Abhinavagupta

Abhinavagupta lived in Kashmir in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. His own writings, which are the main source for his life, say that he came from a learned Brahmin family, studied with many teachers in many disciplines, including grammar, logic, poetics and the Śaiva scriptures, and remained unmarried, devoting himself to study, teaching and practice. A late tradition says that he walked into a cave with his disciples and was never seen again.

He was a writer of extraordinary range. His Tantrāloka, “Light on the Tantras”, is a vast synthesis of the theology, ritual and yoga of the non-dual Śaiva traditions. His commentaries on Utpaladeva’s Stanzas on the Recognition of the Lord made the Pratyabhijñā philosophy classical. He also wrote on the Bhagavad Gītā, on hymns, and on aesthetics, where his theory of rasa, the aesthetic relish of emotion, influenced Indian literary theory permanently.

His disciple Kṣemarāja wrote shorter introductions to the system, including The Heart of Recognition, which spread its teaching. Through the modern teacher Swami Lakshmanjoo and translators such as Jaideva Singh, Abhinavagupta’s thought has become widely known outside India.