Insight Editions · No. 350
The Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One
The Virupaksapancasika with the Commentary of Vidyacakravartin
David Peter Lawrence
David Peter Lawrence's study and translation of the Virupaksapancasika, the Pratyabhijna manual in which Siva as the Odd-Eyed One humbles Indra: the universe as one's body, I-hood as Supreme Speech, the fire of recognition, the five grades of the enlightened and the Book on Powers. All five introductory chapters and every verse, with critical notes, glossary and a practice path.
A study guide to The Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One by David Peter Lawrence (State University of New York Press, 2008). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the author or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
CORE CLAIM
Indra's error was not feeling like the Lord but feeling it about too small a body. The cure is to expand I-hood until the universe is one's body and one's awareness; enlightenment is strong recognition, bondage is its lack.
SCOPE
Lawrence's Preface and all five introductory chapters, then all 53 verses in four books with Vidyacakravartin's commentary and the key notes, a glossary and a master synthesis with a practice path: about 36,000 words.
KEY FIGURES
Virupaksa (Siva) and Indra; the commentator Vidyacakravartin; Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta; translator David Peter Lawrence; and, in the comparison, Plotinus, Freud, Lacan and Kohut.
BEST FOR
Readers who want the Pratyabhijna as practice: the universal body, the ladder from object to I, the fire of recognition, the five grades of subject and the two supreme powers, with critical notes on obscure verses and sectarian limits.
How to Use This Guide
The Virupaksapancasika ("Fifty Verses of Virupaksa", abbreviated VAP) is a short Sanskrit manual of contemplation, probably from Kashmir in the eleventh or twelfth century. It is cast as a dialogue. Indra, the old Vedic king of the gods, is showing off a fight between rutting elephants and imagines he is the Supreme Lord. Siva, wandering the world in a body taken up "in sport" under the name Virupaksa, "the Odd-Eyed One", answers by staging a fight between two mountains. Humbled, Indra asks for the secret of this power. The fifty-three verses that follow are the answer, and their message is startling for an Indian religious text: Indra's mistake was not that he felt like the Lord of the universe. His mistake was that he felt it about too small a body. The cure is not to give up the sense of "I", but to stretch it until it covers everything.
The book has two parts. Part I is Lawrence's Introduction in five chapters: the historical setting, the myth of Indra's humbling, the teaching of the text, a comparative chapter on narcissism, and a note on the translation. Part II is the full translation of the VAP with the commentary (Vivrti, VAPV) of Vidyacakravartin, in four books, followed by notes, a glossary, a bibliography and an index.
This guide follows the book in its own order:
- The core argument of each chapter or verse group: what Lawrence, Virupaksa or Vidyacakravartin is trying to establish.
- Teaching notes: the ideas unpacked one at a time, with each Sanskrit technical term explained when it first appears.
- Insights: what is distinctive, subtle or easy to miss, and how it links to the rest of Kashmir Saivism.
- Critical lens notes: where a claim is assertion rather than argument, where a tradition is doing sectarian work, or where the scholar's own frame shapes what you read.
- Key terms and reflection: a short glossary per section and questions or exercises.
Two reading notes. First, this guide uses plain transliteration without diacritical marks (Siva, Sakti, Virupaksa, Pratyabhijna), as the other Kashmir Saivism editions on this site do. Second, the verse numbering is continuous across the four books, so verse 1.8 is followed by 2.9, and Book 4 ends at 4.53. Lawrence follows the printed Sanskrit editions in this.
The Shape of the Whole Book in One Page
- Where the text comes from (Chapter 1). The VAP is a late work of the Pratyabhijna ("Recognition") school created by Utpaladeva (c. 900 to 950) and expanded by Abhinavagupta (c. 950 to 1020). The commentary is probably South Indian. Kashmiri Saivism is a "tantric" tradition whose defining pursuit is power (Sakti), and the Pratyabhijna turned that pursuit into philosophy.
- The frame story (Chapter 2). Indra's humbling belongs to a long line of Indian myths in which the Vedic high god is corrected: by Prajapati in the Chandogya Upanisad, by Krsna lifting Mount Govardhana, and by Visnu and Siva in the story of Indra and the ants. Each myth teaches a different cure for pride.
- The teaching (Chapter 3). The VAP's cure is the universalisation of the body and the expansion of I-am-ness (asmita) to the whole cosmos, supported by contemplations of wheels of powers, five modalities of Sakti, the sixfold course of speech, the mystical etymology of "aham", the grammar of persons, and the subsumption of difference and sequence. Lesser powers (siddhis) are folded into the one great power.
- The comparison (Chapter 4). Lawrence sets the Saiva teaching beside Western ideas of divine self-love (Plotinus, Aquinas, Eckhart), Narcissus, and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan and Kohut. He argues that the Saiva "perfect I" is close to what Kohut called cosmic narcissism, and he defends the tradition against the charge that monism cannot ground ethics.
- The translation (Chapter 5 and Part II). Fifty-three verses with commentary, in four books: the universe as one's body (Book 1), the universe as awareness (Book 2), the modes of recognitive apprehension that remove doubt and misunderstanding (Book 3), and the Book on Powers with the closing transformation of Indra (Book 4).
