Śivastotrāvalī

In one of these hymns the poet asks Shiva to make him neither a renouncer, nor a master of supernatural powers, nor a seeker of liberation, but a worshipper drunk on the wine of devotion. The poet is Utpaladeva, the Kashmiri philosopher who argued, in his verses on recognising the Lord, that every self already is Shiva, the one consciousness; here the same thinker addresses that Lord as "you". The Śivastotrāvalī, "the garland of hymns to Shiva", is a collection of Sanskrit devotional poems, not a treatise or a commentary, and its shape is not his. Kṣemarāja, a pupil of Abhinavagupta, wrote the commentary through which it has been read, and his introduction says that Utpaladeva composed only three of the twenty hymns as whole poems, the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, at the request of disciples. The rest were single verses that came to him in moments of devotion. Two disciples, Śrī Rāma and Ādityarāja, put them in some order, and a later editor, Viśvāvarta, divided them into twenty hymns and gave the hymns their titles. The verses keep together what a philosophy of non-duality might be expected to dissolve: they call devotees non-dual and yet always with Shiva beside them, and one verse counts liberation itself as no more than a part of devotion that has ripened. The last hymn gives the path on which sorrows turn into joys, poison into nectar and the round of rebirth into liberation a name of Shiva: Śaṅkara. In 1964 Swami Lakshman Joo, a twentieth-century Kashmiri teacher of the tradition, added a Hindi translation of his own to the second edition of the hymns with Kṣemarāja's commentary. N. K. Kotru's English translation followed in 1985, and Constantina Rhodes Bailly's translation and study, Shaiva Devotional Songs of Kashmir, in 1987.