Insight Editions · No. 386
Tantra Illuminated
The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition
Christopher D. Wallis
Wallis's introduction to classical nondual Saiva Tantra: the View of one Consciousness, the history of the schools from the Kashmiri masters to hatha-yoga, and the practices of grace, initiation and the three means.
A study guide to Tantra Illuminated by Christopher D. Wallis (Mattamayura Press, 2013). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
Classical nondual Śaiva Tantra (c. 800–1200 CE) is a coherent philosophy, history and practice of one divine Consciousness, the forgotten parent of much of Asian religion and of modern yoga, and still a viable path today.
SCOPE
The View (Śiva-Śakti, Five Acts, 36 tattvas, three impurities), the history of nine schools and the Kashmiri exegetes through haṭha-yoga, and practice: grace, initiation, the guru and Abhinavagupta's three means.
KEY FIGURES
Abhinavagupta, Kṣemarāja, Utpala Deva, Somānanda, Vasugupta, Matsyendra and Gorakṣa; scholarship of Alexis Sanderson.
BEST FOR
Yoga practitioners and teachers, meditators and students of Indian religion who want an accurate, practice-oriented introduction.
The Book on One Page
Tantra Illuminated is a scholar-practitioner's map of classical nondual Śaiva Tantra (c. 800–1200 CE) in three parts: its View (philosophy), its history (nine schools and their masters) and its practice (grace, initiation and Abhinavagupta's three means). Its claim is that this almost-forgotten tradition shaped much of Asian religion, gave modern yoga its body practices, and still offers a coherent path today.
Wallis begins by clearing ground. "Tantra" in the West has come to mean sacred sex; in its own sources it means a body of revealed scriptures (tantras) and the initiatory traditions built on them, which from about the 5th century spread across India, Southeast Asia and Tibet. He limits himself to the nondual, Śaiva, Kaula-influenced current, which he calls NŚT, and writes as both a Sanskritist trained in the Sanderson school and an initiated teacher.
Part 1 (the View) sets out the philosophy. Reality is one divine Consciousness that is both Śiva (light, awareness) and Śakti (its dynamic power of self-reflection); the world is that Consciousness contracting itself in play. Wallis teaches the system through its categories: a five-layer self, the three powers of will, knowledge and action, the Five Acts of God (creation, stasis, dissolution, concealment, grace) which every being also performs, the 36 tattvas from Śiva down to earth, the three impurities that make us feel small, separate and imperfect, the four levels of the Word, and five states of awareness. The goal is liberation in life: recognising the contraction as one's own free act while embracing the world rather than leaving it.
Part 2 (history) follows the tradition from the earliest dualist Śaiva Siddhānta through the left-current schools: Vāma, Yāmala, Mantrapīṭha, the Amṛteśvara cult, the goddess-centred Trika with its Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra, the Krama of Kālī, Kubjikā (the source of the six-cakra kuṇḍalinī system) and Śrīvidyā. It then shows how 10th–11th-century Kashmiri exegetes (Vasugupta, Kallaṭa, Somānanda, Utpala Deva, Abhinavagupta, Kṣemarāja) turned revelation into philosophy, and how, after institutions collapsed, Kaula-style lineages fed haṭha-yoga and, through Kṛṣṇamācārya, modern postural yoga.
Part 3 (practice) opens with the preconditions: śaktipāta, an unearned descent of grace, and dīkṣā, an initiation believed to destroy future karma, given by a guru whose title guarantees nothing. Abhinava's three means then run from the top down: śāmbhava (direct intuition, catching the first instant of perception), śākta (refining the stories we tell into ones that dissolve into direct seeing) and āṇava (visualisation, breath, posture, ritual), all ending in the same immersion (samāveśa).
The conclusion is practical. Wallis lists the obstacles to practising today (lost lineages, culture-bound initiation, unreliable gurus, the neo-tantra myth), recommends the Kaula Krama as the school best suited to modern Westerners, and gives criteria for testing a teacher by results.
| Ch | Title | Payload |
|---|---|---|
| P | Preface and Forewords | Why a scholar-practitioner's general book; the method |
| I | An Orientation to Tantra | Definitions; Tantra vs neo-tantra; the scope of NŚT |
| 1 | The View | One Consciousness; Śiva and Śakti; epistemology, teleology, theodicy |
| 2 | Self and Powers | The five-layer self; will, knowledge, action |
| 3 | The Five Acts | Creation to grace, enacted by God and by us |
| 4 | 36 Tattvas, Three Impurities | The emanation map; how contraction works |
| 5 | Word, States, 3 + 1 | Four levels of the Word; five states of awareness; Abhinava's 3 + 1 synthesis |
| 6 | Origins and the Siddhānta | Two streams; the dualist base of the canon |
| 7 | Early Sampradāyas | Vāma, Yāmala, Mantrapīṭha, Amṛteśvara |
| 8 | Trika and the VBT | Three goddesses; the trident in the body; the VBT's meditation techniques |
| 9 | Krama | Kālī; the cycle of cognition; the guru lineage |
| 10 | Kubjikā, Śrīvidyā, Canon | Source of the cakras; desire as divine Will; the hierarchy |
| 11 | Kashmir Shaivism | Spanda, Recognition, Abhinavagupta, rasa |
| 12 | Kaula and Haṭha-Yoga | Macchanda; decline; Patañjali vs Tantra as yoga's parent |
| 13 | Grace, Initiation, Guru | Nine grades of śaktipāta; the two-day dīkṣā; three means |
| 14 | Śāmbhava | Grace, first moment of perception, vowelless mantra |
| 15 | Śākta | Refining vikalpas; six-stage contemplation; inner meaning of practice |
| 16 | Āṇava | Fire-Wheel, five-breath uccāra, divine posture, ritual |
| 17 | Modern Practice | Six hurdles; tantric sex myth; Kaula Krama; testing teachers |
The book's strength is also its bias: it is written from inside the tradition it describes. History and philosophy rest on serious scholarship (Sanderson, Goodall, Tompkins, Mallinson), but the selection and judgements consistently favour the nondual, goddess-centred, Kaula current Wallis practises and teaches, and Part 3 assumes the reader will try it.
Preface and Foreword for Scholars
Wallis presents Tantra Illuminated as the first general-audience introduction to the history and philosophy of classical Tantra (8th to 12th centuries), built on Sanskrit manuscripts and three decades of scholarship. A second, combative foreword defends the scholar-practitioner as the person best placed to write it.
Why the Book Exists
Wallis claims three things no earlier book combined: it is written for practitioners and undergraduates rather than specialists; it gives a thorough overview of classical Tantra; and it rests on original Sanskrit sources plus the research breakthroughs of roughly 2000 to 2012. Outside a small circle of scholars, he argues, the huge impact of Tantra on Asian spirituality is unknown, ignored in university courses or credited to other streams of Indian religion (he names the popular book American Veda as an example).
The book sets out to answer six questions:
- What is Tantra? A definition grounded in the tradition's own sources.
- What are its ideas? The nondual philosophy of Śiva and Śakti.
- What is its history? Its schools, deities and main figures.
- What does it practise? Initiation, ritual, mantra, yoga and contemplation.
- Why does it matter to yoga? Its role as the ancestor of haṭha-yoga.
- Can a Westerner practise it? What survives and what can be adapted.
A further, openly spiritual purpose runs alongside: to offer an immersion in a worldview that, worked with deeply, can trigger radical personal transformation.
Scope and Method
"Classical Tantra" here means the religion of Śiva-Śakti (Shaivism), the dominant religion of medieval India, as distinct from later Hindu Tantra, haṭha-yoga and Western neo-Tantra. Wallis holds that the book also serves readers of Buddhist Tantra, because the practices unique to Buddhist Tantra were adopted from Śaiva Tantra, and teachings such as Dzogchen closely resemble the nondual Śaiva view.
The reading advice is practical. The book mixes an informal voice with denser philosophical passages; readers should read once straight through, skipping what is too dense, then return. Sanskrit in parentheses and the endnotes can be ignored at first. Philosophy comes before history, against scholarly convention, because history "can be dense for anyone not already motivated by love for the philosophy".
The Foreword for Scholars
The second foreword is a manifesto. Religious studies, Wallis argues, enforces a tacit norm of "objective knowledge" that forbids examining religious ideas from a personal or pragmatic angle. Graduate students learn to hide their commitments; the field has atrophied, lacking a method of its own (he quotes Ninian Smart's jibe about "polymethodological doodling").
His alternative is to let students treat their own embodied consciousness as the test site: thought experiments, even body experiments, asking what reality feels like from inside a religious worldview, without requiring conversion. Following José Cabezón, he calls his book "academic theology", a self-conscious constructive theology that only a scholar-practitioner can write, because only such a person can let intellectual insight inform spiritual life and spiritual experience guide inquiry.
His own synthesis came not from the academy but from teaching in yoga studios, where audiences kept pushing him from textual literalism toward the question of what experiences informed the ancient views and what holding them would mean today.
Wallis's core methodological claim is that religious ideas only reveal their real power when applied to one's own life. Studying them while refusing to ask how they might change us avoids their original purpose.
The foreword's portrait of academia is polemical. Many scholars of religion (phenomenologists, anthropologists of practice, Buddhist "scholar-practitioners" such as Cabezón himself) already engage lived experience. The insider-outsider debate is older and more varied than the foreword admits, and the claim that only a practitioner can bridge the two audiences is asserted rather than argued.
An Orientation to Tantra
Tantra, in the scholarly sense, is the Indian spiritual tradition articulated in revealed scriptures called tantras, appearing from about the 6th century CE. Wallis asks readers to set aside the Western "buzzword" and start fresh, then builds a definition from the tradition itself and from Western scholarly lists.
Why the History Matters
Almost no one who uses the word "tantra" in the West knows the tradition scholars study under that name. Yet millions practise yoga, and much of yoga can be traced back to Tantra. Wallis positions the book within a new wave of scholar-practitioner work meant to replace 20th-century writing that was either "exciting but incoherent" (practitioners) or "systematic but dry" (academics).
History matters to a practitioner for a specific reason: a tradition preserves effective teachings and discards ineffective ones, so identifying what persisted across centuries identifies what has worked for many people. That knowledge lets us innovate on a firm foundation rather than invent from idiosyncratic experience. Knowing real history also:
- Accepts the world as it is. It replaces fantasies about the past.
- Builds compassion. It shows the very human difficulty of living and teaching a path.
- Prevents bad arguments. It stops people using shaky history to claim one yoga is "most authentic"; we are left to rely on our own experience instead.
Against a postmodern refusal of facts, Wallis defends historiography as evidence-weighing that can predict and be confirmed, using the analogy of black holes predicted before they were observed. He promises not to present as fact anything lacking strong evidence or consensus. His credentials: twelve years of university Sanskrit study and twenty-four years as a practitioner.
What the Word Means
Tantra has plain meanings ("theory", "doctrine", "book") and a specific one: a divinely revealed scripture, also called āgama, composed in large numbers (hundreds of major texts, thousands of minor ones) for about a thousand years from the 6th century. It also names the system of practice a scripture teaches, so people asked each other, "Which tantra do you follow?"
- "Loom" is a homonym. The popular gloss "tantra = loom or warp" appears in dictionaries but no Tantrik text uses it.
- The tradition's etymology. The Kāmikā-tantra splits the word into √tan (elaborate, expand) and √tra (save, protect): it "elaborates profound matters, especially tattvas and mantras, and saves us".
- Device for expansion. As a mantra is a device (tra) for the mind (man) and a yantra a device for control (yan), a tantra is a device for expanding. The modern "stretches awareness" gloss is not in the sources but is "very much in their spirit".
The Tradition's Own Definition
The only known indigenous definition comes from Rāma Kaṇṭha (c. 950 to 1000 CE), a dualist Śaiva theologian, in his commentary on the Sārdhatriśati-kālottara:
A Tantra is a divinely revealed body of teachings, explaining what is necessary and what is a hindrance in the practice of the worship of the Divine; and also describing the specialized initiation and purification ceremonies that are the necessary prerequisites of Tantrik practice.
Rāma Kaṇṭha, as translated by Wallis- Initiation. A ritual that destroys karmic barriers, brings liberation within one lifetime and grants access to scripture and secret practice.
- Ritual worship. At minimum, evoking a deity's power; more commonly becoming the deity through ritualised meditation.
- A twofold goal. The higher goal of mukti/mokṣa (liberation) and the lower goal of bhukti/siddhi (worldly enjoyment and power), the lower always subordinated to the higher.
- Divine revelation. Teachings spoken by God or the Goddess (or, in Buddhist Tantra, a celestial Buddha); efficacy mattered more than belief.
The third point gives Wallis a sharp test: a practice aimed only at the lower goal, such as improving one's sex life, cannot be called Tantra, however spiritual it sounds.
He adds that the scriptural corpus is almost entirely unpublished, surviving in manuscripts. What English readers know as Tantrik philosophy is mostly commentary by Kashmiri masters; "Kashmir Shaivism" consists entirely of such commentaries, which came to be treated as scripture.
Western Definitions
Scholars treat Tantra as a movement that touched all Indian religions, in this order of influence: Shaivism, Buddhism, Vaishnavism, Jainism, Indian Islam. Śaiva Tantra has historical priority: Buddhist tantras drew on Śaiva ones, rarely the reverse. Tibetan Buddhism is "almost completely Tantrik", and there is little difference between the most Buddhist Śaiva school (the Krama) and the most Śaiva Buddhist school (Dzogchen).
Combining the lists of Tribe, Hodge, Goudriaan, Brooks and Lopez, Wallis gives 27 features. The first group applies broadly; the last ten (marked) apply mainly to nondualist, "left current" Tantra.
| Broad features | Nondual / left-current features |
|---|---|
| Alternative, more rapid path; new revelation | Nondualism |
| Centrality of ritual and deity worship | Revaluation of the body |
| Proliferation of deities | Revaluation of "negative" mental states |
| Visualisation and self-identification with deity | Importance of śakti (power, goddess) |
| Centrality of mantras; installing them on the body | Revaluation of women's status and role |
| Ontological identity of mantra and deity | Transgressive (antinomian) acts |
| Initiation, esotericism and secrecy | "Sexual yoga" |
| Yoga as meditation and visualisation | Cultivation of bliss |
| Maṇḍalas, especially in initiation | Spontaneity (sahaja) |
| Subtle body, cakras, kuṇḍalinī | Rapid transformation into the divine |
| Mapping deities and sites onto the body; linguistic mysticism | |
| Guru; worldly aims by magical means; householders; god/goddess symbolism |
Six features are near-universal: yogic meditation, mantras, maṇḍalas, guru, initiation and ritual worship. Since all but maṇḍalas also appear outside Tantra, the decisive marker is a seventh, deity yoga: working with a deity to which one is linked by initiation, through its mantra, yantra, visualisation or image. A practice is indisputably Tantrik when it involves deities and mantras revealed in Tantrik scriptures, or appears in a Tantrik source.
Questions and Answers
- Is Tantra part of "Hinduism"? Wallis argues there was no "Hinduism" before the colonial period: Europeans lumped all non-Muslim Indians as "Hindoos" (from the Persian for people east of the Indus). Indians began using the term in the early 1800s and defined it by Vedic authority, which excluded Buddhism yet included Shaivism, though Shaivism granted the Vedas no special authority. Today Hinduism is real, a "stew" that has blurred the older distinct religions (Brāhmanism, Shaivism, Shāktism, Vaishnavism) and is more cultural identity than creed.
- Must a practitioner convert? No. Tantrik practice builds an esoteric divine identity within one's cultural identity. Śaiva Tantra taught, uniquely in India, that initiates form one community regardless of birth, and that a sincere foreigner is a better candidate than an insincere brāhmin.
- How does Tantra relate to yoga? Yoga as a meditative discipline predates Tantra by about a thousand years; Tantra absorbed and expanded it (complex prāṇāyāma, visualisation, mantra science, postures, mudrās, cakras). The scriptures cover four topics: jñāna (doctrine), kriyā (ritual), yoga (mystical practice) and caryā (conduct and vows). After the loss of royal patronage under Muslim conquest, Śaiva Tantra was simplified into haṭha-yoga, which claimed descent from Matsyendra; haṭha-yoga's āsanas and prāṇāyāmas inspired modern postural yoga in the early 20th century.
- What about the Kāma-sūtra? It has nothing to do with Tantra; it belongs to the science of pleasure, whose goal is pleasure itself. The erotic carvings at Khajurāho are not Tantrik either.
- Isn't Tantra about divine sexuality? Barely. Sex is virtually absent from Śaiva Tantrik literature. Only the Kaula lineages have a "sexualised" view of reality; the sexual ritual is taught in one text out of many hundreds and called secret. It was primarily a meditative exercise. Western "Tantric sex" is spiritualised sexuality; original Kaula Tantra is sensual, embodied spirituality.
Why Nondual Śaiva Tantra
The book focuses on nondual Śaiva Tantra because it is Wallis's expertise, because it is less known than Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, and because he has seen how strongly it resonates with Western yoga practitioners. Part 1 covers philosophy, Part 2 history, Part 3 practice, followed by a conclusion on practising in the modern world.
The claim that "there is no such thing as Hinduism" before colonialism is a strong version of a contested scholarly position. Historians such as David Lorenzen and Andrew Nicholson argue that a sense of shared Vedic-Purāṇic identity, and the use of "Hindu" by Indians themselves, predates British rule by centuries. Wallis's point about distinct medieval religions stands; the sharp break he describes is overstated.
The View of Nondual Śaiva Tantra
Part 1 opens by asking readers to see that everyone lives inside narratives, and that a religion is a metanarrative we test by adopting it. Wallis then defines nondual Śaiva Tantra (NŚT), gives its View in one dense paragraph, unpacks it, and works through epistemology, teleology, phenomenology, desire and theodicy.
Stories and the Need to Question
Entering Śaiva Tantra means relinquishing not only ideas about Tantra but deep assumptions about reality. Wallis starts with narratives: all generalisations and value judgments are stories, false in that they distort reality and true in that they relate to it. "I'm happily married" or "I'm bad at maths" reduces a complex array of experiences to an apparent fact. The useful question is not whether the story is true but whether it serves us.
A religion is a metanarrative designed to achieve a goal such as liberation. Engaging Tantra means asking whether its stories are compelling enough to overwrite some of ours. Some branches teach openly that nothing in words is absolute Truth; a narrative is valuable insofar as it leads beyond language to wordless, immediate revelation.