Why This Book Matters
Most English readers meet Kashmir Saivism through its philosophers (Utpaladeva, Abhinavagupta) or through its meditation manuals (the Vijnana Bhairava, the Siva Sutra). The VAP sits between them. It is short, it uses the full Pratyabhijna vocabulary, and it is designed to be practised. In the Preface, Lawrence reports that it was one of the three favourite texts on spiritual discipline (yoga sastra) of Gopinath Kaviraj, the great twentieth-century scholar of Tantra, the other two being Vyasa's commentary on the Yoga Sutra and the Vijnana Bhairava.
The book matters for three further reasons:
- It is the only reliable English translation of the VAP with Vidyacakravartin's commentary. The one earlier attempt, Henri Lenaerts's 1971 thesis at Banaras Hindu University, Lawrence calls "a rough and problematic paraphrase".
- It isolates the most unusual idea in Kashmir Saivism: that the ego is not to be destroyed but perfected. Earlier Hindu and Buddhist schools treat "I-am-ness" as an affliction. The Pratyabhijna treats it as the human form of God's own self-awareness.
- It asks hard comparative questions. Is a teaching that makes the practitioner "Lord of the universe" a recipe for grandiosity? Can a monism that absorbs all otherness into the Self ground any ethics? Lawrence takes these questions seriously instead of waving them away.
How the Book Is Laid Out
| Part | Pages | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | ix to xi | Why the text matters; Kaviraj's favourite texts; Lawrence's helpers, including Navjivan Rastogi and Hemendra Nath Chakravarty |
| Chapter 1 | 3 to 18 | Dates and authors; what "tantric" means; the philosophical rationalisation of Kashmiri Tantra; Pratyabhijna and the perfect I; language; the universal body; reflection |
| Chapter 2 | 19 to 24 | The frame story; three earlier myths of the instruction of Indra |
| Chapter 3 | 25 to 38 | The teachings of the VAP and VAPV, with three tables and one figure |
| Chapter 4 | 39 to 56 | Comparative reflections: divine self-love, narcissism, psychoanalysis, ethics |
| Chapter 5 | 57 to 58 | Editions, the earlier paraphrase, translation choices, verse numbering |
| Part II | 59 to 130 | Translation of the four books (Book 1 from p. 61, Book 2 from p. 75, Book 3 from p. 93, Book 4 from p. 115) |
| Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index | 131 to 199 | Lawrence's scholarly apparatus |
Reading Strategy
Read Chapter 3 of the Introduction before the translation. It is Lawrence's own map of the text, and without it the commentary can feel like a string of unrelated contemplations. Then read each book of the translation slowly, one verse group at a time, and try the contemplation before moving on. The VAP is built as a sequence of exercises, and Vidyacakravartin's commentary repeatedly says "contemplate" (bhavaya, vimrsa). Return to Chapter 4 at the end, when you have your own sense of what the perfect I feels like and can judge Lawrence's comparison for yourself.
Why a "Simple" Project Became a Hard One
The Preface makes three points that shape the whole book. The text is a practical work, not a work of technical philosophy. It is late, and it shows how the Pratyabhijna was used once its great founders had done their work. And it opens onto a psychological question, the transformation of egoity and the experience of the body, which Lawrence wants to put into dialogue with Western thought.
Teaching Notes
1. Not epistemology but psychology. The original Pratyabhijna works of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta are mostly occupied with epistemology and metaphysics: how knowledge works, why only consciousness can explain memory and recognition, how Buddhist logicians are wrong. The VAP and its commentary "do not engage in the complex and technical investigations" of those works. Instead they "use Pratyabhijna theories to structure a series of tantric contemplations". Their subject is what Lawrence calls the tradition's religious and philosophical psychology: how the ego and the felt body are to be transformed.
2. A text from Kashmir, a commentary from the South. The verses are probably Kashmiri. The commentary, the Vivrti of Vidyacakravartin, is most likely from South India. The commentary is "of the sort designed to help Sanskrit readers understand both the language and the basic ideas of the original, without much elaboration or controversy". That makes it a good guide for English readers too.
3. The comparative chapter is optional, but not an afterthought. Lawrence says those interested "only in the philological and historical representation of the texts may choose to skip" Chapter 4. Yet he also says his aim there is to show that the Saiva texts "may point toward a religious understanding of narcissism beyond the explanatory scope of the psychoanalytic method". The comparison builds on his earlier book, Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument (1999), which defended the Pratyabhijna arguments philosophically.
4. The helpers. Lawrence completed his first draft in Hong Kong around 2001 and then worked through the text line by line in India with Hemendra Nath Chakravarty. Navjivan Rastogi, the leading Indian scholar of the Krama and of the Tantraloka, reviewed the entire translation. Srinarayan Mishra helped with difficult points, and Alexis Sanderson, Mark Dyczkowski, David Dubois and others gave advice. This matters for the reliability of the translation: it was checked against the living Indian scholarly tradition as well as the Western one.
Lawrence admits that he chose this text because he "thought it would be fairly simple and not very time-consuming", and that it proved "significantly more complex than anticipated". Take that as a warning about the VAP itself. The verses look simple. Each one is a compressed instruction that assumes the whole Pratyabhijna system. The commentary is the key that opens them, and even the commentary leaves many esoteric points unexplained.
Key Terms
- Virupaksapancasika (VAP): "Fifty Verses of Virupaksa"; in fact fifty-three verses.
- Vivrti (VAPV): "explanation, commentary"; here, Vidyacakravartin's commentary on the VAP.
- Yoga sastra: a treatise on spiritual discipline.
- Pratyabhijna: "recognition"; the philosophical school of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta.
