, is already the highest reality, what is a path to it for? The poem teaches the ways back and then asks the seeker to let go of all of them.

Every god is Bhairava, the poem's name for Shiva as the highest reality, and so are knowledge and ignorance and even the opponent's case in a debate. A teacher, calling his pupil 'child', shows how one consciousness by its own will narrows into the bound creature Śaiva doctrine calls the tethered animal, and how it finds its way back: by stilling thought and dwelling on 'I', by holding oneself to be Shiva, by tracing speech through four levels. The last word undoes the lesson's scaffolding, since one's own awareness already contains every means.

consciousness
manifestation
self-awareness
self-recognition
subjectivity
nondualism
śiva-śakti
māyā
cosmic creation
cosmology
freedom
conceptualization
nonconceptual knowledge
language
philosophy of language
meditation
spiritual practice
knowledge transmission
tantric philosophy
purity and impurity
time

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 7
distinct concepts: 21
by passages held, corpus-wide: #824

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