The Definition
A spiritual movement from northern India, peaking in the 9th to 12th centuries, characterised by:
- Direct experience of a divine reality with a transcendent aspect (Śiva, pure consciousness, ground of being) and an immanent aspect (Śakti, the flowing energy that is the manifest universe).
- Initiation into a guru-disciple relationship and an egalitarian kula (community).
- Practice in four aspects: contemplation of View teachings, meditative ritual, yogic techniques of the subtle body, and aesthetic cultivation of the senses, aimed at both worldly success and liberation.
The definition applies to Buddhist nondual Tantra too, with other names (such as Buddha-nature). One thing alone exists: the Divine. Śiva is personified as male but understood as nonpersonal, utterly transcendent Light of Awareness; Śakti, personified as female, is the entire manifest universe, to be reverenced as Goddess. They are one, shown as two because two interdependent modes of experience exist: the enstatic (turning within to the quiescent ground) and the ecstatic (creative, outward, embodied expression). A harmonious balance of both is "the only true spiritual liberation".
Practice was mostly a householder path. Initiates kept jobs and families and joined a kula that rejected caste, class and gender divisions. NŚT's novelty lay in subtle-body yoga and the idea that virtually anything can become practice, because all things are the Goddess. The body became a vehicle of realisation, sense experience became worship, and the path was called "the new and easy method".
Why View Comes First
In India the first step on a path is orientation to the View (darśana): worldview, way of seeing, map. Wallis's analogy: the best running shoes are useless if you run the wrong way; with the right direction even a slow walker arrives. The Buddhist Eightfold Path also begins with right View.
The Western assumption that "yoga works regardless of belief" is true only to a limited extent. Yoga gives power, and power magnifies what is present: it makes a good person a saint and "a jerk into an even greater and more effective jerk". This explains medieval yogis turned sorcerers and modern teachers who exploit students.
- Right View is not recitation. It means having "marinated" mind and heart in the teachings until they illuminate experience.
- Alignment of View, practice and fruit. A long-time practitioner who is not stable, kind, clear and open has a misalignment among these three.
- View dissolves views. The objection that we want freedom from concepts is answered: one cannot leap from a flawed foundation to freedom; right View first releases distorted views, then goes beyond views.
- Abhinavagupta's example. Yoga done from the belief that "something is wrong with me" can only fulfil the ego's limited purpose; yoga done from the View that you are already a perfect expression of the Divine can take you all the way.
The View in Seed Form
Wallis gives the whole View in one paragraph, here compressed:
All that exists is one infinite divine Consciousness, free and blissful, which projects within its awareness a multiplicity of apparently differentiated subjects and objects. This creation, a divine play, arises from the impulse within Consciousness to express its self-knowledge in action, an impulse arising from love. When finite subjects identify with their limited cognitions instead of the pulsation of pure Awareness, they suffer. Spiritual practice reveals that the powers of Consciousness, Bliss, Willing, Knowing and Acting make up all individual experience, triggering recognition that one's real identity is "the Whole in every part".
The View, condensed from Wallis's seed paragraphUnpacking the View
Theistic monism. Only one thing exists (monism), and it is self-aware, so it can be called a being (theism). "To make it personal: you are not separate from God/dess and never have been. Indeed, you are the very means by which She knows Herself."
Consciousness is the ground. No reality can be shown that is not the content of someone's experience, and all experience is pervaded by awareness. Wallis anticipates the physicist's objection (unseen objects) by separating consciousness from perception: a modelled object is still known. The specifically spiritual claim is that all limited minds are vantage points within one unbroken field; otherwise we could not share a coherent universe. "There is only one Perceiver and only one Doer." This cannot be proved externally, because Consciousness is prior to all proofs; scientific validation of spirituality is "absurd".
The Light and the fish. Reality is one field of energy, the Light of Consciousness (prakāśa), vibrating at countless frequencies. Like fish asking "what is water?", we least notice the constant medium. Our senses act as frequency analysers; mental operations harden into constructs that filter perception, and the final error is mistaking constructs for reality. That error is "the only cause of suffering".
the Heart (hṛdaya, the preferred name) · the Essence (sāra) · Vibration (spanda) · Absolute Potential (visarga) · Bliss of Awareness (cidānanda) · the All-Pervasive (vibhava) · the Totality (kula) · Intimate Fusion (saṅghaṭṭa) · Vision (dṛk) · Potency (sāmarthya) · Experience (bhoga) · the Fierce One (caṇḍī) · Supreme Power (parā śakti) · Devourer of Time (kālakarṣiṇī) · the Word (vāk) · the Wave (ūrmi) · the Eternal (nityā) · the Nameless (anākhya). There are many names so that at least one will penetrate the practitioner.
Abhinavagupta's definition of God, from the Tantrasāra (which Wallis calls Essence of the Tantras): "It is only the unbounded Light of Consciousness, reposing in innate bliss, endowed with the Powers of Will, Knowledge, and Action, that we call God."
What the Divine is and does. Its essential nature is freedom (svātantrya) and bliss (ānanda); practice removes impediments to seeing this. Its activity is creation and dissolution: the projection, within Consciousness, of subjects and objects. Each object actualises a potential in the Light (prakāśa); each subject adds self-reflection (vimarśa), a unique way for the One to reflect on itself. Vimarśa can also be translated "representation": Consciousness re-presents itself to itself.
Recognition. Every encounter is a chance to recognise yourself in the other and expand identity, until you experience yourself in all things: fullness (pūrṇatā). Then "mother", "American" or "yogī" become roles played like an actor playing Hamlet, passionately but without identification. A physicist who realised he was made of the particles he studied saw that physics is the universe contemplating itself.
Play (krīḍā), not evolution. Creation is a free, joyous act done for its own sake. The View is not evolutionary: divine reality is fully expressed in each moment, though our capacity to see it grows. Wallis prefers "play" to "art" because art implies representation and artifice.
Three powers. Beyond what Śiva-Śakti is (Consciousness, Bliss, Freedom) are three powers describing what it does: icchā (Will), jñāna (Knowledge) and kriyā (Action), unfolding in that order in every instant.
Why is life hard? The question assumes "hard" is not divine. Śiva-consciousness rejoices equally in pain or pleasure. This "tough nut" is resolved only by nondual experience.
Pain versus suffering. Pain is natural feedback and can be beautiful; grief is a form of love. Suffering is mind-made resistance ("I hate this", "I don't deserve this"). Its root is misidentification: to become you, the Goddess temporarily forgets the rest of herself. You see the tip of an iceberg; the pattern of the whole universe is imprinted at your depths. Suffering falls away when you honour both the tip and the whole.
Tradition teaches us that ignorance is the sole cause of bondage: it is taught under the name "impurity" in scripture. When the power of all-encompassing insight arises, it is completely uprooted.
Abhinavagupta, TantrasāraPurpose of practice. Not union (you are already one) nor self-improvement (you cannot be more perfect), but destabilising skewed constructs about yourself until they fall apart. Then comes a flash of recognition that the powers that create and dissolve the universe flow in you. Fear and pettiness drop away. The resulting state of immersion is samāveśa: present, relaxed yet focused, expansive yet grounded. The Tantra holds that Presence can become your default state, reversing the current default of subject-object duality, because unity is more fundamental.
Five Philosophical Questions
- Ontology. What is being? (Answered by the View and the next chapter.)
- Epistemology. How do we know?
- Teleology. Is existence heading somewhere?
- Phenomenology. What can experience tell us?
- Theodicy. Why suffering, if all is divine?
Epistemology: the three supports
Abhinavagupta's bhāvanā-krama (contemplative inquiry) rests on three supports. When all three agree, we have truth; one or two give no certainty, and staying uncertain keeps us learning.
| Support | Sanskrit | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Sound reflection on experience | sat-tarka | Combines perception and inference; never claims deductive certainty |
| A true teacher | sad-guru | Skilled in inquiry and its fruit; guards against your idiosyncratic reading of scripture |
| Scripture | sad-āgama | Collective wisdom transmitted only if it works; guards against an aberrant teacher |
Indian logic prefers inference (the smoke-on-the-mountain syllogism) to deduction, so one "never decides that you know for sure", preserving wonder. People confuse experience with interpretation: "anything you can say in words about your experience is an interpretation". The process ends when wisdom is embodied, and the words of the teaching seem flat beside the experience.
Teleology: no grand plan
NŚT denies universal teleology: there is no future moment when God will be more revealed. It allows an individual teleology: awakening, once set in motion, will bear fruit, even across lives. Two corrections follow:
- Grace plus effort. Grace sets the conditions; effort sets the speed. The effort is gentle: letting go of limited knowledge, not striving toward a distant goal.
- Sudden or gradual. Liberation unfolds gradually but can complete in a sudden leap, since it is not the product of a quota of practice.
You do not need to finish therapy first: your real nature was never wounded. Often you wake up, then the mind slowly realigns over a sometimes disorienting integration period.
Wallis rejects "I don't need to work on myself because I am Light". Awakening to essence-nature must be followed by alignment of the conditioned self, or you get a split personality. He contrasts this with Patañjali's goal of isolating a soul from the world, which the Tantra "utterly rejects". Individual awakening and freedom of body-mind (āṇava-samāveśa) precede śākta-samāveśa, unity with all things.
Finally, liberation as a concept is a teaching tool. "Liberation is complete when we are no longer waiting to be liberated", but that teaching suits advanced students who are still chasing their concept, not beginners.
Phenomenology: this is as God as it gets
Since everything is Consciousness, every experience is an experience of God: "Śiva is the substance of every experience whatsoever." Wallis rejects "some things are more God than others" (the Animal Farm fallacy), because that would require something non-divine diluting God.
"This, whatever is happening right now, is as God as it gets", but not "as free as it gets". Freedom is not wanting the moment to be different. Freedom is not an experience, since all experiences pass. Ānanda is the chief by-product of surrender and a feedback signal: if you think you have accepted reality and feel no relief, you have surrendered to your story, not to reality. The greatest pitfall is confusing by-product with source; the goal is Truth, not happiness.
Desire
Ordinary desire binds because it reinforces the belief that you are incomplete. It becomes liberating when traced to its root: you want the feeling you believe the object will bring, and beneath every want lies the desire for fullness of being. "All longing is longing for God." A second kind, pure desire, flows outward from the core as an impulse to share yourself; the Tantra honours it unreservedly.
Theodicy
- No evil as such. "Good" and "evil" are labels; the real variable is degree of ignorance: nonconceptual disconnection from essence-nature, and the misaligned worldview built on it.
- Love as the only corrective. Moralising fails with disconnected people; only experiences of compassion offer counter-evidence. "All beings are Śiva, in relative degrees of self-concealment or self-revelation."
- Activism. The most effective activism is awakening and helping others awaken; external controls compensate for unawakeness and fail in proportion to it.
- Freedom over safety. Consciousness is autonomous, so the universe is open to every possibility; ignorance must be allowed consequences to mature into wisdom.
- Why ignorance? To manifest X is to withdraw all that is not X. A self-aware form mistakes its manifest part for the whole. Consciousness, enamoured of its creation, forgets the rest of itself: "an innocent mistake with not-so-innocent consequences".
- Suffering as feedback. "Anything can be for a blessing"; the word śiva itself means auspicious.
A college friend's parable: in a world under your total control, you would eventually grow bored and jaded. A machine appears whose button promises joys and nightmares and total forgetting. "The question is not whether you'll push the button. It's just, how long will you wait?" We prefer freedom with suffering to control without challenge.
To the objection of war and concentration camps, Wallis cites Thich Nhat Hanh, who awakened during the Vietnam War, and Viktor Frankl, who found in a Nazi camp "the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude".
The theodicy is psychologically rich but philosophically thin on moral responsibility. Calling evil merely "ignorance" and suffering "feedback" risks explaining away atrocity and blaming victims for their "stories". The Frankl example shows what one person may choose, not that structural cruelty is a blessing. Wallis's own "No, not if by blessing you mean a good thing" concedes the problem without resolving it.
The Categories of Tantrik Thought: Self and Powers
Nondual Śaiva Tantra teaches through lists, and Wallis warns that each list is a complete map of reality cut from a different angle, like slicing one marbled cake several ways. This chapter covers the first two: the five-layered self and the five (plus one) Powers of God. Master any single map and you would not need the others.
How to Read the Lists
The lists look redundant to big-picture readers and overwhelming to detail lovers. Both problems dissolve once you see each list as a separate roadmap for sādhanā (practice). Wallis's advice: read them all, then contemplate deeply the one that makes most sense, and later another, since understanding one illuminates the rest. He notes that the Anusāra style of modern yoga drew its structure directly from the Five Powers, Five Acts and 36 tattvas.
The Five-Layered Self
The Tantrik answer to "Who am I?" is a matryoshka doll: nested layers from gross to subtle, periphery to core. Some texts add an outermost sixth layer, your stuff (vastu).
The layers are not rigidly separated: "it is the nature of each layer to be pervaded by all the layers beneath it." The subtler a layer, the more it pervades. This does not denigrate the body, which is the only layer where all layers can be experienced at once.
Suffering arises from failing to perceive the whole of your being and its natural hierarchy, by identifying "self" with only one or two layers. Each identification shows itself in paired statements, because yoga psychology holds you cannot identify with one side of a pair without the other: if "I'm pretty" pleases you, "I'm ugly" will hurt equally.
- Stuff. "I am rich", "I am poor", or yelling "You hit me!" when a car bumps yours. Loving objects is fine; the problem is an identity dependent on them, as when others' opinions of your home feed pride or self-hatred.
- Body. "I am fat, thin, young, old." The body's one universal truth is that it decays and dies. Ancient yogīs gazed at cremation grounds for days. Wallis observes that a culture obsessed with the physical hides death away, propagating a fantasy of immortality.
- Heart-mind. "I am smart, stupid, happy, sad." In Sanskrit, thought and feeling are two ends of one spectrum of citta: thoughts are vibrations (vṛttis) with more linguistic charge, feelings with more affective charge. Most of us identify most strongly here, so we believe the mind's stories, its oversimplified constructs (vikalpas). Free of this, "we certainly don't believe everything we think."
- Prāṇa. "I am energized, drained." Here individuality is transcended, since all beings share it. Prāṇa is the interface of body and mind. Crankiness with no clear cause is often prāṇa depletion, fixable with food, sleep or rest, not psychology.
- The Void. Empty of form and energy, "Śiva without Śakti", the layer of dreamless sleep, reachable in meditation. Meditators who declare "I am the Void" become transcendentalists, peaceful but often unable to integrate, care for the body or relate to others. "A Tāntrika renounces nothing."
- Consciousness. The core (cit or saṃvit): impossible to objectify, hardest to grasp because it does all grasping, and identical with the supreme Divinity. Because it is both transcendent and immanent, identifying with it lets you experience any state as divine.
Prāṇa (outward, exhalation) · Apāna (downward, inhalation, elimination) · Samāna (equalising, digestive fire, fusion of breaths) · Udāna (uprising: speech, sneezing, rise of kuṇḍalinī) · Vyāna (pervasive: limbs, distribution of nutrients). All five must work for an enjoyable embodiment.
Identification with the core takes the form of experience, not thought: "I am blissfully free self-aware Consciousness", expressed as śivo'ham ("I am the Divine") or best as pūrṇo'ham, "I am that 'I' which encompasses all things."
Experientially realizing the primacy of the Conscious Self as the true Knower and Agent, and realizing that the other layers of individuality, from the Void to the body, are mere attributes of it, is what characterizes samāveśa.
Utpala Deva, Stanzas on the Recognition of the DivineThe practice shows the classic Tantrik twofold movement: transcendence, then pervasion. You negate identification with stuff, body, mind, prāṇa and Void in turn; on realising the core, you discover you are all the layers you negated. "I am (only) this body" becomes "I am divine Consciousness, vibrating in the form of this body." Wallis borrows Paul Muller-Ortega's question: where is your "individual identity assemblage point"? Negation is a tool for deeper affirmation.
The Five (+1) Powers of God
The Powers (śaktis) are the main way NŚT describes what the Divine is: "God/dess is simply the blissful conscious agent of all knowing and doing." Recognising these Powers as your own triggers the realisation that you are not different from God.
| Power | Sanskrit | What it is | In your life |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freedom (meta-power) | svātantrya-śakti | Context in which the other five operate | Total autonomy of the Divine |
| Consciousness | cit-śakti | Foundation of all reality | Being aware of awareness itself |
| Bliss | ānanda-śakti | Contentment independent of circumstance | Reposing in the centre of awareness |
| Will | icchā-śakti | Precognitive creative urge to self-express | Energy that replenishes rather than drains |
| Knowing | jñāna-śakti | Organic patterning, the deep structures of reality | Mastering a field's forms and laws |
| Action | kriyā-śakti | Concrete manifestation; the culmination | Action done for its own sake |
Consciousness. It is present in every experience; the only question is whether it is predominant. You can be fully present with a stubbed toe or a sunset while enveloped in "I am a conscious being experiencing this vibration." When awareness itself predominates, no contraction is felt as limitation. Following Kṣemarāja's Heart of the Doctrine of Recognition, this comes spontaneously (walking silently in nature, falling in love) or through practice, toward awareness "ever arising, ever new" (nityodita).
In NŚT, meditation primarily strips away false notions of what you are. Since you are already That, nothing need be added, though capacities must be strengthened. This is not therapy aimed at feeling better; surrendering self-images can be "searingly painful". The central tool is discernment (tarka), refining concepts until the last one falls away and you face reality directly.
Bliss. Ānanda "inheres in Consciousness like heat in fire." Ordinary happiness (sukha) depends on circumstances and alternates with misery (duḥkha); ānanda can coexist even with grief. Reflect on your best moments (nature, applause, a perfect ski slope, lovemaking): the common element was that you were fully present and connected with reality, not a concept of it. Others present did not share your experience, so the moment was not intrinsically special. External things can at best trigger expanded awareness, which itself is the cause of bliss. We open only when it feels safe enough or exciting enough; the path teaches internal triggers so we need nothing outside to change.
Take a deep, slow breath, imagining a cooling, silvery lunar in-breath (apāna) landing you in the space of the Heart. After several, stay centred there and extend awareness on a warming solar out-breath that connects you to your surroundings. In-breath releases; out-breath illuminates.
Will. Icchā is not desire (which needs prior knowledge) but a precognitive creative urge, the impulse behind a universe and behind art done for its own sake. It arises when Consciousness reposes in blissful self-awareness. Activity pursued as self-expression replenishes instead of draining, so a yogī must express his nature through work, or "change them or become desiccated."