The Texts in Their Religious and Intellectual Contexts (pp. 3 to 18)
Chapter 1 places the VAP in four contexts, each wider than the last. First, dates and authors: what little can be known about the verses and the commentary. Second, Tantra: Lawrence's working definition of what makes a tradition tantric, namely the pursuit of power. Third, the history of Kashmiri Tantra, and in particular its "philosophical rationalisation" by the Pratyabhijna, which Lawrence defends against purely political readings. Fourth, the specific doctrines and practices the VAP draws on: the perfect I, the theory of language, the universal body and the analogy of reflection.
1. Names and Dates
The name. Virupaksa, from virupa (odd, irregular, deformed) and aksa (eye), means "the Odd-Eyed One". It is a common name of Siva and refers to his third eye, which is odd in number (three eyes) and odd in form (the third eye in the forehead is set "awry, perpendicular to the other two").
The author of the verses. "There is no evidence presently available to support the identification of Virupaksa with any known historical individual." Lawrence offers a conjecture, flagged as only that: the encounter of Indra and Virupaksa might allude to a royal patron and a Saiva scholar-practitioner. The king who thinks himself lord is taught by the yogin who really is.
The date. The VAP draws heavily on Abhinavagupta, which sets the earliest date (the late tenth to early eleventh century). It is quoted in the Maharthamanjariparimala of Mahesvarananda, a twelfth-century South Indian Krama text, which sets the latest. So the verses date from the eleventh or twelfth century. Old manuscripts in the Sarada script, the script of Kashmir, suggest a Kashmiri origin.
The commentator. The closing verses of the commentary say it "was composed by the glorious (Sri) Vidyacakravartin, and placed on the touchstone named the intelligence of Govindacandra". Who was Govindacandra? A twelfth-century king of Kanauj had that name, but nothing links him to this text. The evidence points south instead:
- The only known manuscripts of the commentary are in South Indian scripts: a Malayalam-script manuscript from the Trivandrum Palace Library, used by T. Ganapati Sastri for his 1910 edition, and three Telugu-script manuscripts in the Sarasvati Mahal Library at Thanjavur, reported by Sanderson.
- A Vidyacakravartin of the fourteenth century is associated with the court of Ballala III of the Hoysala dynasty. Works ascribed to him include a short monistic Saiva text (the Dasasloki), a poem (Rukminikalyana) and commentaries on two works of poetics. These works are full of references to Kashmiri religion and poetics.
- But one author for all of them has not been proven. S. S. Janaki has argued that there were three Vidyacakravartins in succession under Hoysala patronage.
Sanderson's point about the name. If "Sri" were only the honorific "glorious", the commentator would be giving himself an honorific while denying it to his patron or guru, Govindacandra, which would be "markedly disrespectful". So the commentator's real name may have been Srividyacakravartin. Lawrence finds this reasonable but notes that the author of one of the Hoysala poetics commentaries also calls himself "Sri Vidyacakravartin" and names his source author without the "Sri". He also notes, with a light touch, Janaki's remark that this author shows "an air of self-consciousness and pride" and praises himself "in exaggerated terms". One "might be tempted" to see in that pride the perfected egoity the VAP teaches, but Lawrence says at once that this is "ungrounded".
The dating problem has a practical lesson. The VAP is a Kashmiri text read through a South Indian commentary perhaps two or three centuries later. Everything you learn about the verses comes through a reader who lived in the world where Kashmiri Saivism had been transplanted into the Tamil and Kannada south, where it shaped Srividya and the later Krama of Mahesvarananda. The commentary is a witness to how the text was received, not necessarily to what its author meant.
2. What Makes a Tradition "Tantric"
Lawrence prefers the name monistic Saivism or monistic Kashmiri Saivism to "Kashmir Saivism", because medieval Kashmir also had a dualistic Saiva Siddhanta, and the label "Kashmir Saivism" blurs the two.
He then addresses the word "tantra". Scholars agree that modern uses of "tantra", "tantrism" and "tantric" do not match any single premodern Indian self-description. Nevertheless there is "a growing consensus" to group movements by historical and thematic links. The tantric traditions of medieval Kashmir include the Kaula, Krama, Spanda and Trika (interwoven Saiva and Sakta lineages), the Vaisnava Pancaratra and the Buddhist Vajrayana.
The defining feature: the pursuit of power. "Probably the most generic and distinctive feature" of tantric traditions "is the pursuit of power." For Hindu Tantra, this power is Sakti, the Goddess herself. Practitioners variously try to:
- Identify with the Goddess;
- Be ecstatically possessed by her (avesa);
- Become her possessor (saktiman) by identifying with her male consort, a form of Siva or Visnu.
Other common features, all understood as expressions of this quest:
| Feature | What it is |
|---|---|
| Sexual cosmogony | Myths of the union of Sakti with a male deity, and practices that re-enact it in contemplation or intercourse |
| Mandala | Circular diagrams of the emanation and rule of the cosmos |
| Mantra | Speech formulas charged with power |
| Theosophical schemes | Maps of correspondences between transcendent and immanent levels of Sakti |
| Divinised body | The body as the site and vehicle of the divine |
| Enjoyment and liberation | The joining of bhoga (enjoyment) with yoga (practice) and moksa (liberation) |
The range of powers. Tantric power runs from the limited "proficiencies" (siddhis) of local practitioners, through the sovereignty of kings (who were great patrons of Hindu and Buddhist Tantra), to the omnipotence of the person who is liberated by complete identity with the deity.