Knowing. Will must be poured into the structures of knowing or inspiration fizzles out. Jñāna-śakti gives the laws of physics and the patterns of life. A jazz musician improvises freely because she mastered form: submitting to a discipline is what makes free expression possible, on the spiritual path as in any craft.
Action. Kriyā-śakti makes things actually exist, the "lowest" Power and the culmination. Wallis distinguishes kriyā from karma: karma is volitional action aimed at a result, which binds; kriyā is spontaneous action expressing your nature, which does not. One teacher accepts favours only if done "with all the delight of a child feeding a dog, because I don't want to have to pay for it later." Practice works best when enjoyed for its own sake.
The lists are offered as interchangeable maps, but Wallis gives little guidance on how to tell which map fits whom, and his examples (ski slopes, stockbrokers, Anusāra's "hug inward to the midline") tie medieval categories to a modern Western yoga studio. The claim that the bliss you felt "has one and only one cause" is a phenomenological argument by elimination: it shows presence was common to the moments, not that it was the sole cause.
The Five Acts of God
If the Powers describe what God/dess is, the five Acts describe what S/He does, and "they are all S/He ever does." Wallis maps them onto Śiva Naṭarāja, then argues the same five Acts run inside every cognition you have, which is why performing them "reveals the ultimate reality of one's own Self". Along the way he sets out ābhāsa theory, the Tantra's account of how objects appear.
The Five Acts on Naṭarāja's Body
Kṣemarāja opens the Heart of Recognition: "Reverence to the Divine, who ceaselessly performs the Five Acts, and who, by so doing, reveals the ultimate reality of one's own Self, brimming over with the bliss of Consciousness!" The Acts (pañca-kṛtya) run at every scale, from the cosmos to your moment-to-moment experience.
| Act | Sanskrit | Better rendered | Naṭarāja |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creation | sṛṣṭi | Emission, flowing forth | Upper right hand with ḍamaru drum: the pulse (spanda) of reality |
| Maintenance | sthiti | Stasis for a duration | Lower right hand in abhaya-mudrā, "Do not fear" |
| Dissolution | saṃhāra | Reabsorption, retraction | Upper left hand holding fire |
| Concealment | tirodhāna | Occlusion, forgetting | Arm across the chest, hand downturned |
| Grace | anugraha | Revealing, remembering | Upraised foot, source of the guru's grace |
- Emission, not creation. Sṛṣṭi is the Divine flowing forth into form, closer to the word's root.
- Reabsorption, not destruction. Mainstream Hinduism (which, Wallis says, "has almost nothing to do with Śaiva Tantra") casts Śiva as destroyer. In the Tantra, saṃhāra is drawing creation back into the luminous ground.
- Concealment is the hardest Act. To manifest one form, Consciousness must suppress all others. "In order for God to fully become you... She must temporarily forget everything about Herself that is not you", a freely chosen self-limitation, Sianna Sherman's "auspicious squeeze". Failing to express any potency would be self-negation, impossible for a being whose nature is love.
- Grace completes concealment. The concealing hand points at the foot of grace: one implies the other. Grace is reconciliation: it shows your individuality as a unique expression of the Whole, without relinquishing it.
Abhinavagupta dismisses the idea that God rewards the worthy as the "nonsensical prattling of the dualists". What activates grace is the subtle inner movement by which we open: "as soon as we make space within our hearts, the power of grace moves in to fill the vacuum", in proportion to our openness. Wallis reads anugraha etymologically as "that which follows grasping", the blessedness that follows glimpsing your own potential, while admitting he has found no primary source for that reading.
Ābhāsa Theory: How Objects Appear
The universe is self-similar, like a fractal, so the cosmic Acts are also the movements of individual cognition. To see how, Wallis first explains the status of "external" objects.
Perceiver and perceived arise together. Consciousness manifests an object by contracting to vibrate at its "wavelength", whether a dragonfly, the colour blue or a feeling of happiness. That requires a matching limited subject, "the mind". Internal and external are two coordinated contractions of one Goddess Consciousness; no external reality is shown to exist without a corresponding internal one.
Objection: the object has priority Many people perceive the same object and describe it alike.
NŚT's reply They are aspects of one Perceiver, which divides precisely to view the object from different perspectives. No two perspectives match, which is what justifies each individual's existence.
For concepts, the reverse objection fails too: creating a concept is a social act of shared meaning-making. Any object known by more than one person is cocreated by all its perceivers, which explains why no individual has total autonomy over reality, and why unlimited autonomy requires subsuming individuality in universality.
The awareness of the knower and the known is common to all embodied beings; but for yogīs, this is the difference: they pay careful attention to the connection.
Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra, verse 106The yogī watches Consciousness split into three: object (prameya), perceiver (pramātṛ), perception (pramāṇa), all present in "I see a pot". Grammar programs us to see three separate things; reflection shows none exists without the other two, except the unlimited divine "I" that grounds all three.
Many shinings of the one Light. Each trait of an object (tall, round, blue, sandalwood) is an ābhāsa, "a shining", a vibration of the Light; "shine" and "manifest" are the same Sanskrit verb. The mind is a synthesiser that assembles ābhāsas into "pot". The decisive ones are subjective: how much you like it, how useful it is, and what prior experience you have of it. There is no pot in general, only particular pots.
Wallis argues Western materialist culture treats consensus traits (physical parameters) as "objective reality" and discounts the subjective ābhāsas, though they are never absent and matter most to each person. NŚT counts appeal and utility as part of the object's reality. Since we argue, and even kill each other, over the subjective layer, acknowledging it turns disagreement into cooperative inquiry.
The Five Acts in Every Thought
Drawing on the Krama school, Wallis maps the Acts onto each cognition:
- Emission. An object arises from the void of pure potential. You never experience a familiar object exactly the same way twice, so you create it anew.
- Stasis. You hold it, perhaps as a train of connected images, each with its own mini-cycle.
- Dissolution. Feeling "done", you release it into the ground.
- The choice. In the gap at the end of a train of thought, a natural "coming back to yourself", you either reveal or conceal your own agency.
This is the great secret: we touch down in our fundamental nature many times a day, every time we release one thought and before we turn to the next. Usually we perform concealment, launching a new thought, often an evaluation of the last. The longer the gap, the better the odds of recognition, so the yogī seeks to prolong the space between thoughts: hence meditation.
You create, hold and dissolve thoughts, then choose to repose in your nature or reach for the next pleasure. Recognising "one eternal Perceiver" of the cycle means you were never a victim of circumstance: no one else determines your inner state. Choosing differently is hard because of saṃskāras (subliminal impressions), but you are no longer at the mercy of thoughts once you identify as their ground.
The argument for the co-dependence of subject and object proves less than claimed. That knowing an object always involves a knower is close to a tautology; it does not show the object's existence depends on one. The reply to the realist ("all perceivers are aspects of one Perceiver") assumes the nondual conclusion it is meant to establish. As contemplative bhāvanā it works; as philosophy it needs the fuller Pratyabhijñā arguments Wallis only gestures at.
The 36 Tattvas and the Three Impurities
The tattva system is the Tantra's master map of embodied experience: thirty-six "principles of reality" from Earth up to Śiva, plus a secret thirty-seventh, the Heart. Śaiva Tantra took Sāṅkhya's 25 tattvas (followed by Patañjali) and added eleven above them, which it claimed the Sāṅkhyas had missed. Wallis then adds the three malas that the list leaves out, and the awakening, śaktipāta, that starts their removal.
Reading the Map
Tattva literally means "that-ness". The list runs top-down as the order of creation (sṛṣṭi-krama) and bottom-up as the order of liberation (saṃhāra-krama); Wallis climbs from the bottom. Earth is not "lowest" but most complete: at Śiva all principles exist in potential, at Earth all are fully expressed.
| Tier | Tattvas | What they are |
|---|---|---|
| Pure Universe | 1–5: Śiva, Śakti, Sadāśiva, Īśvara, Śuddha-vidyā | Phases of God's own awareness; reaching any one is liberation |
| World-source | 6: Māyā | Power of differentiation by which One appears as many |
| Five shells (kañcukas) | 7–11: kalā, vidyā, rāga, kāla, niyati | Limited forms of divine Powers that make a finite subject |
| Soul and matter | 12–13: puruṣa, prakṛti | Contracted subject; matter/energy and the three guṇas |
| Inner instrument | 14–16: buddhi, ahaṅkāra, manas | Discernment, ego, attention |
| The twenty | 17–36: senses, action capacities, subtle and gross elements | The world as perceived and acted on |
The Lower Twenty and the Mind
The four groups of five align: Earth with odour, smelling and evacuation; Water with flavour, tasting and reproduction; Fire with appearance, seeing and locomotion; Wind with touch, feeling and manipulation; Space with sound, hearing and speech. Each element has a bīja mantra (lam, vam, ram, yam, ham). The senses are frequency analysers that translate vibration into apparently solid things.
A full meeting of sense and object is rarer than it seems, because most of us filter the world "through a glass, darkly". Hence sensual meditations (savouring food, music, a tea ceremony), called "feeding the goddesses of the senses", which repay you with aesthetic rapture. The mind-bound live in a dull world; the transcendentalist in a "shadow world": both starve the goddesses.
- Manas (16). Attention and sense-processing; the faculty to train "gently and lovingly" in meditation.
- Ahaṅkāra (15). The "identity-constructor", simply what you think you are: a collection of self-images based on past stories, a fluid entity that hardens into "a static prison". Many traditions treat ego as an enemy; in Tantra an enemy is an ally viewed wrongly, so the ego is purified and expanded infinitely until it merges into the ocean of Consciousness (pūrṇo'ham vimarśa).
- Buddhi (14). Reason, imagination and above all discernment between what to hold close (upādeya) and lay aside (heya). Abhinavagupta calls discernment (tarka) the highest yoga practice and the only one that leads directly to liberation.
Buddhi misjudges because of saṃskāras, impressions of the past. When the tide (reality) flows over sand full of footprints, it flows differently. Our pattern-matching brains assume the present resembles the past on the slightest resemblance; this unconscious projection is the primary reason we cannot see the present as it is. Yoga polishes the mirror. Masters seem psychic because "they just see without obstruction". The buddhi extends through the body, so "gut instinct" is buddhi tied to deep saṃskāras and can mislead without practice.
- Prakṛti (13). Matter/energy as one word, which Wallis notes the West lacked until Einstein (1905). Body and mind are a continuum. As primordial matter it balances the three guṇas: sattva (lucidity), rajas (energy) and tamas (inertia). It is "secondary" because Māyā is higher.
- Puruṣa (12). The top principle for Sāṅkhya and Patañjali, who posit many separate souls. In the Tantra it is Śiva veiled by five limitations, a phase of contraction that may last thousands of lifetimes but is still "a wave on the ocean of being".
The Five Shells (Kañcukas)
In the original understanding, Śiva first contracts to a point of absolute limitation, then equips himself with five limited capacities, "shell" or "armour" for a dual world. Hence Śiva + kañcukas = jīva. Each shell is the limited form of a divine Power, to be expanded, not destroyed.
| Shell | Limits | Full form | Wallis's point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalā (7) | Power of action | Kriyā-śakti | The root shell; also "a sliver of the moon", waxing toward fullness |
| Vidyā (8) | Knowledge | Jñāna-śakti (unmeṣa, Unfolding) | Not ignorance but knowing a little and thinking it is all |
| Rāga (9) | Will, as craving | Icchā-śakti | Nonspecific craving rationalised as love, money, power; truly craving fullness |
| Kāla (10) | Time | Timeless simultaneity | One second per second; past and future make growth possible |
| Niyati (11) | Causality and place | All-pervasiveness | Binds you to your own karma and your location |
Rāga means "colour": desires dye the mind. Since every other desire leaves the craving intact, desire becomes an opportunity to trace back to the source. Even Śiva, in the myths, turned his addiction to gambling and wine into one for "shattering the fear of all beings".
Wallis's chart places NOW at the centre with four exits: guilt/regret and nostalgia (past), anxiety and fantasy (future). Most people accept that guilt and worry hurt but excuse nostalgia and fantasy; yoga psychology says fantasy removes you from the present just as effectively. The aim is not an animal's timeless present but to be centred in the present with past and future held lightly, citing Heidegger.
Niyati binds you to your own karmic results. Actions done as service or sacrifice, invested in process but unattached to outcome, carry no charge, so the liberated being is free of fate, though pre-liberation karma may still ripen.
Māyā and the Pure Universe
In other traditions māyā means illusion. In Tantra it is the "world-source" (jagad-yoni), the Divine's power to project itself and to make One appear many. It deludes, but that is a freely chosen part of Self-exploration: the same power that causes trouble is the power by which God glorifies Himself. Like gold made into earrings and anklets, all things differ "only in name, form, and function, not in essence".
The top five are "not a place" but phases of God's awareness:
- Śuddha-vidyā (5). Pure mantra-wisdom, home of all seventy million mantras, which are conscious beings like angels. A guru whose initiate falls away must ritually apologise to the mantras. A mantra, its deity and its goal are one: Lakṣmī's mantra is her sonic body and the vibration of abundance. Experience: "I am this!" (idam evāham). Power: action.
- Īśvara (4). The personal God (Kṛṣṇa, Allāh, Avalokiteśvara, YHWH), the level most monotheisms take as highest. Power: knowing. Experience: "I am This; This am I", which Wallis compares to Exodus 3:14. The difference between Īśvara and others at this level is "one of office, not of nature".
- Sadāśiva (3). Beyond named deity: the first faint differentiation of God and the idea of a universe. Power: will. Experience: "I am this", with the "I" enveloping the "this". "Still Śiva": the Absolute loses none of its divinity.
- Śakti (2) and Śiva (1). In nondual schools they switch places; neither has priority. Śakti is all energy, so the universe is the Goddess's body. Śiva is the still ground, the "still point at the center of the turning world", yet with kiṃcit-calana, "an exquisitely sweet undulation".
One school, several definitions Vijñāna-bhairava: Śiva is space, Śakti energy. Recognition school: Śiva is the Light of manifestation (prakāśa), Śakti self-reflective awareness (vimarśa), together cid-ānanda.
Krama: no Śiva at all Both poles are Goddesses: dark, emaciated Kālī as the void that devours, and white, full-bodied Parā as the Light. Abhinavagupta: two forms of one Goddess. The schemas "need no reconciliation".
The traditions keep the word "God" despite rejecting "a guy in the sky", because they want a path of intimate relationship, and they define God nondually: "the unbounded Light of Consciousness, reposing in its innate Bliss, fully connected to its Powers of Willing, Knowing, and Acting."
Tattva Zero: The Heart
The secret tattva #0, Śiva-Śakti in perfect fusion, is "the key to understanding the whole philosophy". It does not crown the list, because to transcend is to exclude; the Ultimate must transcend and encompass at once. Abhinava's lineage calls it the Heart (hṛdaya) or Essence (sāra), also Visarga, Spanda, Ūrmi, Dṛk and Yāmala, the Couple; Goddess Tantra worships it as Kālī Kāla-saṅkarṣaṇī, Devourer of Time.
This whole universe is One Reality: unbroken by time, uncircumscribed by space, unclouded by attributes, unconfined by forms, inexpressible by words, and impossible to understand with the ordinary means of knowledge.
Abhinavagupta, Essence of the TantrasThis is "higher nonduality" (paramādvaya): ordinary nonduality negates duality as false, but duality is a real level of experience, so the higher view includes duality within the Real. To the philosopher's objection that if all is divine "divine" loses meaning, Wallis answers that initiates' shared "transrational" experience supersedes it. Diversity is celebrated: every being expresses Godhood "never seen before and never to be seen again".
The Three Impurities (Malas)
The malas sit outside the list and constitute bondage. From the nondual view they are not stains but limited perception that Consciousness took on and can relinquish.
Āṇava-mala, Impurity of Individuality. The preconscious belief that you are incomplete, unworthy, separate from God: "the most untrue thing that we could believe". It is not a social belief you can argue away ("otherwise, just reading this book would be all you needed"). You need experiences of fullness (pūrṇatā) frequent or powerful enough to become your reference point. Yet the same mala produces the nagging sense that "something's missing", which starts the search.
Only a revelation can dislodge āṇava-mala: śaktipāta, an awakening of power within, more ascent than descent, "vertical" because it breaks the horizontal circling of normal life. It follows a subtle turn inward and world-weariness. Intensity depends on how long you waited, like firewood that dries longer: an intense awakening does not mean you are more blessed, only that you waited longer. The key sign: closing your eyes, you sense a sweet presence within.
- Signs of awakening. Worldly fun satisfies less; spiritual teachings fascinate; you honour your body; you feel reverence for teachers; tears of gratitude come at acts of compassion; creativity is unleashed; mantras work; meditation yields benefit; you feel more vulnerable yet stronger; old friends are harder to relate to for a time.
- The danger of strong śaktipāta. People mistake the beginning of the path for its end. Clinging to that error is hard on loved ones and occasionally brings "a psychotic break".
- Letting go of good self-images too. Pūrṇatā requires relinquishing every self-image, positive ones included, because "good person" carries "shoulds" that block responsive virtue. You keep your roles, as an actor plays a tragic part with joy, knowing who he is.
Māyīya-mala, Impurity of Differentiation. Seeing difference without underlying unity, chiefly the subject-object split, which makes the world a threat or a store of goods. Wallis's image: mountain peaks above the sea look like separate islands to one who never dives. Seeing through it, condemnation gives way to compassion: the other is you under different pressures. It does not mean all are equally good: "seeing all beings as equally Divine does not mean equally approving" their actions.
Kārma-mala, Impurity of Action. Actions driven by attachment and aversion (one vibration, inverted) create binding consequences, proportionate to how extreme the conviction. The Tantra's answer to the weight of past karma is dīkṣā, initiation said to burn all future-life karma; whatever the metaphysics, "the psychological effect of this ceremony is undeniable". The real solution: stop being the person to whom those karmas apply. An action can be "Self-ish and not selfish": the root, not the fruit, decides.
"Focus on the more fundamental malas, and karma will take care of itself." Everything returns to āṇava-mala. A being who removes the other two by his own insight but not this one is a Vijñānākala: beyond Māyā yet "forever at the gates of heaven", because he will not surrender his limited identity to a greater grace.
Wallis frames the dīkṣā claim honestly ("whatever the reality of this metaphysical claim") but then asserts that "because Consciousness creates reality, it became so", which converts a placebo-style effect into metaphysical proof. The śaktipāta symptom list (healthier eating, reverence for teachers, finding unspiritual friends harder) is broad enough to fit most new enthusiasts, and invites self-diagnosis and in-group signalling. The "higher nonduality" answer to the philosopher appeals to experience the critic is assumed to lack.
The Word, the States of Awareness and the 3 + 1 Pattern
The last of Part 1's categories turn to language and consciousness. The Trika worships the Goddess Parā Vāk, the Supreme Word, and maps how speech, thought, conviction and pure awareness shape each other. Wallis then sets out five states of awareness (one more than meditators usually count) and closes with Abhinavagupta's "3 + 1" synthesis, the organising key to the whole tradition.
The Word and the Sixfold Path
In the Trika the highest deity is Parā ("the Supreme"), also Anuttarā, the feminine Absolute, a Tantrik counterpart of Sarasvatī elevated to the top. Existence is her expression, so all beings are "the Word made flesh", parallel to the Greek logos. The Word manifests twice, as signifiers (language) and signified (objects), and the two shape each other: we wrongly assume the outer world shapes the inner but not the reverse.
| Inner Path: signifier (vācaka) | Outer Path: signified (vācya) |
|---|---|
| 1. Varṇa: phonemes, subtle pulsations | 4. Kalā: five major divisions of reality |
| 2. Mantra: morphemes, thought-units | 5. Tattva: the 36 principles |
| 3. Pada: words and phrases | 6. Bhuvana: 118 planes of reality |
The Sixfold Path (ṣaḍ-adhvan) is pan-Śaiva; the Trika's distinctive "linguistic mysticism" builds its theology on the inner path. If inner and outer share a source, why do our ideas often misfit reality? Because Consciousness is free enough to build any picture, even one at odds with nature; a skewed picture still corresponds to something real, the limitation in our perception.
"The whole process of sādhanā is nothing but the process of carefully and slowly aligning our internal mental constructs (vikalpas) with the actual patterns of reality", and discarding those that cannot align. This is nondual language for "submitting to the will of God". Effort eventually gives way to an epiphany into "the mind of God", after which alignment proceeds spontaneously.
The Four Levels of the Word
Vaikharī, corporeal speech. Language is inherently dualistic: each word means something by negating all others, and it carves reality into chunks. Indian philosophy has long criticised mistaking a linguistic symbol for a fact. In religion we call it fundamentalism, behind "some of the most vitriolic hatred and horrific bloodshed of the last hundred years". Speech is the ocean's surface: shaped by thought, which is shaped by deep conviction, which articulates the one Awareness. So the Tantra does not seek programmatic word-policing, even by a spiritual community, but deep shifts that change speech naturally. Words still matter as forms of action.
Madhyamā, intermediate thought. The "mentalese" of words, images and half-ideas where vikalpas form: the distorted stories we take as fact. Telling that a vikalpa is a representation, possibly faulty, rather than reality is a core skill for the yogī; some say the central one. Yet this level works in unity-in-diversity (bhedābheda), so practices here (visualisation, deity-yoga, bhāvanā) are "āsanas for the mind". "We rise by the support of the same ground that trips us": purified constructs widen possibilities as impure ones narrow them.
Paśyantī, visionary. Wordless vibration of thought and feeling, the level of precognitive will, where space and time and even sound and light fuse. "Nirvikalpa" here means constructs converted into subtle energy, more powerful for being internalised. Saṃskāras lodge here and template all engagement. If yoga does not reach this level, lasting change is impossible.
Both feel visceral because both pass through Paśyantī: real insight rises from Parā, conditioning from saṃskāras imprinted on Paśyantī. The test: question the hunch. Conditioning makes the mind defend and justify it, pointing to "evidence". Real intuition remains silent: it "does not justify or explain itself, but offers itself as a gift."
Three ways to reach Paśyantī:
- Purified thought-constructs. Cultivate them on the Madhyamā level until they spill into the unconscious (Abhinavagupta, Essence of the Tantras ch. 4).
- Open-awareness meditation. Sit in openness, neither seeking nor pushing away thoughts, accessing the all-accepting Witness; "the most effective method of meditation for healing saṃskāras".
- Mantra. Recited with faith, it becomes subtler until it is a rhythmic pulsation that arises spontaneously and blissfully: the sign it has reached Paśyantī.
Parā, the Supreme Word. Beyond the three planes yet their deepest identity; the essence of vimarśa, Consciousness representing itself to itself. Though highest, "we all experience Her every day in the form of our own self-awareness." Her powers are freedom and self-awareness; her fullest human expression is camatkāra, self-aware wonder in "the sudden rapture of great beauty".
She is the primordial, uncreated Word, the very essence of the highest reality, pervading all things and eternally in creative motion: She is simply luminous pure Consciousness, vibrating with the greatest subtlety.
Abhinavagupta, An Exposition of the Thirty Verses of ParāThe Five States of Awareness
Most people count three states, meditators four; NŚT counts five. Wallis cites William James: "Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness... parted from it by the filmiest of screens."
| State | Body | Breath | Predominant | Sphere |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waking (jāgrat) | Physical | Out-breath | Object | Duality |
| Dreaming (svapna) | Subtle | In-breath | Object-impressions | Unity-in-diversity |
| Deep sleep (suṣupti) | Causal | Samāna | Subject | Nonduality, unaware |
| The Fourth (turya) | Supracausal | Udāna | Subject, aware | Nonduality, aware |
| Beyond the Fourth (turyātīta) | All/none | Vyāna | Transindividual subjectivity | Supreme nonduality |
- Waking is "the unawakened". Lost in objects, a person "never asks himself who he is" (Mark Dyczkowski). The first four states interpenetrate: dreaming-in-waking is daydream; deep sleep-in-waking is a blank stare, common in teens; the Fourth-in-waking, a spontaneous thought-free moment of self-awareness, is what Abhinava calls "true wakefulness".
- Dreaming. You occupy the subtle body among impressions. Dreams are not random firings but tell of the subconscious, so Abhinava teaches dream yoga (Light on the Tantras ch. 10): lucid dreaming lets you "rewrite your past". Meditation in a dream is said to bear fruit faster than in waking.
- Deep sleep. Pure subjectivity without self-awareness, refreshing because it is close to the innermost Self. Sub-states range from "I slept well" traces to the rare Fourth-in-deep-sleep.
- The Fourth. Samādhi: deep sleep while fully aware, nondual awareness of the individual Self. Classical yoga reaches it by absorption in an object, then without one (nirbīja). Transcendentalist schools treat it as highest.
- Beyond the Fourth. Not "the Fifth", since it tops no hierarchy: it is the Fourth permeating the other three, transcendence followed by pervasion. It is final liberation under another name (Śiva-sūtra 1.7–11): experiencing the Light not in spite of moods and activity but as their very substance.
One whose self is the universe, knowing fully that "All this is my own expansion," experiences the divine state even in the flow of differential cognitions.
Utpala Deva, Stanzas on the Recognition of the LordAbhinavagupta's 3 + 1 Synthesis
By 950 CE hundreds of Tantras existed, sharing themes but with little coherence. Two 10th-century Kashmiri geniuses organised them: Utpala Deva, philosopher and devotional poet, and Abhinavagupta, philosopher, theologian and yogī, whose Light on the Tantras (Tantrāloka) quotes nearly a hundred scriptures to show one coherent View. Wallis compares his role to Thomas Aquinas and the Summa, in form and influence.
The organising principle is the "3 + 1" model, from the Trika ("Trinity") itself: individual, Śakti and Śiva are three expressions of one ground, the Heart. The truth "resides within the scriptures like the scent in a flower, the oil in a sesame seed" (Tantrāloka 35).
| Triad | The three | The +1 |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | Known, knowing, knower | One process of self-reflecting Consciousness |
| Powers | Will, knowledge, action | Cidānanda, the Deity-Self |
| Means (upāyas) | Body, heart-mind, spirit | The nameless Fourth they all lead to |
| Lineages (santānas) | Three founding sages | The daughter of one |
| Spanda | Individual, śakti, universal "I" | The nondual ground |
| Views of reality | Duality, unity-in-difference, nonduality | Paramādvaya, supreme nonduality |
| Krama phases | Creation, stasis, dissolution | Kālī Saṅkarṣaṇī, the Nameless |
"In every example of the 3 + 1 pattern the +1 is the same: it is the One that gives rise to all the triads." Wallis quotes Alexis Sanderson's definition of the Deity-Self as "the absolute autonomy of a nonindividual consciousness which alone exists, containing the whole of reality within the bliss of a dynamic 'I'-nature."
The views of reality. Dualists (bheda) do good works and worship a separate God; unity-in-difference (bhedābheda) practitioners cultivate knowledge and relish beauty; pure nondualists (abheda) reject all practice. But pure nonduality excludes duality and invites transcendentalism. Paramādvaya includes all as valid levels: Śiva revealed dualist scriptures for dualists, with hidden hints so they can "graduate", and the higher nonduality stops nondualists getting stuck in rejection.
Here there is no purity and no impurity, no dualism nor nondualism, no ritual nor its rejection... In fact, there is but one commandment on this higher path, O Queen of the Gods: the yogī is to make every effort to steady his awareness on reality. He must practice whatever makes that possible for him.
Mālinīvijayottara-tantra, chapter 18Abhinava applies this to disputes over liṅga worship, impersonating the deity, pilgrimage and sectarian marks: "In our way, none of this is enjoined or prohibited", because no practice guarantees access to Śiva for everyone and none can diminish that reality (Tantrāloka 4.271–2). Wallis stresses this is not "anything goes": each person needs a committed practice tailored to constitution and goal, and it is not for beginners, who can misuse it to skip foundations.
Trika meets Krama. Initiated young into the Krama but liberated through a Trika master, Abhinava fused them. The three Trika goddesses (knower, knowing, known) emanate from a supreme Goddess, Mātṛsadbhāva ("essence of all mothers / knowers"), identified with the Krama's Kālī Saṅkarṣaṇī. Three aspects times four Krama phases gives the twelve Kālīs, "the primary circuit of power" (śakti-cakra), a map of consciousness withdrawing to pure Awareness. That the twelve names preexisted his analysis lends weight to his claim of discovering, not inventing. Wallis withholds the full teaching as secret: "Those who truly wish to learn it will find a way." The synthesis shaped all that followed, condensed by Kṣemarāja in the twenty-sūtra Heart of the Doctrine of Recognition.
The 3 + 1 table is elegant, but a pattern found everywhere risks being imposed rather than found: Abhinava's own exegesis built the coherence he then reads off the scriptures. Wallis's argument that the twelve Kālī names "fit well" his map cuts both ways, since a skilled exegete can fit most lists. Withholding the twelve-Kālī teaching as "secret" in a book that teaches openly about everything else asks the reader to take its importance on trust.
Origins, Two Streams and the Śaiva Siddhānta
Part 2 condenses the history of the whole Śaiva Tantra, building on Alexis Sanderson's 1,400-plus pages of Oxford scholarship. This chapter sets the scene: Tantra arose within Shaivism in a turbulent post-Gupta North India, grew out of the older ascetic Atimārga, and split into a dualist right current (the Siddhānta) and a nondualist, goddess-centred left current (the Kaula). It ends with the nine sampradāyas and the first of them.
Why Tantra Arose
The first certain evidence dates from about 1,500 years ago in North India, after the Gupta empire crumbled into warring kingdoms. Insecurity was "at an all-time peak", and people craved empowerment; Tantra offered new technologies for transforming mind, body and environment, and ultimately "the power to determine your own inner state, regardless of external circumstance."
Scholars long debated whether Tantra came from tribal shamanism, Buddhism or lost antiquity. Sanderson has shown, with several hundred pages of evidence, that it arose entirely within Shaivism and passed into Buddhism and Vaishnavism, then across South, Southeast and East Asia. Wallis summarises the evidence:
- Around 600 CE the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti criticises Śaiva Tantra, implying its success, and mentions no Buddhist Tantra.
- The first complete Śaiva system predates the first Buddhist one by about a century (early 6th versus early 7th century).
- Early Buddhist tantras defend themselves against charges of borrowing Śaiva mantras, one claiming Mañjuśrī taught "everything... referred to as the teaching of Śiva". No Śaiva text borrows Buddhist material for another 500 years.
The Social World of Shaivism
Uninitiated devotees (Śiva-bhaktas) practised bhakti per the Śiva-dharma, whose "eight commandments" range from affection for devotees "like that of a cow for her calf" to devotion strong enough to affect "voice, eye, and limb"; whoever keeps them, "even a foreigner", equals a foremost brāhmin.
- Festivals. All-night vigils of song, dance and theatre, then a scripture paraded on an elephant; the king forbade all violence, "even toward plants", and freed prisoners.
- Temples. Landowners, employers and cultural hubs. The Bṛhadīśvara temple at Thanjavur (11th century) housed over two thousand resident dancers. Śiva, installed in the liṅga, was a legal entity who owned the land. Temples ran clinics, maternity wards and food dispensaries.
- Monastic universities. Mattamayūra and Golagī rivalled Buddhist Nālandā, and like it were destroyed in the Muslim invasions.
- Initiates' world. Private, interiorised practice with a portable liṅga and rosary; probationers (samayins) lived with the guru; married initiates joined gatherings of pūjā, teaching and a feast. Kaula melāpas could be orgiastic, but were "not common" and well outside the mainstream.
Roots in the Atimārga
Pre-Tantrik Shaivism, the Atimārga ("Higher Path"), existed at least four centuries earlier. It was restricted to male brāhmin renunciates, rejected worldly aims and lacked community, yet shared much: solitary meditation near cremation grounds, the five brahma-mantras (the Rudra gāyatrī among them, one of the few Vedic-Tantrik links), monotheism, and a hierarchy of planes to ascend. The Pāśupatas of the Great Vow (mahā-vrata) imitated Bhairava: naked, ash-smeared, eating from a skull bowl, feigning madness, deliberately adopting the marks of society's outcasts to throw off pride and fear of death.
Three inheritances followed: yoga as means to liberation, ascent through the planes to identity with the deity, and transcending karma through antinomian behaviour, plus mantras and the body as sacred microcosm. "The most likely conclusion is that the one grew organically out of the other."
The earliest Tantra. The Niśvāsa-tattva-saṃhitā (c. 500–550 CE), surviving in one Nepalese manuscript, is so detailed it implies a century or two of oral tradition. Nominally Saiddhāntika, it also has later goddess-cult features, so the currents had not yet split. Its Naya-sūtra holds the earliest Tantrik yoga chapter: seek "the place in one's own body where there is no such form", a formless ground the ego cannot appropriate.
Two Streams
| Right current: Śaiva Siddhānta | Left current: Kaula (NŚT) | |
|---|---|---|
| Deity | Śiva without Śakti | Female and fierce deities |
| Liberation | Through ritual initiation; at death | In this life, through insight and yoga |
| Mala | A real substance, like a cataract needing surgery | Nothing but ignorance |
| Guru | Ritual officiant | Liberated, charismatic transmitter |
| Caste | Initiated low castes but kept caste divisions | One "caste" of God's lovers; some initiated outcastes |
| Women | Initiated but usually no daily practice | Initiated and encouraged; Krama made women gurus |
| Society | Sought brāhmin acceptance | Challenged the social order |
Both shared a common core: the soul is innately divine but veiled; out of compassion Śiva revealed scriptures teaching dīkṣā, whose mantras burn the karma of future births. Anyone fit could be initiated, women and low castes included, the sole qualification being signs of śaktipāta (plus the fee, dakṣiṇā). The ceremony lasted at least two days.
"There is no problem, and there has never been any problem, other than the fact that you think there's a problem." That is the nondualist reading of bondage. Wallis insists the Siddhānta is still Tantra, against the misconception that the left current is the whole, just as Christian mystics remain Christian. Ironically, the Kaulas did not call themselves "Tāntrikas", a word they reserved for ritualists; the Western "Tantric" refers precisely to them. A popular middle ground, the Svacchanda-tantra, was "philosophically noncommittal" but rich in cosmology and yoga.
Shamanic Roots, Reinterpreted
The Kaula stream grew from an old, largely illiterate stratum of nature goddesses and animal-headed yoginīs. The sādhaka invoked fierce goddesses in a cremation ground, offered his own blood and, if fearless, would rise into the sky as leader of their wild band, like Bhairava.
By the late 9th century Kaulas were often educated aesthetes connected to royal courts. Unable simply to reject scripture in a traditional society, they reinterpreted it:
- The wild goddesses became the energies of mind and body.
- Mortuary symbols became transcendence of ego and body-identity.
- Offering "nectar" became objects shining within consciousness as aesthetic experience that gratifies the goddesses of the senses.
- Flying as Bhairava became soaring in the sky of awareness, still embodied.
From inside a religion, reinterpretation "has no quality of artificiality": interpreters believe they draw out the meaning God always intended. The highest state became camatkāra, wonder at "the raw and vivid beauty of embodied existence", which let them face death and "impurity" as part of the beauty of existence. Literal cremation-ground ascetics were tolerated as an "eccentric and socially inappropriate cousin". Fierce deities are exclusive to nondual Tantra.
The Nine Sampradāyas
Groups lay on a spectrum: the further left, the more nondualism, worship of the feminine, inclusion of women, transgression, mortuary symbolism and charismatic gurus. Over 600–1100 CE, literature grew sophisticated, audiences shifted from ascetics to householders and from powers to liberation, and the reach covered the subcontinent plus Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. Each group is identified by deity, mantra and scripture, because in India the question was "What do you practise?", not "What do you believe?" Images are "icons of essence", pointing to a deity's energy-signature, never confused with it. Wallis prefers sampradāya to "sect": there is "no evidence whatsoever of violence or open animosity" among them.
| No. | Sampradāya | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Śaiva Siddhānta | The Orthodox Doctrine |
| 2 | Vāma | The Feminine |
| 3 | Yāmala | The Couple |
| 4 | Mantrapīṭha | The Throne of Mantras |
| 5 | Amṛteśvara | The Lord of Nectar |
| 6 | Trika | The Trinity |
| 7 | Kālīkula | The Family of Kālī |
| 8 | Kaubjika | Kubjikā's Tradition |
| 9 | Śrīvidyā | The Goddess of Auspicious Wisdom |
Sampradāya 1: The Śaiva Siddhānta
Deity Sadāśiva (white, five-faced, ten-armed, meditating); mantra HAUṂ; texts Kiraṇa, Parākhya, Kālottara. Most Śaivas saw the Siddhānta as the general revelation and Kaula texts as specialised revelation assuming its contents. The Siddhānta dismissed the Kaula; the Kaulas did not deny Siddhānta truths but ranked them in a hierarchy of revelation, each more esoteric text overriding conflicts in the one below. Wallis defends this as "the only way to have a coherent nonrelativist yet nonexclusivist system."