Transgression. Following Alexis Sanderson, Lawrence notes that the pursuit of tantric power often breaks orthodox upper-caste norms of purity (suddhi). Many rites were first performed in cremation grounds, places of extreme impurity. Sexual rites sometimes prescribe adultery and caste-mixing. David White argues that Tantra began with Siddha practices of offering and ingesting sexual fluids to win favours from yoginis, and some traditions included the ingestion of other bodily substances.
The definition "Tantra is the pursuit of power" is the key to the whole book. It explains why the VAP's frame story is a contest of power (elephants against mountains), why its highest goals are powers (becoming guru of the universe, performing Siva's five acts), and why its last book is a Book on Powers. The Pratyabhijna does not abandon the old tantric quest for power. It reinterprets the quest as the recognition of what the Self already is.
3. How Kashmiri Tantra Was Transformed
Lawrence summarises three historical trends documented by Sanderson, White, Mark Dyczkowski, Ronald Inden and others.
Overcoding. Each tradition continually appropriated and subordinated the symbols and rituals of its rivals and of more established traditions. Sanderson calls this "overcoding": you take the other school's deity, practice or text and place it below your own in a hierarchy. Lawrence notes that such ranking processes are found in every culture, but the Tantric traditions are "remarkable for the baroque complexity and convolutedness" of theirs.
Domestication. The traditions "domesticised" or "Sanskritised" themselves by moving closer to upper-caste orthopraxy. Cremation-ground and sexual rites were toned down and internalised; the emphasis became more gnostic, a matter of knowledge. White adds the idea of dissimulation: practitioners concealing transgressive practice under the appearance of householder propriety. Lawrence adds a further idea of his own: the goal of identity with the omnipotent deity may be seen as a kind of sublimation of the pursuit of concrete magical and political powers.
Philosophical rationalisation. Lawrence's own research concerns a third expression of domestication: the enrichment of monistic Saivism through Sanskrit academic discourse and philosophical debate. Writers "often candidly inspired with a sense of religious mission" consolidated their inheritance in systematic manuals (sastras). The sequence:
| Period | Figure | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| 9th century | Vasugupta and his disciple Kallata | The Siva Sutra and the Spanda Karika, core texts of the Spanda ("vibration") system |
| c. 900 to 950 | Somananda | The Sivadrsti, "Cognition of Siva", the first full-scale philosophical defence of the Trika against rival Hindu and Buddhist schools |
| c. 900 to 950 | Utpaladeva, Somananda's pupil | The foundational verses and commentaries of the Isvarapratyabhijna system, "which became the authoritative system of monistic Saiva philosophical theology" |
| c. 950 to 1020 | Abhinavagupta, a disciple of a disciple of Utpaladeva | Long commentaries on Utpaladeva; the Tantraloka, which organises the whole of Trika practice by Pratyabhijna categories and absorbs Kaula, Krama and Spanda material; the aesthetics of rasa |
"With Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, Hindu tantra reached its peak of intellectual sophistication", and their influence is evident "in most later Sanskritic traditions of Hindu tantrism".
4. Lawrence's Argument Against Reductionism
This is the most polemical passage in the chapter, and one of the most important.
The target. The dominant approaches in the modern humanities explain culture "in terms of the advancement, maintenance, and enjoyment of social, political, and economic power". Lawrence does not deny such motives, but he questions "how far we should presuppose that influence to extend". His example is David White, who describes the "high Hindu" tantric mysticism of the exegetes as "an effort to win a certain support base of high-caste householders" and calls the scholastic works "a hermeneutical transformation of an earlier body of practice into a mystical metaphysics, which often systematically distorts the meaning of the original practice itself". White goes further and compares Abhinavagupta's "packaging" of Tantra for a "leisured Kashmiri populace" to New Age seekers who treat "Tantric sex" as "a consumer product".
Lawrence's reply. Such claims are "exaggerated and prejudicial":
- Distortion versus insight. Sometimes it is easy to tell a hermeneutic distortion from a creative insight, "but often not". The same applies to guessing at hidden motives.
- Reverse Orientalism. Reducing other cultures to "the counters of a globalized system obsessed with profit and consumption, political world order, marketing, and media spin" may itself be "an insidious hegemonic Orientalism", what Lawrence calls "ethos-centrism".
- Why assume epiphenomena? Practical benefits have always been part of the tantric pursuit of power. "Why should we assume that soteriology and philosophy are epiphenomena?"
- Charity first. Before "debunk[ing] tantric sastras by a postulation of pristine and authentic sexual transgression", we owe Sanskrit writers "the hermeneutic and dialogical charity" of engaging seriously with what they say they are doing.
This is a real debate in the field, and Lawrence is one party to it. White's view (in books such as "Kiss of the Yogini", 2003) is that the original Tantra was a body of transgressive ritual practice and that the philosophers recast it. Lawrence's view is that the philosophy has its own integrity and must be engaged on its own terms. Both can be partly right. The Pratyabhijna clearly did internalise and reinterpret older ritual, as Lawrence himself grants when he describes overcoding and domestication. The question is whether the reinterpretation was a cover for social ambition or a genuine development. The VAP is a useful test case, because it keeps the vocabulary of power while turning it into contemplation. As you read, ask which description fits better.
5. The Basic Pattern: Approaching Siva Through Sakti
The doctrine. The only reality is Siva, and Siva is the true Self of all beings. These traditions overcode Sakti within Siva's nature: Siva is the saktiman, the possessor of Sakti, who holds her "within his androgynous nature as his integral power and consort". According to the central myth, Siva divides himself from Sakti and then, in sexual union, emanates and controls the universe through her.
The practice. Liberation is the realisation of one's true Self as Siva. The basic pattern, which Sanderson suggests reflects the absorption of Saktism by Saivism, is the approach to Siva through Sakti. The Vijnana Bhairava says that Sakti is Siva's "door" or "face" (mukha). The adept re-enacts the myth to become the saktiman. Lawrence lists examples:
- In the Kaula sexual ritual, a man realises himself as the possessor of Sakti immanent in his partner.
- In the monistic Saiva appropriation of Kali Krama, one contemplates oneself as the possessor of sakticakras, circles of goddesses or powers.
- The Spanda tradition pursues possession of the sakticakras understood as spanda, creative vibration.
Abhinavagupta and others then multiplied "secondary codes" for this one basic pattern: philosophical theories, pantheons, hierarchies of mantras and cosmic principles, mandalas, metaphors and analogies. The VAP uses several of these codes, and Chapter 3 lists them.
Lawrence's phrase "mythico-ritual pattern" is worth holding on to. Behind every contemplation in the VAP there is one story: Siva separates from Sakti, emanates the world through her, and then possesses her again. The adept's task is to take Siva's place in that story. Each "code" (the body, the ego, speech, grammar, reflection) is a different language for telling it. Once you see this, the variety of the VAP's exercises stops looking random.
6. The Pratyabhijna and the Perfection of Egoity
Philosophy as ritual. Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, "belying the Western dichotomy of faith (or mysticism) and reason", treat the Pratyabhijna as both a philosophical apologetic and an internalised tantric ritual. The discourse follows the sixteen categories of the Nyaya school, the most widely accepted Indian standards for public argument. Its goal is the liberating recognition "I am Siva".
Revealing Sakti as a syllogism. Utpaladeva describes the method as the "revealing of Sakti" (saktyaviskarana). Abhinavagupta explains that this has the form of a Nyaya "inference for the sake of others" (pararthanumana):
| Part of the inference | Content |
|---|---|
| Subject (paksa) | "I", oneself |
| Predicate (sadhya) | "Siva" |
| Reason (hetu) | Sakti: the power to emanate and control the universe |
| Conclusion | I am Siva, because I have Siva's defining quality, Sakti |
Pure Wisdom. The insight gained by revealing Sakti is identified with Pure Wisdom (suddhavidya), one of the cosmic principles: the awareness "I am this", in which one knows oneself as the emanator of the universe. This insight animates "good reasoning" (sattarka), which counters ordinary dualistic thinking and leads to a "purification of conceptual constructions" (vikalpasamskara).
Self-recognition as creation. The centre of the system is the explanation of Siva's creation as an act of self-recognition (pratyabhijna, ahampratyavamarsa). Siva's self-recognition is also identified with Supreme Speech (paravak), taken from the grammarian-philosopher Bhartrhari, and with omnipotent agency (kartrta). Siva emanates by differentiating his self-recognition into discrete acts of recognitive-linguistic apprehension that constitute all objects. "Siva recognizes himself even through limited objective judgments such as 'This is blue' and 'This is yellow.'"
The perfect I. In philosophical psychology, the Pratyabhijna describes the recognised Siva-identity as a higher I (aham) or I-hood (ahambhava), which came to be called perfect I-hood (purnahanta). Michel Hulin and Mark Dyczkowski have shown how new this was. Dyczkowski writes that this concept of Self "as pure, absolute ego-consciousness is quite unique in the history of Indian thought", found only in the monistic Kashmiri Saiva schools and traditions they influenced, such as Srividya. Lawrence thinks precursors can be found in earlier tantric and even some Upanisadic texts, but accepts Dyczkowski's point for the developed theory.
The break with earlier Indian thought. Hindu and Buddhist traditions usually call for the surrender of ordinary egoistic identity, under names such as:
| Term | Usual meaning | Pratyabhijna view |
|---|---|---|
| ahamkara | "I-maker", the ego function | An expression of God's I in contracted form |
| abhimana | pride, self-conception | To be universalised, not suppressed |
| asmita | I-am-ness (a Yoga Sutra affliction) | The seed of the perfect I |
| ahamta | I-hood | The very nature of Siva |
For the Pratyabhijna, "the human ego is an immanent expression of God's identity that must be universalized and transfigured into its essential nature as perfect I-hood".
Divine satiety. Integral to God's perfect egoity is a state of satisfaction, which Abhinavagupta calls "rest in the self" (svatmavisranti), "self-enjoyment" (svatmopabhoga) and "self-relishing" (svatmacamatkara, svavisayasvada). Through practices from the Kaula sexual ritual to aesthetic appreciation and philosophical contemplation, "ordinary selfish pleasures are transfigured into that divine satiety".
The phrase "perfection of egoity" can sound like a licence for arrogance. Notice exactly what is claimed. The ordinary ego is not inflated as it is; it is universalised. The small I says "I am this body, this house, this mood." The perfect I says "I am this" about everything. The difference is not in the intensity of self-regard but in its range. Pride is a contracted form of the very thing liberation is. That is why the VAP can take Indra's pride as its starting material instead of its enemy.
7. The Semantics and Syntax of the Perfect I
The Pratyabhijna theory of the I is also a theory of language. Chapter 1 explains three parts of it that the VAP uses.