- Yoga's source. Much Tantrik yogic technology (meditation, prāṇāyāma, subtle-body mantra work) began in the Siddhānta; the Kaulas simplified it. "Yoga is the means of revealing the infinitely radiant light of the divine soul" (Mataṅga-pārameśvara).
- Survival in the South. After the 12th century, under Advaita Vedānta's influence, it became nondualist and survives in Tamil Nadu temple ritual; Sanderson and Dominic Goodall proved the descent.
- Kuṇḍalinī in the heart. A c. 7th-century passage summons the Primordial Power from the crown to an eight-petalled heart-lotus, fusing sun, moon and fire channels (piṅgalā, iḍā, suṣumnā), the soul hidden "like a bee": evidence that Śaiva yoga fed haṭha-yoga.
The account leans heavily on one scholar. Sanderson's Śaiva-priority thesis is strong but not unanimous; Buddhologists such as Ronald Davidson read the evidence as shared regional culture rather than one-way borrowing, and Wallis's "sealed the deal" overstates a live debate. The story of Kaula "reinterpretation" is also told sympathetically from the insider view; the same evidence fits elite domestication of popular cults for courtly patrons.
The Early Sampradāyas: Vāma, Yāmala, Mantrapīṭha and Amṛteśvara
Four lineages between the orthodox Siddhānta and the Trika show the tradition's range: an early goddess cult that vanished, a cremation-ground cult of skull-bearing deities, the hugely popular Svacchanda-Bhairava of Kashmir, and a broad-minded Lord of Nectar whose mantra could honour any deity, even the Buddha. Each also shows how nondual commentators read their own View into texts that did not teach it.
Vāma: The Feminine
Deities: four sister-goddesses Jayā, Vijayā, Jayantī, Aparājitā with brother Tumburu-bhairava; text Vīṇāśikhā, the only survivor.
- Early and far-flung. Mentioned by Dharmakīrti in 600 CE; a scripture turned up in the Dunhuang caves in China. It died out before Tantra peaked.
- Firsts. One of the earliest goddess-worshipping and transgressive traditions in a masculine religious culture; adopted by the early Buddhist Mañjuśriya-mūla-kalpa.
- Marginal origins. The goddesses (names meaning victory) ride a corpse, owl, horse and flying car; they sail in a ship steered by "Tumburu the Trader", a non-Sanskrit name suggesting origins at civilisation's edges.
Yāmala: The Couple
Deities Aghoreśvarī (Caṇḍā Kāpālinī) and Kapālīśa-bhairava, naked with bone ornaments; mantra HŪṂ CAṆḌE KĀPĀLINI SVĀHĀ; text Brahma-yāmala (Picu-mata). Attested in the 6th-century Skanda-purāṇa, it barely survived into the classical period. Aimed at power-seeking ascetics, it has some of the most intense mortuary and cremation-ground practices: new-moon rites with skulls, mudrās and diagrams.
Abhinavagupta quotes the Brahma-yāmala though he preached against grasping for powers. The nondual doctrine: Śiva hid nuggets of truth even in dualistic, power-obsessed scriptures, revealed when a text is "bathed in nondual awareness". The guru is a "living canon" (Douglas Brooks): if Abhinava were your guru, only the parts he cites would be scripture for you. This differs sharply from Western equal authority of every verse.
Wallis gives the text's sole View passage: Śiva "beyond conception... nothing but Consciousness", whose Śakti, "like refreshing moonlight", is Avadhūtā, "she who has cast off all form", and exists "shaped like a coil" in the sixteen vowels: Kuṇḍalinī.
Mantrapīṭha: The Throne of Mantras
Deity Svacchanda-Bhairava, "Bhairava of autonomous play" (white, five-faced, eighteen-armed, skull garland), with Aghoreśvarī; mantra HŪṂ; text Svacchanda-tantra.
- Middle ground. Some goddess worship and mild transgression: wine offered to the deity but not drunk.
- Commentary war. With no clear View, both Saiddhāntikas and Kaulas wrote commentaries to win its followers. Only Kṣemarāja's Svacchanda-tantra-uddyota survives, so "we may infer that the nondualists won".
- Longevity. Svacchanda-Bhairava was worshipped in Kashmir and Nepal into the 20th century.
All those who have been initiated by this ritual are of equal nature, whether they be brāhmins... or outcastes... they are said to form but a single caste of Bhairava... Once a person has taken up this Tantrik system, he may never mention his former caste.
Svacchanda-tantraAbhinava's mapping. He correlates the Vāma ("Left") and Mantrapīṭha ("Right") with two poles found across the tradition, placing the Kaula Trika as the central channel where they fuse:
| Vāma (left) | Mantrapīṭha (right) | Kaula Trika (centre) |
|---|---|---|
| Feminine, sensual | Masculine, mortuary | Fusion of both |
| Creation, knowing | Dissolution, acting | Pure impulse (icchā) |
| Left channel, inhale | Right channel, exhale | Central channel, summit |
Amṛteśvara: The Lord of Nectar
Deity Amṛteśvara (white, four-armed) with consort Lakṣmī; mantra OṂ JUṂ SAḤ; text Netra-tantra, "Scripture of the Eye". It had few exclusive followers but great influence in Kashmir because of an unusually nonsectarian attitude: its mantra may preface worship of any deity, Viṣṇu, Gaṇeśa, even the Buddha ("Oṃ juṃ saḥ buddhāya namaḥ"), since all are emanations of one Lord. It can even revive mantras of extinct lineages.
Commenting on the visualisation, Kṣemarāja turns each feature into your own capacities: white and translucent as unlimited consciousness; one-faced as one with Freedom; three-eyed as united with Will, Knowing and Action; holding nectar and moon and showing boon and protection gestures because the Divine grants worldly success, uproots fear and unfolds the Self.
"You are God" is not anthropocentric narcissism but something close to its opposite. The deity is primary, so the human persona is overwritten by the Divine personality that is its ground: your life history is "a fleeting thought, a moment of self-reflection" in the infinite Light.
Wallis presents the nondual commentaries as "winning", but survival of manuscripts is weak evidence of who won a debate: Kashmir's later scribal culture was dominated by Abhinava's lineage, which also chose what to copy. The truth-nugget and living-canon doctrines are candid descriptions of exegesis, but they also license a commentator to ignore whatever in a source disagrees with him, a point the chapter notes approvingly rather than critically.
The Trika and the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra
"Kashmir Shaivism" usually means the Trika, the "Trinity" school Abhinavagupta made the fulcrum of his synthesis. Wallis explains its three goddesses and their trident visualisation, its linguistic mysticism, its unusually strong place for women, and the strange, seminal Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra with its catalogue of ways into expanded awareness.
The School and Its Goddesses
Deities Parā, Parāparā, Aparā; mantras SAUḤ and HRĪṂ; texts Mālinī-vijaya-uttara-tantra and Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra. Though linked to Kashmir through Abhinava of Śrīnagar, the Trika was pan-Indian, perhaps originating in Mahārāṣṭra, home of his guru's guru. Its founder Tryambaka may be connected to Tryambakeshwar temple. The Kaula Trika, founded by Tryambaka's daughter, is "the only major lineage to have been founded by a woman": an interiorised, aestheticised, more esoteric form.
| Parā (gentle, white) | Parāparā (midway) | Aparā (terrifying) |
|---|---|---|
| Knower | Knowledge | Known |
| Willing | Knowing | Acting |
| Unity | Unity-in-diversity | Diversity |
| Emission | Stasis | Reabsorption |
Aparā is terrifying "because the world of duality and karmically-charged action is terrifying". Realising she is an emanation of nectar-sweet Parā makes her aghorī, unterrifying, and her fierceness becomes your own heroic power in action.
The three goddesses sit on lotuses on a trident whose staff is your spine, mapping all 36 tattvas: elements at the base, the staff up to Māyā, the knot at the palate (Māyā), the plinth at the third eye (Śuddhavidyā), a lotus (Īśvara), and Sadāśiva lying as a corpse gazing upward. The trident emerges from the fontanelle as three Powers: All-pervasive, Equalising and Transmental (unmanā), beyond time and space. There the three goddesses fuse into the Heart, the secret of the Trika (trika-rahasya), dissolving worshipper and worshipped.
The three are one Great Goddess, Mātṛsadbhāva, tattva #0, cidānanda: "Consciousness in love with itself". Parā is Parā-vāk, characterised by pratibhā (intuitive insight, creative inspiration and natural instinct at once); she is the esoteric form of Sarasvatī, worshipped as supreme. Hence the Trika's linguistic mysticism: Sanskrit phonemes as concretised divine vibrations underlying both thought and the universe. Her creation mantra SAUḤ "sounds very much like a contented sigh"; her dissolution mantra is secret and shared with the Kālīkula.
Women. The Trika is the first group to initiate women as full practitioners, "extremely transgressive" when women were expected to gain merit by proxy through husbands. Its earliest text, the Siddha-yogeśvarī-mata (c. 7th century), reserves its most powerful mantra, the yoginī's heart mantra, for women, passed orally woman to woman.
The Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra
Perhaps "the most unusual of all the Śaiva Tantra scriptures", it teaches practitioners of high aptitude (adhikāra) deceptively simple ways into luminous expanded Consciousness. The Goddess asks: if Parā has a colour and form, how can She be Absolute? (In Tantras the Goddess feigns confusion for our sake.)
Bravo! Bravo, my dear one. You have asked about the very essence of the Tantra. Know that the forms of the Divine I have taught in the scriptures are not the real essence, O Goddess. They are like magical dreams, or palaces in the sky... like a mother uses sweets and threats to tempt her children.
Bhairava, Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra 7–11The real "form" is Bhairavī: beyond space and time, free of mental constructs, "blissful with the experience of the innermost Self. When this is the ultimate Reality, who is to be worshipped, who gratified?" Wallis stresses this was not a shortcut, but a revelation for practitioners already trained by meditation and ritual.
| Kind | Examples |
|---|---|
| Unconventional techniques | Gaze at a blank wall or clear sky; spin until you fall; notice the gap between breaths or thoughts; watch sunlight on the floor; rest between waking and sleep; the pain of a piercing; the sky inside your head; repeat "a"; sit doing "nothing" |
| Pure-thought contemplations | "All this is Her play"; "Everything I think I know is a fabrication"; "What is inside, is outside" |
| Daily-life openings | Wonder at a magic show; after orgasm; tracing desire to its source; live music; savouring food; a swing's motion; any intense experience |
The subtle technique in all of them: turn awareness inward to the vibration of the feeling, not the external object. The text dwells on voidness (śūnya), suggesting Buddhist influence, but keeps a Śiva-Śakti theology: Śiva as spaciousness, Śakti as energy, inseparable like fire and heat. For most, it is easier to reach Śiva's spaciousness through Śakti's energy than the reverse. The text grounded a "gnostic" Trika where ritual is infused with inner meaning, or dropped only by those ready to make all life practice.
Legacy. The Trika was not dominant in its time; Abhinava's Light on the Tantras made it famous, and its philosophy (not its ritual) was taught as late as Swami Lakshmanjoo in the 20th century.
The Mālinī-vijaya-uttara-tantra (2.10–16): a guru who knows all tattvas "exactly as they are" is equal to Śiva; those he sees, speaks with or touches are freed from seven births of karma. The signs of his immersion (Rudraśakti-samāveśa): 1) steady devotion; 2) mantras that visibly work; 3) awareness of all levels of reality; 4) completing whatever he begins; 5) spontaneous enchanting poetry and knowing the scriptures without reading them.
The five signs are offered as a practical test, yet several (mantric "efficacy", knowledge of all levels of reality, scripture known without reading) are unverifiable by a student, and the promise that a glance frees seven births is exactly the kind of claim that has empowered abusive modern gurus. Wallis's list of VBT practices is valuable, but he notes that its breath and subtle-body exercises remain inadequately explained in published translations, which limits how far a reader can act on it.
The Krama: The Family of Kālī
Wallis calls the Krama ("the Process") the Kaula path par excellence: the most radical, transgressive, feminine-oriented and nondual of all the Śaiva groups, and in its later phase the most philosophically subtle. Almost nothing was known of it before Sanderson's 2007 study. This chapter traces its nine-generation lineage of awakened masters, its "new and easy method", its three means of awakening and the "Teaching of the Manuscript".
Kālī as the Ground
Deity Kālī Kāla-saṅkarṣiṇī, the Devourer of Time, with no anthropomorphic form; mantra KHPHREṂ MAHĀCAṆḌA-YOGEŚVARĪ; texts Jayadratha-yāmala and Kālīkula-pañca-śataka. This is not the later Bengali "goddess of destruction" but the Highest Divinity: "the insatiable void in the Heart of Consciousness, which the limited self cannot enter and survive." Initiates worshipped the phases of cognition (counted as five, twelve or seventeen) as goddesses.
- No non-Kaula form. Unlike other sampradāyas, the Krama was Kaula only.
- Refinement and transgression together. Some of "the most refined spiritual thinking in the same sphere as some of the most transgressive practice".
- Royal reach. It counted Kashmiri royal ministers among initiates and fused with the Trika in Abhinava's "Kaula Trika with a Krama core".
- Unstudied. No translations of Krama texts exist; Wallis notes striking parallels with refined Tantrik Buddhism.
The Lineage
- Mid-9th century. A Kashmiri pilgrim reaches Uḍḍiyāna (the Swāt Valley, said also to be Padmasambhava's homeland) and the cremation ground Karavīra near Maṅgalapura, home of Goddess Maṅgalā and sixty-four yoginīs. After an epiphany he becomes Jñānanetra Nātha, "Lord of the Eye of Wisdom", first Krama guru. His Kālikā-stotra survives.
- Keyūravatī. One of his seventeen disciples, three of them women; she became his successor, "the Goddess K." The Krama is "the only pre-modern Indian tradition to grant women the full status of Guruhood".
- Hrasva Nātha (Vāmana, Vīranātha). Very short, very charismatic, minister of war and peace to King Yaśaskara (mid-10th century); author of the Svabodhodaya-mañjarī.
- Cakrabhānu. His nephew, a dreadlocked Kāpālika bearing the five cremation-ground marks. He presided at orgiastic cakra-melāpas; the disapproving king branded his forehead with a dog's foot, the mark for grand theft. He still initiated eight key disciples.
- Bhūtirāja, Prabodha, Īśānī. Bhūtirāja initiated Abhinavagupta and his father into the Krama; Prabodha the Ascetic founded a line of poets; Īśānī was a female Kāpālika.
- Nāga, then Arṇasiṃha. Three generations on, the insight "remains undimmed".
Here I will teach dissolution through the release of effort.
Hrasva Nātha, Svabodhodaya-mañjarī, setting himself against Patañjali's renunciation and repetitive practiceRather than cultivating distaste for what the mind clings to, Hrasva Nātha's method is to become totally absorbed in a beautiful sensual object that naturally fades: "The more complete your absorption... the more complete the dissolution of mind." Fix the mind on a gong or thunder until "the mind dissolves with it"; rest at the kanda as the bliss of lovemaking fades; keep a sweet on the tongue: "when the pleasure of the flavor fades away, liberation arises." Other methods: hovering at the edge of sleep, seeking the mind's location, asking "Who am I?"
The lineage came to be worshipped as one awakened consciousness. The Kaula-sūtra opens: "There is but one Guru, the unbroken transmission of the rays [of awakened consciousness]... There is but one God: the Reality that they have perceived." Wallis finds the claim borne out by nine generations of writing "imbued with the same flavor". Bhūtirāja: "There is no method other than staying with awareness of one's own being." Prabodha, punning on Kālī's root √kal ("conceive"): "Whatever form I conceive, however transcendent, is lower than You!" Two of Prabodha's verses still close the Bahurūpa-garbha-stotra, recited by Kashmiri brāhmins today, though author and school are forgotten.
The Mahārtha and the Move South
After the 10th century the Krama continued as Mahārtha or Mahānaya, "the Great Way", with three works all titled Illumination of the Great Way:
| Author | Distinctive feature |
|---|---|
| Arṇasiṃha (c. 1050–1075) | Shows the structure of worship mirrors the structures of Consciousness |
| Old Kashmiri root-text, Śitikaṇṭha's commentary | Written in the vernacular; a nine-day intensive; maps worship onto bodily energy |
| Anonymous (sole manuscript found in Trivandrum, Kerala) | The most sophisticated; sudden enlightenment in which Consciousness devours its content |
The anonymous text makes a startling move: the Goddess is the centre-point within Śiva that even He cannot see, "the Goddess-ground, in which even the Lord cannot see his way", the final rest that devours "even the subtlest traces" of judgements of higher and lower.
Around 1300, Maheśvarānanda of Chidambaram (home of the original Naṭarāja temple) dozed in "contented intoxication" after worship and saw the Goddess as a yoginī, who signalled seven with her fingers. His guru told him to write seventy verses in Māhārāṣṭrī: the Mahārtha-mañjarī, with his own Sanskrit commentary, "one of the last pieces of truly original writing of nondual Śaiva Tantra".
The Krama repudiated hierarchies of caste, class and gender more than any premodern Indian sect, and its frank sexuality offended both brāhmins and the Muslim conquerors of the 12th–13th centuries. A third factor: false gurus used its teachings for "sexual exploitation and alcoholic overindulgence". The Krama mocked them: "they make love to others' wives, declaring constantly that it is wrong to impede the inclination of the powers." Understanding the teachings mentally does not require understanding the inner state they point to.
Three Means of Awakening
- Direct transmission (saṅkramaṇa). The disciple's ripe awareness fuses with the Guru's, often through a glance: the rarest and quickest.
- Oral instruction (kathana). Cryptic sayings called chummās, said to come from Uḍḍiyāna's yoginīs and passed down by women in Kashmiri, absorbed by intuition. Examples: "Time is devoured"; "The One Ground plays"; "Wild, then tamed", Consciousness recklessly taking and dissolving forms until it catches sight of Śiva. This corresponds to Abhinava's śākta-upāya.
- Worship with nondual awareness (pūjana). Offerings to goddesses that are the powers of your own body, senses and mind; uniquely, the worshipper must understand the ritual's inner meaning, making it meditation-in-action on the cycle of cognition.