(a) Speech splits into words and things. Following Bhartrhari, emanation occurs through a bifurcation of Supreme Speech into ordinary expressive speech (vacaka, "that which denotes") and the objects of speech (vacya, "that which is denoted"). Because words and objects have a common source above language, "the entire universe of experience" is "inherently linguistic", and this common origin is what makes ordinary reference possible. Liberation reverses the split.
(b) The occult etymology of "aham". Abhinavagupta reads the word aham ("I") as containing the whole alphabet:
- a is the first phoneme in the traditional Sanskrit list, and ha is the last. So aha contains everything from first to last.
- The final m, written as a dot (bindu), completes the word.
- Together they map the cosmic cycle of emission and reabsorption.
This justifies aham as a favourite Saiva mantra. A parallel scheme describes the six courses (adhvan) of emanation: on the side of expressive speech, phonemes (varna), mantras and words (pada); on the side of referents, cosmic segments (kala), principles (tattva) and worlds (bhuvana).
(c) The ranking of scriptures. Because Supreme Speech is the essence of all scripture (agama), Abhinavagupta can overcode the texts of rival Hindu, Buddhist and Jain schools: each gives its followers a more or less "complete" (purna) realisation of the Saiva perfect I.
(d) A grammar of omnipotence. Lawrence's earlier work described a "mythico-ritual syntax of omnipotence". It concerns how verbs of action (kriya) relate to the nouns that name the factors of action (karakas: agent, object, instrument and so on).
- Edwin Gerow and Lawrence have argued that many Indian philosophies denigrate the agent. The tendency is strongest in Advaita Vedanta; Buddhists from Nagarjuna to Dharmakirti deny the agent's role entirely in dependent origination; the late grammarian Nagesa treats passive intransitive syntax as the paradigm.
- This reflects both the agent's bondage to karma and its subordination to the order of ritual, caste and life-stage in Brahmanic norms.
- Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta reverse this. Siva forms the intention (iccha) for action and is the instigator (prayojaka) and locus (vyaparasraya) of all processes. God is svatantra, "self-determined"; every other factor is paratantra, "determined by another", namely by the agent.
- This grammar is "ritually axiomatic". Utpaladeva says the Pratyabhijna leads to salvation through contemplating oneself as the agent of the universe. In ritual, the adept identifies with Siva as the agent who impels all the other factors, the ritual implements standing for all cosmic entities.
(e) The grammar of persons. Abhinavagupta ranks the three grammatical persons:
| Sanskrit name | English name | Pronoun | Trika level |
|---|---|---|---|
| prathama purusa ("first person") | third person | He, She, It, They | Nara, the human reduced to an inert object |
| madhyama purusa ("middle person") | second person | You | Sakti, addressed by Siva in the tantric dialogues |
| uttama purusa ("final" or "highest person") | first person | I, We | Siva, the enunciator of all discourse |
Like modern linguists, Abhinava accepts that the three persons are defined by contrast and are arbitrary in reference. But he ranks them by extension, anticipating Emile Benveniste: "You" (as plural) can include "He"; "We" can include "You" and "He". The wider reach of the first person points to its ultimate meaning: the I is Siva, and the universe is my Supreme Speech. The contemplation of return personalises every "He, She, It" by absorbing it into "You" (Sakti), and then realises "You" as my own power and consort.
The grammatical-person contemplation is the most practical of these theories. Try it with the next person you meet. In ordinary experience they are a "he" or "she", an object in your world. Addressed, they become a "you", a living presence with whom you are in relation. The Saiva step is a third move: recognise that the "you" is not outside the "I" that addresses it. The contemplation does not abolish the other. It raises the other from object to presence before folding presence into Self. Whether this last step respects the other or swallows them is the ethical question Chapter 4 takes up.
8. Universalising the Body
The body is not left behind. Tantric traditions agree with modern cultural theory that embodiment is central to identity. But they do not celebrate the ordinary body as it is: its everyday experience is "an extremely limited and inadequate realization of much greater possibilities". Building on the Vedas, the Upanisads, the Bhagavad Gita (with its vision of the cosmic form) and earlier Tantra, the monistic Saivas treat the whole cosmic emanation through Sakti as the Self's true body. The Siva Sutra says that "the perceptible (drsya)", the universe, "is one's body".
Microcosm and macrocosm. The human body replicates the cosmic body. Lawrence quotes Gavin Flood: the human body "is thought to contain the higher universe beyond it and also the absolute consciousness of Siva with which it is ultimately identical", so it is homologous to "the manifest cosmic body" and contains "the essential cosmic body". Hence the body becomes "the vehicle of transformation", and awareness of identity with Siva "is thought to expand and to fill the body", which is also an expansion "through the cosmos".
Practices. Lawrence names several techniques for what he calls the "universalization" of the body and the "corporification" of the universe, which overcode the everyday body habits that the sociologist Marcel Mauss called the "habitus":
| Practice | What it does |
|---|---|
| Bhutasuddhi, purification of the elements | The adept resolves the gross elements of the body into subtle essences, burns away the body's limits and, by infusing divine nectar, manifests a divinised body |
| Nyasa, projection of mantras | Divinising syllables are placed on the body and on ritual implements |
| Kundalini practices | Sakti, dormant at the base of the spine in serpent form, rises through the energy centres (cakras) and divinises the subtle body |
| Sexual ritual | The partners become Siva and Sakti and realise their unity in their bodies |
These transformations are often believed to improve health and strength, or even to make the body immortal.
9. The Analogy of Reflection
The VAP does not use the image of reflection (pratibimba) directly, but Lawrence reviews it because it helps to understand the text, especially in Chapter 2 (Indra and his reflection) and Chapter 4 (Narcissus).
- Reflection has a long history in Indian thought for explaining how the Ultimate relates to the many subjects and objects.
- Phyllis Granoff has shown that reflection is often said to constitute the body of the Ultimate or of the enlightened being, and that images (pratibimba, pratima) give an accessible way to approach the divine.
- Abhinavagupta "fully established" reflection as a model for the basic Saiva myth and ritual: just as the universe is the Self's Sakti-body, it is also one's own reflection. He applies the model to the Pratyabhijna itself, to the meditations on phonemes and principles in the Tantraloka, Tantrasara and Paratrisikavivarana, to the Kaula gathering of yoginis (yoginimelaka) and to aesthetic experience.
Hold three uses of the mirror side by side, because the whole book plays them against each other. In the Chandogya Upanisad, seeing yourself in a mirror is the first mistake to be overcome. In Abhinavagupta, the whole world is your mirror image, and seeing it so is liberation. In the Narcissus myth, gazing at your own reflection is fatal self-absorption. The VAP takes the Abhinava line: the cure for the small mirror-self is not to break the mirror but to see that everything is your reflection.
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sakti | Power; the Goddess; Siva's integral power and consort |
| saktiman | Possessor of Sakti |
| siddhi | A yogic proficiency or supernatural power |
| overcoding | Sanderson's term for absorbing and subordinating a rival tradition's symbols |
| saktyaviskarana | The revealing of Sakti, Utpaladeva's name for his method |
| pararthanumana | Inference for the sake of others, the public form of a Nyaya syllogism |
| suddhavidya | Pure Wisdom, the awareness "I am this" |
| sattarka | Good reasoning, which purifies thought |
| purnahanta | Perfect I-hood |
| paravak | Supreme Speech |
| kartrta | Agency |
| svatantrya | Self-determination, freedom |
| vacaka / vacya | Expressive speech / its referents |
| adhvan | Course, path; the six courses of emanation |
| bindu | Dot, drop; the final m of aham; germinal essence |
| pratibimba | Reflection |
Reflection
- Lawrence defines Tantra as "the pursuit of power". List three things you pursue for the sense of power they give. Would they become different if you saw them as partial forms of one power?
- White says the philosophers "packaged" Tantra for a leisured elite. Lawrence says philosophy deserves to be heard on its own terms. Which kind of evidence would settle the matter, if any could?
- Try the grammatical-person exercise once today: notice someone first as "he" or "she", then as "you", then as within the "I" that is aware of them. What changes at each step?
The Instruction of Indra (pp. 19 to 24)
The VAP's frame story places it in a very old Indian genre: the humbling and instruction of Indra. Indra was the great god of the early Veda, lord of rain and slayer of the demon Vrtra ("the Restrainer"). Over the centuries his status fell, and later texts repeatedly show him humiliated, helped and taught, usually to prove the superiority of a newer god or doctrine. Some of these stories are also lessons in what we would call psychology: Indra's problem is pride, grandiosity, egotism. Lawrence summarises three earlier versions to show how differently Indian traditions treat that problem, and to set up the VAP's own very different answer.
1. The Frame Story
Vidyacakravartin tells it in a few lines:
- "Once, in sport, Siva assumed a body in this world."
- Wandering, he came upon Indra, who, "presuming himself (abhimanyamanam) to be the Supreme Lord", was showing off a fight between rutting elephants.
- Virupaksa displayed a fight between two great mountains.
- Indra was humiliated and asked Virupaksa "to explain the seed of his yogic proficiency (siddhi)".
- Virupaksa then taught the text "in order to enlighten Indra".
The pattern. These myths of Indra's decline begin in late Vedic and early Buddhist texts and run through the epics and Puranas. Indra needs other gods, or even humans, to defeat demons; he receives advice about new practices and realisations. Generally such stories "overcode" Indra and his cult to show the superiority of later doctrines, just as later Hindu stories subordinate Siva, Visnu and the Goddess to one another.
2. The Chandogya Upanisad: Transcending the Reflected Body
This is the oldest example (Chandogya Upanisad 8.7 to 8.12), and its psychology is subtle.
The announcement. The creator Prajapati proclaims a Self (atman) "free from evil, ageless, deathless, sorrowless, hungerless, thirstless, whose desire is the Real, whose conception is the Real". Whoever finds it "obtains all worlds and all desires". Gods and demons both want it. Indra comes from the gods, Virocana from the demons. They live chastely with Prajapati for many years before asking.
The four teachings. Prajapati answers their confusion "with trickery":
| Stage | What Prajapati says | What the student does |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The reflected body | "That Person who is seen in the eye, He is the Self." Asked about the person seen in water and in a mirror, he says "The same one, indeed, is observed in all these." He has them look at themselves in water, then dress up and look again. | Virocana is satisfied that the body is the Self and teaches the demons this. Indra realises that the body can be injured and will die, so it cannot be the deathless Self. He returns. |
| 2. The dreamer | The Self is the one who moves about in dreams. | Indra sees that dreams contain unhappiness and even apparent death. He returns. |
| 3. Deep sleep | The Self is the one in deep sleep. | Indra sees that deep sleep is "like annihilation". He returns. |
| 4. The bodiless Self | "This body is mortal... it is the standing ground of that deathless, bodiless Self... while one is bodiless, pleasure and pain do not touch him." | Indra receives the truth. |
Sankara's reading. Sankara, the eighth-century Advaita philosopher, says Prajapati's first statement meant the Seer (drastr) known to yogis who have detached from the senses; Indra and Virocana misunderstood it as the person reflected in others' eyes.