The Teaching of the Manuscript
The Krama was highly textual yet warned of "the snare of learning". Its emblem is the manuscript, palm leaves held between two boards. In the chummā text's frame story, the silent guru Siddhanātha gives Niṣkriyānanda an overwhelming awakening; asked how it may abide, he glances at the sky and Parā Vāk emerges: "Why are you so proud? What is this snare of learning?"
Upper board Outgoing breath · immanence · extroversive expansion · all-encompassing Fullness · the full-figured sweet Goddess
Lower board Ingoing breath · transcendence · introversive expansion · all-devouring Emptiness · the emaciated fierce Goddess
Her command: "Break open the two boards and behold the great spaciousness beyond the void!" That spaciousness, the superposition of both poles, unlocatable, "the devourer of Time", is your essence-nature (svasvarūpa). Niṣkriya went "forever beyond the snare of knowledge" and became suprabuddha, fully awakened.
Wallis's affection for the Krama is plain ("I love these sayings of his"), and his evidence for unbroken awakening across nine generations is the consistency of their poetry, which shows a shared literary style as much as a shared realisation. Cakrabhānu's branding is retold with humour; the record is also compatible with the king's view that a guru was monetising orgies of respectable citizens. The "easy method" of absorption in fading pleasures is easy to state and easy to misuse, as the Krama's own satire of false gurus concedes.
Kubjikā, Śrīvidyā and the Shape of the Canon
The last two sampradāyas carry the tradition's afterlife. Kubjikā's scriptures are the main source of kuṇḍalinī-yoga and the six-cakra system later taken into haṭha-yoga; Śrīvidyā, the goddess of desire and the Śrī Yantra, is the only original sect that survives intact, at the cost of being "sanitised". Wallis closes the survey with how the nine fit into one hierarchical canon.
Kubjikā: The Crooked Goddess
Deity Kubjikā, dark blue, six-faced (including Parā, Kālī and Tripurā), twelve-armed; mantra AIṂ HRĪṂ ŚRĪṂ PHREṂ HSAUṂ; texts Kubjikā-mata-tantra and Manthāna-bhairava-tantra. She is fierce and sweet at once; seen as an emanation of Parā (much of her root text adapts Trika scripture) and as emitting Tripurā, linking Trika and Śrīvidyā.
Bhairava visits the Himālaya, gives the Mountain's daughter Kālikā a vision of the universe ablaze with the Empowering Transmission (ājñā), tells her to find her essence, and vanishes. Confused, as many are after awakening ("Who are you, and what am I doing?"), she travels to the Mountain of the Moon, mounts a magic stone and becomes the "female liṅga", an androgynous fusion, sometimes shown doubled over in self-savouring bliss: one reason for the name "the Hunchback". When Bhairava asks her for the transmission she bends in embarrassment, knowing it must be given in union. The dominant explanation: Kubjikā personifies kuṇḍalinī, the "coiled power".
The union of Śiva and Śakti yields a Point "blazing with the light of ten million suns" whose explosion emanates the universe (Wallis notes the Big Bang parallel), first as a triangular yoni of will, knowledge and action. Above the couple stands the Neuter, the timeless Void before and after the Point. A Manthāna-bhairava passage, in Krama vocabulary, places "the ground of perfect repose" in the centre, "melted between the exhale and the inhale", where She, "imperishable and terrifying... awakens one to reality".
- Late 10th century. Possibly arises in the western Himālaya, then moves to Candrapura (Chandor) in Konkan, modern Goa.
- South India. An alternate Śāmbhavānanda lineage worships Kubjikā's partner Navātma-śiva and absorbs Śrīvidyā; a probable source of haṭha-yoga.
- 13th century. The Compendium of Matsyendra bridges Tantra and haṭha; the Panhāle-Kājī caves near Goa show 84 Nātha siddhas and may be where Gorakṣa found Matsyendra.
- Now. Mark Dyczkowski's twelve-volume study of the Manthāna-bhairava-tantra.
The cakra system popular in the West derives directly from Śaiva Tantra, and Wallis hopes Dyczkowski's work makes that widely known.
Śrīvidyā: The Goddess of Auspicious Wisdom
Deity Tripurasundarī or Lalitā ("the Playful One"), young, red, four-armed with goad, noose, sugarcane bow and flower-arrows, seated on Śiva lying as a corpse; mantra the fifteen-syllable ka e ī la hrīṃ..., also AIṂ HRĪṂ SAUḤ; texts Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava and Yoginī-hṛdaya.
In Śrīvidyā, desire (icchā) drives the universe; without it Consciousness would stay static. Practice has two steps: release your judgements of your own desires, which contract consciousness, then merge limited desire into divine Will: not giving up desire, but "learning to want passionately what the Goddess wants", which is to flow in ever more harmonious patterns. Condemning desires blocks this, since they are "the same energy as divine Will constrained by our ignorance".
- Origins in love-magic. It grew from the Nityā cult, rituals to win a lover, into a liberation path worshipping Śrī, the feminine radiance that brings beauty and fortune; later worship of Śrī as a girl (kumārī) and as a married woman.
- Survival by sanitisation. It alone survives intact, but was assimilated by conservative Tamil brāhmins, transgressive elements cut. It "tantricised" Vedānta: southern Vedānta's highest authorities still worship the Śrī Yantra.
- Royal appeal. It enhanced life's pleasures rather than conquering death, and eclipsed the Trika and Kubjikā sects, though Parā's SAUḤ lives on as Tripurā's heart-mantra.
| Form | Level | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Coarse (sthūla) | Image | A sixteen-year-old woman come into her sexual power, in red |
| Subtle (sūkṣma) | Śrī Cakra / Śrī Yantra | Emanation of reality from the bindu, and the path back |
| Most subtle (ati-sūkṣma) | Sixteen-syllable mantra (Ṣoḍaśī) | Three parts: insight and liberation; action and romantic desire; will and removal of obstacles |
The Śrī Cakra is "simultaneously a dynamic map of reality, a substrate for ritual, and a focal point for meditation". The Heart of the Yoginī describes it arising from "the Point of Ultimacy... the Void", an ocean of light (Śiva) undulating with waves (Śakti): "This great bindu-born Cakra of nine yonis and many mantras is replete with the Bliss of Consciousness."
The Structure of the Canon
The scriptures were seen as "a single complex utterance" from Śiva's five faces, graded into a hierarchy of revelation. In Sanderson's 1988 diagram, the horizontal axis runs from nondual, goddess-centred and transgressive (left) to dual, Śiva-centred and non-transgressive (right); the vertical axis shows specificity: lower is more general and valid except where a higher text overrides it.
The base division is Siddhānta-tantras versus Bhairava-tantras; within the latter, the Vidyā-pīṭha ("Throne of Wisdom-goddess mantras") holds the Yāmala, Trika and Kālīkula. Kubjikā and Śrīvidyā are omitted because they are later and the map is Abhinava's. His mystical account of the hierarchy as God's self-awareness is in the Mālinī-vijaya-vārttika.
Wallis's wish that the cakra system be credited to Śaiva Tantra is fair, but the six-cakra model was one of many competing subtle-body maps in the texts, and its modern form owes as much to Arthur Avalon's 1919 Serpent Power and later Western adaptations. Calling Śrīvidyā's survival a loss of independence through "sanitising" judges the tradition by its transgressive phase; its brāhmin practitioners would see continuity, not decline.
Kashmir Shaivism and Abhinavagupta
After the scriptural phase came an exegetical phase (900–1050 CE) in cosmopolitan Kashmir: named, highly educated authors who turned cryptic revelations into philosophy. Western writers since the early 20th century have called this literature "Kashmir Shaivism", often cut off from its scriptures and practices. Wallis traces the Spanda and Pratyabhijñā lineages, then profiles Abhinavagupta and his Tantrāloka, and closes with his aesthetics of rasa.
Kashmir and the Two Phases
Kashmir sat near the Silk Road, enjoyed cosmopolitan multiculturalism, and its capital Śrīnagar ("the Goddess's City") was called the tilak of Mother India. Śaiva, Śākta, Buddhist, Vaiṣṇava and solar cults flourished under kings who patronised philosophy, poetry and satire.
| Scriptural phase | Exegetical phase | |
|---|---|---|
| Authors | Anonymous; spoken by Śiva (or Śakti in the Krama) | Named, highly educated individuals |
| Style | Elliptical, mysterious, practice-focused | Philosophical, systematic theology |
| Argument | Revelation | Reason (vs Buddhists), scripture (vs other Śaivas), experience (for disciples) |
20th-century scholars read the philosophical texts in isolation, coined the label and published in English with "little to no knowledge of the powerful practices"; no accurate translations of kuṇḍalinī and subtle-body sources exist even now. They also made it sound like rarefied speculation, while the original concern was how Consciousness creates moment-to-moment experience.
The Spanda Lineage
- Vasugupta (c. 825–875). Revealed the Śiva-sūtra (77 aphorisms). Kṣemarāja's story: Śiva told him in a dream of teachings on a rock on Mt. Mahādeva, which turned over at his touch, a tale to give it scriptural status. Other sources say it drew on oral teachings of male and female adepts. Sample: "One who experiences these three [waking, dream, deep sleep, as the Fourth] is the Lord of Heroes" (1.11).
- Kallaṭa (c. 850–900). The Spanda-kārikās (Stanzas on Vibration): God is "nothing but the vibrant pulsation of Consciousness", expanding and contracting. Seven commentaries survive.
The Pratyabhijñā (Recognition) Lineage
- Somānanda (c. 900–950). Vision of Śiva. Feeling no separation from God, his opening verse asks Śiva, who "has completely permeated my embodied form", to ward off the obstacles which are himself and "bow to his greater Self".
- Utpala Deva (c. 925–975). "One of the greatest intellects and one of the most passionately devotional hearts" in the tradition. His Stanzas on the Recognition of the Lord names the school; his Garland of Hymns to Śiva shows him anguished, longing, exultant: "may I attend to all the common occupations of man, savoring the ineffable in every thing."
- Lakṣmaṇagupta. Utpala's disciple; no surviving writings.
- Abhinavagupta. Wrote two commentaries on Utpala's Stanzas, the longer finished "on a dark December night in the year 1015", rivalled only by the Tantrāloka.
- Kṣemarāja. Abhinava's disciple; the twenty-sūtra Heart of the Doctrine of Recognition, for the spiritually inclined without logical training: "Awareness, free and independent, is the cause of the performance of everything."
Abhinavagupta (c. 975–1025)
Born of a yoginī. His parents, advanced Kaula practitioners, conceived him in ritual, so he was yoginī-bhū. His signature verse, opening five major works, has a double meaning: praise of Śiva and Śakti whose fusion emits the universe, and a tribute to his mother Vimalā and father "Siṃhagupta", from "the emissions of the ecstatic state of their union". For Wallis it is one truth in expanded and contracted modes: every procreative act recapitulates creation; his parents were simply aware of it.
- All that exists expresses the Goddess, the ground of power. 2. All things are one Light in self-aware play. 3. God gives cohesion to the free-flowing Goddess. 4. The ultimate is their fusion (yāmala), the Heart. 5. The Heart pervading embodiment is felt as nectar-sweet joy and eternal life.
- Training. His mother died young; Sanskrit from his father; Krama initiation from Bhūtirāja. His early Gītā commentary is "learned but still callow".
- Seventeen gurus. Transmissions in Trika, Pratyabhijñā, Krama and Siddhānta (Spanda studied only). He likened himself to a bee making honey from many flowers.
- The sadguru. Something was missing until Śambhu Nātha of Jālandhara, a master of both Trikas, gave the final śaktipāta: a meeting "like that of Rumi and Shams". He praises Śambhu above all teachers.
Light on the Tantras
The Tantrāloka runs to over 5,800 verses: encyclopedic but synthetic, everything placed in one coherent framework. It reconciles scriptures through a hierarchy of understanding culminating in paramādvaya, but one must ascend through each level; leaping straight to "no-levels" decays into incoherent relativism. He wrote it in a quiet village of devotees, in a house given by a retired minister.
| Chapters | Contents |
|---|---|
| 1–5 | Bondage and liberation; the four means: anupāya, śāmbhava, śākta, āṇava |
| 6–7 | Yoga of time: cycles of breath, mantra in the breath |
| 8–12 | Space: worlds, tattvas, seven kinds of conscious beings, kalās, the six paths |
| 13–14 | Śaktipāta (grace) and its opposite, occlusion |
| 15–28 | Ritual: initiations (incl. for the dying, the dead, converts), consecration of gurus, cremation, daily worship |
| 29 | Kaula Trika rites, including the sexual ritual (ādi-yāga) |
| 30–33 | Mantras, maṇḍalas, mudrās, ancillary deities |
| 34–37 | Relation of the means; canon; transmission; Abhinava's lineage |
The table shows Tantra had reached into exoteric religion, yet Abhinava insists rituals and mantras are living embodiments of the Divine, "like dead bodies" without understanding, revived only by a guru for whom they still vibrate. He rewrote it twice: the prose Tantrasāra, which Wallis prefers for practitioners because it "feels more like a transmission than a dissertation" (his own translation was forthcoming), and the shorter Tantroccaya. He also wrote poems such as the Hymn to Bhairava.
Rasa: Art as Spiritual Training
Abhinava is better known to Sanskritists as an aesthetician, through his commentary on the Dhvanyāloka. Wallis quotes his teacher Somadeva Vasudeva: rasa "is not located in the work but in the viewer"; it is worldly emotion transformed into aesthetic sentiment by becoming keenly aware of it.
Erotic, comic, wrathful, compassionate, disgusting, terrifying, heroic, astonishing, peaceful. All are experiences of beauty. Two spiritual principles follow: art centres us in ourselves, savouring awareness flavoured by a rasa; and it transforms unpleasant emotion into beauty: lust into the erotic, sadness into the compassionate, anger into the wrathful, world-weariness into the peaceful.
Influence. Deep rather than wide: other lineages adopted his Trika/Krama synthesis, Śrīvidyā borrowed his framework, and the Vaiṣṇava Lakṣmī Tantra borrowed Kṣemarāja. Teachings survived in Kashmir (diminishing after the Muslim conquest around 1300) and in Tamil country, where Madhurāja of Madurai, who may have travelled 2,000 miles to be initiated, left a pen-portrait: Abhinava in a crystal pavilion amid a vineyard, music and dancing, eyes "trembling in ecstasy", two dūtīs holding wine, students led by Kṣemarāja writing down his every word.
The chapter is part history, part hagiography. Abhinava's account of his own conception, the "Rumi and Shams" meeting and Madhurāja's portrait are insider sources whose literary conventions Wallis acknowledges but then sets aside ("hardly disproves that an actual meeting took place"). The criticism of 20th-century "Kashmir Shaivism" is well taken, yet it also positions Wallis's own practice-inclusive reading, and his forthcoming translation, as the corrective.
The Kaula Lineages and the Birth of Haṭha-Yoga
The Kaula lineage of Macchanda Nātha was less a school than a way of practising: body-first, sensual, immanent. After Islam dissolved Tantra's institutional base, Kaula-style grassroots lineages survived best, and from them came haṭha-yoga. Wallis's sharpest claim: modern postural yoga descends from Śaiva Tantra, not from Patañjali.
Macchanda and Konkanāmbā
Macchanda Nātha (Matsyendra, "Lord Fisherman", possibly 8th century) from Kāmarūpa (Assam) is revered as the revealer for the kali-yuga and as a mahāsiddha by Śaivas and Buddhists alike; Kathmandu still holds his festival, its teachings forgotten. His consort Konkanāmbā ("Mother from Konkan") was originally praised with him as an awakened master. They worshipped Kuleśvara and Kuleśvarī.
Of their twelve sons, six became celibate ascetics and six householders; the householders, with non-Sanskrit tribal names hinting at shamanic roots, founded six clans with lodges at sacred sites and secret hand-signals: Ānanda, Bodhi, Āvali, Prabhu, Pāda, Yogī. Members' names ended in their clan name.
- A mode, not a sect. It produced Kaula variants of existing schools (Kaula Trika); the Krama existed only in Kaula form.
- Primacy of the body. Sensual experience as a springboard into divine Presence; only Kaula-influenced lineages used sexual rites and consumed transgressive substances, as a nondual view that "walks the talk".
- One source. Our only detailed account of the sexual rite (kula-yāga) is Tantrāloka ch. 29, where it produces sacramental substances for Kaula initiation, implying it was for qualified gurus.
Decline After the Classical Period
With institutions and funding gone (from about 1300), the householder base contracted and wandering ascetic yogīs, often barely literate, became the main carriers. They were fed but feared, pursued powers, and sold magic to clients wanting "wealth, a woman, or to hurt an enemy". Wallis attributes part of the loss of balance to the decline of female practitioners. Sober seekers remained, "an ever-dwindling minority".
From Matsyendra to Gorakṣa
- 12th–13th century. The South Indian Śāmbhavānanda lineage teaches kuṇḍalinī rising through six cakras, the haṭha system exactly.
- 13th century. Matsyendra's Compendium (translated by Csaba Kiss): Gorakṣa, a Chola royal, searches two years for Matsyendra, finds him "cavorting with wine and women", withholds judgement, passes the test, is initiated.
- Gorakṣa's texts. Viveka-mārtaṇḍa, Hundred Verses of Gorakṣa; with Virūpākṣa's Attainment of Nectar, adopted by the Nāth Yogīs, who honour nine nāthas.
- 15th century. Haṭha-pradīpikā, a compilation citing 20+ earlier texts, first with many āsanas, most-cited thereafter.
- After the 16th century. The Nāths stop practising yoga; the Dasnāmī Sannyāsins preserve it.
- 1930s. Kṛṣṇamācārya in Mysore builds modern postural yoga (MPY), practised by 20+ million in the West.
Haṭha texts drop the View and the mantra system, a loss Wallis ties to vanished patronage, but simplify classical practices for people who could not spend years in study.
The Tantrik Roots of Haṭha-Yoga
Christopher Tompkins traced dozens of passages in Gorakṣa's Hundred Verses to the much earlier Transcendence of Time (Kālottara). Ideas "sourced directly from Tantrik scriptures":
- Subtle body. 72,000 channels, 10 primary, 3 chief, likened to sun, moon and fire; the ten prāṇa-vāyus.
- Mantra. Mantras installed in body centres; the haṃsa / so'ham "recitation of the Self", 21,600 times a day.
- Ascent. The heart as blossoming lotus; the soul's rise through suṣumnā by prāṇāyāma, dhāraṇā, dhyāna; the coiled power, kuṇḍalinī; fruition as "nectar pervasion".
Popular view. Haṭha and modern yoga descend from the Yoga-sūtra; teachers chant to Patañjali; teacher trainings require it; 100+ English translations.
Wallis's view. Over a thousand years separate them; the Yoga-sūtra has two sentences on posture. Tantra absorbed Patañjali's eight limbs (rejecting his dualism) and passed them on. An 18th-century fifteen-limb yoga adds mostly Tantrik limbs (mūlabandha, kuṇḍalinī, khecarī, nāda, unmanī). Teaching it alone is "artificial revivalism".
Self-identification. The Śiva-saṃhitā (c. 1500) calls itself a tantra in Śiva–Śakti dialogue; the Gheraṇḍa-saṃhitā (c. 1700) has a student "the Fierce Skull-bearer" and says the inversion viparīta-karaṇī was "concealed in all the Tantras". Its kuṇḍalinī passage (Mallinson's translation) uses HUṂ and HAṂSA to raise the serpent goddess to "supreme union with Śiva". The 18th–19th-century Yoga-karṇikā shows posture interest growing before Western physical culture.
Other Post-Classical Streams
| Region | What survived |
|---|---|
| South India | Śrīvidyā, taken up by the Śaṅkarācāryas of Śṛṅgeri and Kāñcī; Saundarya-laharī |
| Kerala, Andhra, Orissa, Nepal | Manuscript study and practice; Nepal through the whole 2nd millennium |
| Rājasthān | Śaiva āśrams nearly to now; a 19th-c. king initiated; Swāmī Satyānanda learned there |
| Bengal | The Ten Mahāvidyās (Kālī, Tārā, Tripurasundarī, Bhuvaneśvarī, Chinnamastā, Bhairavī, Dhūmāvatī, Bagalamukhī, Mātaṅgī, Kamalā): a synthesis of Kālīkula, Buddhist, Śrīvidyā and Trika goddesses |
| Kashmir | Karma, yoga, jñāna; 16th–18th c. kuṇḍalinī-yoga with OṂ through six cakras; jñāna after Abhinava, down to Swāmī Lakṣman Jū |
Late texts (1400–1800, studied by Gudrun Bühnemann) are syncretic and largely philosophy-free: deity sādhanā for specific worldly goals.
The genealogy. Kṛṣṇamācārya is the father of MPY, Gorakṣa its grandfather, Matsyendra its great-grandfather. Kṛṣṇamācārya claimed transmission from the disembodied Nātha-muni in his Yoga-rahasya, valid in an "open canon". Mark Singleton shows MPY also draws on 20th-century European and American exercise such as "harmonial gymnastics"; about 80 postures trace to premodern haṭha. Wallis's conclusion: teachers seeking a spiritual frame should align with classical Śaiva Tantra.
The Tantra-not-Patañjali correction is well supported by Tompkins, Mallinson and Singleton. But the "great-grandfather" genealogy runs through a Matsyendra who may be a literary invention, and Singleton's own point (MPY is largely a modern hybrid) cuts against tracing it to any premodern system. The closing recommendation is also a sectarian argument from a teacher of the tradition.
Grace, Initiation and the Guru
Part 3 turns to practice, starting with its preconditions. Śaktipāta, the descent of grace, is a spontaneous awakening that cannot be earned; dīkṣā, initiation, is a rite given by a guru that was believed to burn future karma and make liberation possible in one life. Wallis then defends guru-yoga, sets out Abhinava's three means (upāyas) and the rare "non-means".
Śaktipāta: The Descent of Grace
Historically initiation was open to anyone whose sincere longing showed in devotion (bhakti), service (sevā) and offerings proportionate to income. That longing was read as the result of śaktipāta, a kind of conversion experience; a guru would not initiate without signs of it.
His mother bribed him into a two-day retreat. It was "fairly boring" until, after the last sitting, he walked outside: everything was "more vivid and real, and almost sparkling", and a tangible power of "exquisitely pure love" flowed between his heart and everyone's, "independent of whether these people liked each other or not". "There has never been a possibility of playing any other game in life."
- Universal. Wallis treats it as a real, culturally independent human potential, called God, the inner Self or Buddha-nature elsewhere; some get a mild first awakening and a stronger second one.
- From God, not the guru. Modern lineages (Viṣṇu Tīrth, Muktānanda) equate it with guru-given kuṇḍalinī awakening; classically śaktipāta always comes from God, the guru being one conduit. The confusion comes from conflating śaktipāta with dīkṣā.
- Unearned. Abhinava: it is "independent of family, caste, body, actions, age, religious practices, and wealth". The only aids are ardent prayer and openness.
- Signs. Dualist texts list eagerness for liberation, aversion to saṃsāra, devotion, faith; nondualists expect bliss, oneness, tears, trembling.
For Abhinava, Highest Divinity and the contracted soul are one Consciousness in two phases. Śaktipāta is "a choice made by your Śiva-self" to end contraction. He rejects the idea that good works earn it: rather, only grace makes sustained practice possible at all, and practices are expressions of the Power of Action (kriyā-śakti), not karma.
| Grade | Effect | Liberation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Total awakening; the body drops | Immediate (extremely rare) |
| 2 | Spontaneous intuitive insight; if complete, a "Self-revealed guru" | This life, sometimes with scripture/teacher support |
| 3 | Burning desire for a true guru and ability to recognise one | This life (living liberation) |
| 4 | Takes initiation; insight ripens slowly | At death |
| 5–6 | Ready for spirit but wants enjoyment too | Enjoyment, then liberation at or after death |
| 7–9 | Desire for enjoyment stronger | A future life |
Grade depends on the intensity of longing relative to desire for "the good life", not worthiness; the slower path "is not denigrated". The third grade also helps one leave a false guru: "One thing alone marks a Guru: wisdom that is expertly put into practice" (Tantrāloka 13.333). A disembodied guru works only if "just as palpably present" as a living one.
Dīkṣā: The Rite of Initiation
The karma problem. Past karma was believed incalculable, putting freedom out of reach; initiation mantras were held to destroy all karma due in future lives, leaving only this life's. Wallis sets aside whether this is "true": the psychological effect was real, and many reached jīvanmukti. Eligibility rested on śaktipāta alone, regardless of caste, class, gender, or ethnicity: a radical break from Vedic adhikāra.
- Before. A maṇḍala 12 to 35 feet long in coloured powders, under a white canopy with curtains, mirrors, bells, ghee lamps and vases; the guru installs deity-mantras and meditates on his identity with Deity.
- Day 1. One to five initiands are consecrated, blindfolded, and throw a flower onto the maṇḍala, which fixes their deity and initiation name. The blindfold comes off: many weep, tremble, laugh or faint. Śiva-hasta: the guru's mantra-charged hand on the head. Offerings remove caste. The guru fuses his central channel with the initiand's and raises their consciousness through the cakras. Initiands sleep in the space.
- Day 2. Dreams discussed; the fire ritual incarnates the soul in all its future wombs at once and "fast-forwards" those lives till their karmas dissolve; the three malas are cut; climax śiva-yojanikā, fusing the soul with the Absolute at the dvādaśānta.
Two levels: probationary samaya-dīkṣā (vows, study, daily practice; often living in the guru's house one to five years) and full nirvāṇa-dīkṣā. Kaula masters could initiate "with a word, a glance, a touch, or a thought". The rite passed to Tantrik Buddhism and Tibet; the last real nirvāṇa-dīkṣās were performed in the early 20th century.
Just as manipulative mantras can bring a heavenly beauty under the control of an ugly man without getting rid of his ugliness, similarly the liberating mantras undo the power of the three bonds, but they do not necessarily quell attachment, aversion, and their products.
Kṣemarāja, Svacchanda-tantra-uddyotaKṣemarāja adds that after intense śaktipāta he has seen attachment quelled "on hundreds of occasions", and links results to the initiand's ripeness and the guru's insight. Etymology: dī (giving insight) plus kṣi (destroying bonds). Without śaktipāta, Wallis says, mantras have "little to no potency"; with it, practice gets "an injection of rocket fuel".
The Guru and Guru-Yoga
- Two pictures. Right current: guru as priest and teacher (ācārya). Left current: liberated master who transmits the experience; Abhinava became "aflame with awakened Consciousness" only through Śambhunātha and his consort.
- Consecration, not attainment. One becomes guru through abhiṣeka from one's guru, based on ability to teach; the title "no guarantee" of attainment, so students must use discernment.
- Guru-yoga. Seeing the guru as Śiva made flesh, an "icon of essence": not believing his personality is perfect but engaging the divine Essence. "Love one person completely, love the whole universe." It needs great self-respect and never requires giving up critical thinking.
The less evolved the guru, the more perfect one's devotion must be for guru-yoga to work, a paradox Wallis accepts, adding that one who sees the situation will "probably choose to move on".
The Three Means (Upāyas)
| Means | Power | Level | Centre | Process |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Śāmbhava (Divine) | Will (icchā) | Unity | Spirit / intuition | Non-sequential |
| Śākta (Empowered) | Knowing (jñāna) | Unity-in-diversity | Heart-mind / energy | Sequential and non-sequential |
| Āṇava (Individual) | Action (kriyā) | Plurality | Body | Sequential |
All lead to samāveśa, continuous immersion. Practice is taught top down so the rare few can "get it" at once, though most need body-based work first. Pursued fully, each entails the others until bliss "floods and overflows the internal dams" and one becomes cidānanda-ghana, a mass of blissful awareness.
For the rarest few, one teaching from a true guru stabilises awakening with no further practice. Abhinava's sample: "what could any method of practice achieve?... no 'veil' whatsoever exists... That alone am I." Example: Bhagavān Nityānanda, established by eighteen. For 99.9 per cent, the same truth must be uncovered by practice.
Wallis warns well: powerful awakenings mistaken for liberation create charismatic, deluded gurus; judge by a teacher's community, not one or two followers. Yet his defence of guru-yoga puts the full burden on the disciple ("no one to blame but themselves"), an uncomfortable stance after the guru abuse scandals in Western lineages, including Muktānanda's, which he cites as a śaktipāta lineage. The nine grades and karma-burning rite are also presented largely on the texts' own terms.
Śāmbhava-Upāya: The Divine Means
The subtlest means has no practices explainable in ordinary words. It works through pure Will (icchā) and Autonomy: direct, wordless intuition (pratibhā) of the upsurge of Consciousness before anything is labelled. Wallis gives it three practical aspects: opening to grace, catching the first moment of perception, and working with mantra below meaning.
What the Divine Means Is
It emphasises subjective awareness, the unity of subject with all perceived, opening into the sky of Consciousness (cidākāśa) and beyond it the "stainless void" that contains both being and non-being. On this level path and goal are not sharply distinguished.
- A way of grace. Seeing no line between spiritual and mundane; expecting teachings "around every corner"; seeing the guru in all beings; cultivating "divine unknowing", "hovering on the knife-edge of divine uncertainty".
- Catch the first moment. The Spanda teaching unmeṣa-daśā-niṣevaṇa: notice the initial shift of any mood or feeling before labelling it "hunger" or "sadness", and rest in that vibration.
- Non-conceptual mantra. Seed-syllables without meaning (OṂ, AIṂ, HRĪṂ) experienced as modes of Śiva's awareness; at its subtlest, a "vowelless k": staying on the leading edge of the impulse to articulate, like forgetting what you were about to do and simply remaining "about to do".
That which shines forth and is directly grasped in the first moment of self-aware perception, the single ground free of differential thought-constructs, is said to be the pure Impulse.
Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka 1.146The noise floor. Wallis judges this practice "virtually impossible" in the stimulus-saturated life of the average American; it needs enough space and silence to sense each new state arising. There is no attempt to change what arises, since that wish comes only after labelling.
Zen-like Techniques from the VBT
Kṣemarāja labels several Vijñāna-bhairava techniques as śāmbhava: support is only immediate perception, with no instructions.
| Verse | Technique |
|---|---|
| 59 | Absorb awareness in the space inside a jar |
| 60 | Gaze at vast open space or a blank wall |
| 84 | Look at the sky and let the mind become like it |
| 89 | Sensory deprivation to perceive the inner void |
| 101 | Focus one-pointedly on the burgeoning of an intense emotion |
Trance. Dull, numb, or "pleasantly luminous but hazy", lacking sharp clarity.
Śiva-state. Clear wakeful presence, effortlessly free of thought-constructs; feels like surrendering and opening, not focusing. If effort is involved, you are at the āṇava level instead.
Linguistic Mysticism
Abhinava's śāmbhava chapter (Tantrāloka 3) presents phonemic mysticism, which many readers find baffling. Wallis cites Paul Muller-Ortega's quantum-flavoured gloss: reality "coagulates" around interference patterns in waveless Śiva as currents of consciousness collide, the vowel order mapping that sequence of powers. Wallis's claim: the chapter is meant to be understood through meditative insight, not intellectually.
Icchā, the pre-cognitive impulse toward self-awareness; paśyantī, the visionary level of language where phonemes vibrate as reality's building blocks; abheda, unity of subject enveloping all objects; pratyakṣa, direct perception of the ground of Being in every moment, "even the awareness of nothing". Abhinava uses one word, parāmarśa, for both "phoneme" and "self-awareness": the universe is the Absolute's loving self-awareness articulated, which, unlike a mirror's reflection, is conscious.
By design this chapter offers little that can be checked or taught step by step, and Wallis says so ("It's okay if that doesn't make sense yet"). The risk he names, mistaking a subtle concept of meditation for real non-conceptual awareness, has no external test here except more work at lower levels. The quantum-mechanics analogy is illustrative metaphor, not evidence.
Śākta-Upāya: Refining the Stories We Live By
The Empowered Means works with the Power of Knowing on the heart-mind: replacing misaligned thought-constructs (aśuddha-vikalpas) with aligned ones (śuddha-vikalpas) until even those fall away into direct, storyless seeing. Wallis treats it as yoga āsana for the mind, gives a six-stage contemplation method, a recipe for antidotes to self-attack, and Abhinava's inner meaning of worship, fire-offering, mantra and yoga.
Mind and Heart Are One
Sanskrit has one word, citta, for mind and heart, and one word, citta-vṛtti, for thought and emotion. So moods usually rest on a hidden thought, and opinions on hidden feelings. Wallis criticises both "trust reason" and today's "follow your heart", which often means "get in touch with your deeper programming". A yogī consults thought, feeling, intuition and instinct plus teachers and friends, privileging none.
A small morning mistake is forgiven, yet the day goes badly till a beer or TV "buffers" it. The incident reignited a subconscious story ("I always screw things up"), which then finds evidence everywhere. Wallis's own subtler case: "I am blessed" when things clicked flipped to "nothing comes together for me" when they did not. A vikalpa exists in necessary relationship with its opposite; only the wordless state of blessing does not swing back.
- No "negative emotions". Every mood is a gift of the Goddess; one learns from contraction as well as expansion. Bow to anger or fear: "O Goddess, thank you for coming in this form. What do you have to teach me?"
- Heroes (vīras). It takes courage to embrace pain rather than push it away; locked energy is released by self-acceptance.
- Trace thoughts to feelings. Strong abstract views ("justice", "fairness") may hide suppressed anger. Wallis applies this to academia's pretended objectivity, calling the book his "cry in the wilderness" against compartmentalisation.
Aligned and Misaligned Constructs
Misaligned constructs breed more constructs, "a sterile snake biting its own tail", like an argument going in circles. Aligned ones lead to and then dissolve in wordless experience: the moment the heart softens and eyes fill. No construct is "true"; the test is effectiveness at bringing direct experience. Vikalpas are like downloaded programs; studying spiritual philosophy is literally "brain-washing", consciously rewriting the code.
Objection. You have just swapped a miserable program for a happier one; any deeply rooted construct dissolves into "wordless" experience.
Reply. Aligned constructs can destroy dualistic ones but not the reverse: once seen, reality "cannot be undermined" by any construct, because it never depended on one. Test: if anyone's opinion can rob your experience of power, it is still a vikalpa. Hence wise gurus send disciples home or "to get a job".
The tripod for this work: sound reasoning (sat-tarka), true scripture (sad-āgama), a true guru (sad-guru). Abhinava: "Just as the man who thinks intensely that he is a sinner becomes such, just so one who thinks himself to be Śiva... becomes Śiva."
| Stage | Practice | Level |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Choose a passage that resonates; adjust wording if needed | |
| 2 | Learn every word; memorise | Vaikharī (literal) |
| 3 | Ponder: "How would I experience the world if I felt this fully?" | Madhyamā |
| 4 | When slightly bored, meditate on it as mantra, ask "Is there anything more?" | Paśyantī |
| 5 | Sleep and wake with it for days; examine resistance | |
| 6 | Let go; watch how it shows up in daily life |
Assimilation shows when you can explain it in entirely different words: "If you can't show it, you don't really know it."
- Identify a recurring self-attack ("I'm so stupid"). A teacher told Wallis this ensures the behaviour continues: the ego "would rather be right than happy".
- A feeble opposite ("I'm really smart") fails. The antidote must be very powerful and terminate in ultimate Reality: "The divine intelligence that created this whole universe dwells within me as me."
- It should feel uncomfortable, yet true. A student's "I'm a bad mother" became "I am a manifestation of the Divine Mother in the process of realizing and embodying my true nature."
- Repeat it to yourself in a mirror until past feeling silly.
Abhinava's Prākṛt verse names the stains: "I am a filthy sinner", "I am a bound creature", "I am separate", and even "I transcend all things".
The Inner Meaning of Practice
For Abhinava no limb of yoga liberates directly; only insight (sat-tarka) manifesting Pure Wisdom does. He reinterprets four practices:
| Practice | Inner meaning |
|---|---|
| Pūjā (worship) | Offering every thing and state into the Divine; start with the beautiful (flowers, wine, scents), which dissolve easily into repose (viśrānti), then let love "overspill" to the repellent and boring |
| Homa (fire-offering) | Objects wholly devoured in the Fire of Consciousness: one essence (sāmarasya); dissolution, Kālī |
| Japa (mantra) | Affirming "the supreme Reality... remains just as it is", unaffected by any object |
| Yoga | "A special kind of vikalpa": an investigation into That for its constant manifestation |
The VBT's closing verses support this: japa is "ever-greater meditative absorption", dhyāna "a mind become motionless", pūjā a mind that "dissolves into the thought-free ultimate Void". Śākta is kramākrama, gradual cultivation punctuated by sudden leaps, and at its height a tuning in to "particular pulsations in the universal rhythm" that can yield synchronicities.
This is the book's most practical and most psychological chapter, and also where Abhinava sounds most like modern cognitive therapy and affirmation culture. Wallis takes that as proof of transcultural insight; a sceptic would note that his "Śiva-rooted" antidotes are selected for feeling true and moving, not for accuracy, and the refutation of the postmodern objection rests on experience the objector is said not to have had.
Āṇava-Upāya: Body, Breath and Ritual
The Individual Means covers every visible practice: meditation, prāṇāyāma, visualisation, mantra, postures and ritual, using the Power of Action. Most of what is taught as yoga today belongs here. Wallis details Abhinava's four forms: dhyāna (the Fire-Wheel), uccāra (the five breaths), karaṇa (postures of body and awareness) and pūjā, plus a defence of the traditional world of spirits and Sanderson's theory of meaningful ritual.
Āṇava suits those for whom plurality seems most real, "nearly all of us"; it is the easiest to understand and refines awareness for the other two. "There is absolutely no difference among these methods in that the practice of any of them may yield the supreme fruit" (Tantrasāra 5). Any yoga practice done within a Tantrik View becomes Tantrik.
The Three Channels
| Channel | Meaning | Light | Breath | Cognitive aspect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Suṣumnā | "Graceful" | Fire | Udāna (rising) | Knower |
| Piṅgalā | "Reddish" | Sun | Prāṇa (exhale) | Knowing |
| Iḍā | "Refreshing" | Moon | Apāna (inhale) | Known |
- Exhale is prāṇa. In all classical sources prāṇa is the out-breath ("breathing forth") and apāna the in-breath, the reverse of many modern teachers.
- 72,000 channels is "hyperbole"; pre-20th-century images show a few dozen at most.
- Two routes to the rise. Energy enters the central channel by yoga (long, equal breaths with retention plus the kuṇḍalinī seed-mantra in the heart, until the breaths "fuse" and surge upward) or by gnostic insight (knower, knowing and known realised as one). Both presume mind-body unity.
Dhyāna: The Fire-Wheel
- Centre in the Heart, the place where you feel "the very you-ness of 'you'", loving self-awareness without content.
- Fuse the three lights: inhale the moon down to the heart, hold, exhale the sun up and out the crown, until heat or vibration arises: the Fire of Mahābhairava (white moon plus red sun equals orange fire).
- Form a twelve-spoked Fire-Wheel (the twelve powers) and send it out through a sense-aperture to rest on an object.
- Contemplate the object as created, sustained and dissolved by consciousness alone.
- Withdraw it up the central channel and repose in the Void at the crown.
- Repeat with the object's memory (saṃskāra).
"At the very moment of the full realization of this, he becomes God" (Tantrasāra 5).
Uccāra: Raising the Breath
Standard uccāra raises a seed-syllable up the channel on one breath: for HRĪṂ, H at the base, R at the navel, Ī at the heart, nasalisation at the throat, a "swarm of bees" hum at the palate, then silence rising past the crown; 3 to 108 repetitions. Abhinava's prāṇa-uccāra uses all five prāṇa winds, each mapped to a state of consciousness:
| Step | Breath | What happens | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Repose in the Heart | ||
| 2 | Prāṇa (exhale) | Awareness flows out and rests on an object | Waking |
| 3 | Apāna (inhale) | Object's energy drawn in; "sees himself in all things", free of desire | Dream |
| 4 | Samāna | Balanced, retained breaths fuse: "repose in the unity" | Deep sleep |
| 5 | Udāna | Fire rises up the centre; knower, knowing, known collapse | The Fourth |
| 6 | Vyāna | Nectar pours from the crown into every cell: Great Pervasion | Beyond the Fourth |
The third step can be used with an object representing a difficult person to shift the relationship. Wallis twice warns: do not attempt advanced prāṇāyāma ratios (9-9-9-9, 1-4-2) without a qualified teacher.
Karaṇa: Postures of Body and Awareness
- Āsana meant "throne". The deity's (usually lotus) throne, then a meditation seat; the modern sense of stretching postures dates from the 18th century. The general Tantrik term is karaṇa: inversions, dance poses, internal adjustments, "postures of awareness".
- Divya-karaṇa. The "divine posture" of head and face: hips above knees, spine long, head floating "like a waterlily", chin slightly down, jaw and face released, eyes sunk back, tongue tip curled toward the crown.
- Mudrā as seal. Any posture arising spontaneously in absorption is both a sign of and a means to the state. The chief one, khecarī, "moving in the sky", is in Abhinava raising the central energy to the crown; haṭha texts later described "a very different (and rather bizarre)" procedure under the name.
Pūjā: Only God Can Worship God
Spirits. Tantra arose when conservative Vedic ritualists had become effectively atheist; it reintegrated a folk world "full of energies" contactable by mantra. Asking whether spirits have independent agency is a Western psychological question; villagers who disbelieve in them perform the same rites.
Dualists and nondualists share almost the same rites; lineage is defined by mantra and deity, and by the understanding behind practice. Both hold that one must become Śiva to worship Śiva. They part on one point: for nondualists, ritual is effective only if it brings an inner experience. Sanderson distinguishes ritual meaningless, meaningful in a weak sense (intellectual understanding) and in a strong sense (evoking liberating awareness in the act). For Abhinava ritual is vikalpa-saṃskāra enacted.
| Phase | Steps |
|---|---|
| I. Door-guardians | Honour the guardians, remove obstacles |
| II. Five purifications | Site; self (ātma-śuddhi): burn the body in psychic fire, build a body of light with mantras, worship oneself as the deity, install the throne along the channel (Trika: trident with three white lotuses); materials; mantras; icon |
| III. External worship | Throne; substrate; summon, establish, fix the deity; retinue; offerings (water, arghya, flowers, incense, flame, food); show the mudrā (in the Trika, khecarī); japa; circumambulation; homa (optional); offer the fruit; dissolve the maṇḍala |
"If you seek a path with a goal of complete cessation... Tantra is not your path": even awakening needs nourishing, and Abhinava kept a daily practice. A great experience that fades means "your vessel was weak and leaky"; practice plugs the leaks.
Wallis gives enough detail to try the Fire-Wheel and prāṇa-uccāra, yet withholds the key seed-mantras and says success is unlikely without a teacher, so readers get the frame, not the method. His defence of the spirit world shifts the burden ("no traditional society that has ever existed agrees") rather than offering evidence, and his breath-terminology correction, though textually right, may simply confuse students of modern lineages.
Practising Tantra in the Modern World
The conclusion asks whether a modern Westerner can really practise Śaiva Tantra, and answers yes, with caveats: access, secrecy, unreliable gurus, a rite built for a vanished culture, the myth of "Tantric sex", and the question of foreigners. Wallis's recommendation is the Kaula Krama, and he closes with where the tradition survives and how to test a teacher.
Six Hurdles
| Hurdle | Wallis's response |
|---|---|
| Access | Most lineages dead, most scriptures unpublished, corrupt and Sanskrit-only; this book helps, but mantras from a book are "inert and useless" without a teacher |
| Secrecy and stamina | Indian teachers say perhaps 1 per cent of Western students stay to mastery |
| The guru | Asian masters with limited English vs eloquent Western teachers "grossly premature" as gurus: fly like a bee, in person. "The blueprint of a house is not a house." |
| Culture | Dīkṣā was calibrated to dissolve a Veda-determined identity; Westerners each have unique programs, so the rite would need individual tailoring |
| Sex | No scripture teaches sexual technique; neo-tantra is a modern invention |
| Foreigners | Scriptures reject caste: sincere foreigners preferred to insincere brāhmins |
The Tāntrika kept a respectable civic identity as a costume ("the Clark Kent/Superman paradigm") over a Tantrik Self free of social constructs. Freedom "is not attained by merely asserting it": you must first have a strong and healthy ego in order to go beyond all ego. Without a specific identity to see through, one just swaps one construct for another.
The Truth about "Tantric Sex"
North American "Tantric sex" likely traces to Pierre Bernard, "Oom the Omnipotent", teaching in San Francisco from 1905, who used Tantra to satisfy "his prodigious sexual cravings", with lore from a Bengali immigrant; Aleister Crowley invented similar "sex magick". The real Kaula rite (Tantrāloka 29, never translated) bears no resemblance.
- Two transgressive rites. The "five jewels" (semen, menses, urine, faeces, phlegm, a little in much wine) and the "three M's" (meat, wine, extramarital union): both tests of whether you really see all things as one Light.
- The deflating detail. The ritual partner must be someone you are not attracted to, and for a high-caste man a low-caste dūtī; the rite is first a meditation.
- A modern equivalent. A student's joke: a green Californian might have to eat a McDonald's hamburger as divine Consciousness.
There is only one caste, that of human beings. No "caste" was ordained for them, nor color such as white. All arise from the union of a liṅga and a yoni, and thus all souls are one and the same.
Pauṣkara-pārameśvaraWallis's Recommendation: The Kaula Krama
Practice can be lighter than the old daily ritual: Abhinava gives (Tantrāloka 30) a simple Kaula initiation whose three Wisdom-Goddess mantras, recited daily, can replace ritual. The Krama needs no ritual life, only contemplation of chummās (compressed power-statements) received from a teacher within a community. Wallis calls it "the Tantrik school par excellence": most free of sexist and racist programs, most empowering to women, most universal in its analysis of cognition, closest to living Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā.
Where the Tradition Survives
- 1920s. Last proper Śaiva dīkṣās in Kashmir, purpose long forgotten. The Hindu Mahārāja of Kashmir commissions the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies (about 100 volumes), the most important 20th-century event for preserving original Tantra; sets go to Western libraries.
- 1960s–70s. Scholars including Sanderson sit with Swāmī Lakṣman Jū of Śrīnagar, who kept the philosophy while ritual and yoga were lost; the far South kept ritual and yoga but lost the View.
- Now. A few dozen scholars; hundreds of texts unpublished. Best scripture translation: Lakṣman Jū's Shiva Sutras. Wallis names North American scholars (Biernacki, Nemec, Hatley, Bühnemann, Cox, Lawrence) and teachers of lineage (Shankarānanda, Muller-Ortega, Niranjanānanda, Tigunait, Chetanānanda, Tompkins, Khecaranātha, himself), "not... a list of recommended teachers".
- Give it six to twelve months, then take a break for "radically honest" review, asking people close to you what has changed.
- Avoid the internet for evaluating gurus (Wallis bans Wikipedia on Indian religions for his students); visit in person and talk to many students.
- Look for students who are grounded, warm and clear and describe attainments without glamour; jargon alone does not make a cult.
- Find a root-guru first; "guru-shopping" is digging a dozen three-foot holes instead of one thirty-foot well.
Dzogchen. Wallis finds no significant difference between NŚT and Dzogchen's rigpa (from Sanskrit vidyā): all phenomena arise in empty, luminous awareness. Padmasambhava came from Uḍḍiyāna, also the Krama's birthplace. The book ends with a blessing, "May all beings be full", and appendices: a pronunciation guide, the Tantrāloka's opening verses (the Mother "radiant with ever-new genesis", the Father "maintaining his Light through his five faces", their fusion the Heart), and Sanderson's list of texts by school.
Wallis is candid about obstacles, but his conclusion leads to the school he himself teaches and lists his own websites among lineage teachers. Declaring the Krama "par excellence" and the best fit for Westerners is a practitioner's judgement, and his near-identity of NŚT and Dzogchen comes with an admitted "relative ignorance of Dzogchen". The "test a teacher" advice is the chapter's most durable contribution.
What to Take Away
The whole book distilled: the master takeaways, the frameworks worth keeping, the people who matter, and a final critical reading of what Wallis gets right and where his position as an insider shapes the account.
Master Takeaways
- Tantra means scriptures, not sex. Classical Tantra is a body of revealed texts and initiatory lineages (c. 5th–13th centuries); modern "Tantric sex" has no link to it.
- One Consciousness, two faces. Reality is Śiva (aware light) and Śakti (its dynamic power) in fusion; everything is that Consciousness contracting itself in play.
- Embrace, don't escape. Unlike renunciant paths, NŚT seeks liberation within the world and the body; "this is as God as it gets".
- You perform the Five Acts. Creation, stasis, dissolution, concealment and grace happen in every cognition; the gap after dissolution is where choice lives.
- Contraction has a structure. The 36 tattvas and three impurities explain how infinite awareness feels small, separate and imperfect, and which root to loosen first: the sense of lack (āṇava-mala).
- Grace comes first. Śaktipāta is unearned and makes practice possible, not the reverse; its grade reflects the intensity of longing, not worthiness.
- Initiation was a karma technology. The two-day dīkṣā aimed to burn future karma and bring liberation within one life, open regardless of caste or gender.
- A guru's title proves nothing. Gurus were consecrated for teaching ability, so discernment stays with the student.
- The canon is a hierarchy. Schools ran from dual, Śiva-centred and conservative (Siddhānta) to nondual, goddess-centred and transgressive (Kālīkula), with higher texts overriding lower.
- Trika and Krama are the summit. Abhinavagupta's Kaula Trika/Krama synthesis set the terms for later Śaivism and even Śrīvidyā.
- Kashmir Shaivism is half the story. The exegetes cannot be understood apart from the scriptures and practices 20th-century readers ignored.
- Modern yoga's parent is Tantra. The subtle body, kuṇḍalinī, bandhas, mudrās and prāṇāyāma reached haṭha-yoga from Tantrik texts; the Yoga-sūtra has two sentences on posture.
- The cakra system is Śaiva. Six-cakra kuṇḍalinī yoga comes from the Kubjikā tradition through Matsyendra and Gorakṣa.
- Desire is divine Will constrained. Śrīvidyā's practice is to stop judging desire and merge it into the Goddess's Will.
- Three means, one goal. Śāmbhava (intuition), śākta (refined thought) and āṇava (body, breath, ritual) all aim at samāveśa; teach top-down, practise mostly bottom-up.
- Catch the first moment. Notice each new state before labelling it; this needs a life with a low "noise floor".
- Refine your stories. Replace misaligned constructs with aligned ones that terminate in ultimate Reality, until all constructs fall away.
- There are no negative emotions. Every mood is a vibration of Śakti to be welcomed and learned from.
- Ritual must mean something. For nondualists, ritual works only if it evokes liberating awareness in the act (Sanderson's "strong sense").
- Daily practice plugs the leaks. Peak experiences fade without a stable vessel; even the awakened keep practising.
- You need an ego to transcend. Freedom requires seeing through a specific identity; merely asserting it swaps one construct for another.
- Test by results. Give a practice six to twelve months, review honestly with people close to you, and judge teachers by their students' groundedness.
Frameworks to Keep
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Five Acts of God | Every cognition runs through creation, stasis, dissolution, concealment, grace | Watching how a mood or thought forms and where choice enters |
| 36 tattvas | Reality emanates in 36 levels from Śiva to earth | Locating where a contemplative practice operates |
| Three impurities | Lack, separateness, and karmic doership, each resting on the one before | Diagnosing what kind of contraction you are in |
| Five-layer self | Body, prāṇa, mind, void, Consciousness, each pervaded by those below | Choosing which layer a practice addresses |
| Four levels of the Word | Supreme, visionary, middle, spoken speech | Working with mantra or self-talk at deeper levels |
| Nine grades of śaktipāta | Intensity of grace sets the speed of liberation | Thinking about why people progress differently |
| Three upāyas (+ an-upāya) | Intuition, refined thought, body-breath-ritual | Matching method to temperament and stage |
| Vikalpa refinement | Misaligned to aligned to no construct | Working with recurring self-attacks |
| Six-stage contemplation | Resonate, learn, ponder, meditate, live with, release | Truly absorbing any teaching |
| Prāṇa-uccāra | Five breaths mapped to five states of awareness | Structured breath-based meditation |
| Meaningful ritual | Meaningless, weak (understood), strong (evokes awareness) | Evaluating any habitual practice |
| Teacher test | Six to twelve months, honest review, observe the community | Choosing or leaving a teacher or practice |
Who's Who
| Person | Date | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Vasugupta | c. 825–875 | Revealed the Śiva-sūtra; root of the Spanda lineage |
| Kallaṭa | c. 850–900 | Stanzas on Vibration (Spanda-kārikā) |
| Somānanda | c. 900–950 | Vision of Śiva; first Pratyabhijñā master |
| Utpala Deva | c. 925–975 | Stanzas on Recognition; devotional hymns |
| Abhinavagupta | c. 975–1025 | Tantrāloka, Tantrasāra; Trika/Krama synthesis; rasa theory |
| Kṣemarāja | 11th c. | Heart of the Doctrine of Recognition; key commentaries |
| Śambhunātha | 10th–11th c. | Abhinava's sadguru from Jālandhara |
| Macchanda (Matsyendra) & Konkanāmbā | c. 8th c. | Founders of the Kaula lineage |
| Gorakṣa | 13th c. | Credited founder of haṭha-yoga; Nāth patriarch |
| Kṛṣṇamācārya | 1930s | Father of modern postural yoga |
| Swāmī Lakṣman Jū | 20th c. | Last Kashmiri teacher of the philosophy |
| Alexis Sanderson | 20th–21st c. | Oxford scholar whose maps of the canon underpin the book |
Whole-Book Critical Lens
What holds up. The history is grounded in the Sanderson school and recent manuscript work, and several corrections are now mainstream: Tantra is not sex, haṭha-yoga is Tantrik in origin, "Kashmir Shaivism" was studied cut off from its scriptures, and the cakra system has Śaiva roots. The practice chapters are unusually clear about what Abhinava actually taught.
What to read with care. Wallis is an initiated teacher writing a book that ends by recommending the school he teaches, listing his own websites among lineage teachers. Judgements of value ("summit", "par excellence", "decline") track his nondual, goddess-centred, Kaula preference. Insider testimony (Abhinava's birth, Madhurāja's portrait, gurus' attainments, his own śaktipāta) is presented sympathetically, and his defence of guru-yoga places the whole burden of abuse on the disciple. Claims about practice effects (karma burned, nine grades of grace) are given on the texts' terms, without external evidence.
Net. The best single general introduction to classical Śaiva Tantra, best read as a scholar-practitioner's argument, not a neutral survey.
About This Edition
This Insight Edition is an independent study guide to Tantra Illuminated by Christopher D. Wallis. It summarises and comments on the book in its own words, quotes only short passages for discussion, and is not a substitute for the original. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.