The paradox of the ending. Having taught that the Self is bodiless, Prajapati describes its freedom in "paradoxically carnal terms": the serene one, rising from the body and reaching the highest light, "goes around laughing, sporting, having enjoyment with women or chariots or friends, not remembering the appendage of this body".
Lawrence's points.
- Against Indra's Vedic reputation for martial valour, it would have been "a very challenging and humbling lesson" for him to stop identifying with his body.
- Though the rejection of the body and its reflections disagrees with later Tantra, the text anticipates Tantra in including omnipotence and enjoyment in self-realisation.
- There is "a remarkable parallelism" between the Upanisad's theme of mirrored identity and the myth of Narcissus. A Freudian could even read the second and third false teachings (dream wish-fulfilment and contentless sleep) as further stages of narcissistic, or "Virocanistic", self-absorption.
Virocana's error and Indra's progress set out two attitudes to the body that run through all of Indian religion. Virocana takes the body as it appears to be the Self, and the text calls this view "demonic". Indra doubts the body because it is mortal. The Upanisad's answer is to leave the body behind. The VAP will give a third answer that neither Virocana nor the Upanisad imagined: keep identifying with a body, but let the body be the universe. In a sense the VAP agrees with Virocana that the Self has a body, and with Indra that no particular body can be the Self.
3. The Govardhana Story in the Bhagavata Purana
The setting. In one of the most famous Vaisnava myths (Bhagavata Purana, Book 10), Krsna is described as having "the nature of time (kala) and acting to destroy the pride of Sakra [Indra]". This recalls Krsna's self-identification with time in the cosmic vision of the Bhagavad Gita, which terrifies creatures by revealing their finitude.
The story.
- The cowherds of Vraja prepare to worship Indra as god of rain. Krsna argues that Indra controls nothing that truly matters, and persuades them to worship cows, Brahmins and Mount Govardhana instead.
- Krsna himself appears as the mountain and eats the offerings.
- Indra, furious, accuses Krsna and the cowherds of pride and sends a deluge from clouds normally released only at the dissolution of the cosmos, riding in on his elephant Airavata.
- Krsna declares he will thwart Indra's pride and his presumption of being Lord of the universe. He lifts Mount Govardhana with one hand and holds it as an umbrella over the people and cows for a week.
- Indra surrenders and praises Krsna: "Fools like me, who regard themselves as rulers of the universe, speedily shake off that pride on seeing You... and, rid of their haughtiness, take the path of Devotion."
The parallels to the VAP are obvious: Indra is cured of pride and of the presumption of being Lord by an incarnation of the real Lord; Indra is linked with the elephant; the Lord proves his superiority by power over mountains. The cure in this story is devotion (bhakti): Indra surrenders to a Lord who is not himself.
4. Indra and the Ants in the Brahmavaivarta Purana
Made famous in the West by the Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, this story shows Indra's pride as a recurring disease.
The backstory. Indra has already alienated his priest and guru Brhaspati; been punished for seducing the sage Gautama's wife by having a thousand vaginas on his body for a year; killed his new priest Visvarupa, provoking Visvarupa's father Tvastr to raise Vrtra against him; and been hunted by Brahmahatya, the personified sin of killing a Brahmin, until he begged Brhaspati's forgiveness.
The main story.
- Indra becomes inflated again and makes grandiose demands of the divine architect Visvakarman for rebuilding his heavenly city.
- Visnu comes as a Brahmin boy. With a backhanded compliment he says no Indra before has built such a city, and explains that Indra is only one of an infinite number of Indras, born and dead in countless parallel universes over countless cosmic cycles.
- A long column of ants appears. Each ant, the boy says, was once an Indra.
- A mysterious old ascetic arrives, whom Zimmer identifies as Siva. He has a circle of hairs on his chest. Each time an Indra passes, one hair falls out; when all are gone he will die. So he does not bother to build a house.
- Overwhelmed, Indra halts his building and decides to become an ascetic. Brhaspati helps Indra's wife persuade him to stay with her instead.
The lesson resembles the Bhagavad Gita's: Indra continues his worldly duties "with a proper sense of his role in the cosmic scheme, and with the ascetic's detachment from the vanities of life". The cure here is perspective, a vision of cosmic scale that shrinks the ego.
5. The VAP's New Twist
Lawrence's conclusion is the key to the book: "Virupaksa does not teach Indra to abandon his corporeal form that appears in reflections, by identifying with abstract consciousness, or to surrender in devotion. Virupaksa teaches him contemplations to transform his grandiosity into genuine omnipotence."
| Story | Indra's problem | The cure |
|---|---|---|
| Chandogya Upanisad | Identifies with the body seen in reflections | Abandon the body; know the bodiless Self |
| Bhagavata Purana (Govardhana) | Presumes to be Lord of the universe | Surrender in devotion to Krsna |
| Brahmavaivarta Purana (the ants) | Grandiose building, forgets his finitude | Perspective: see the infinity of Indras; act with detachment |
| Virupaksapancasika | Presumes to be Supreme Lord with too small a body | Expand the I and the body until they are the universe; become the Lord in fact |
The table makes the VAP's boldness clear. Three traditions agree that Indra's sense of being Lord is the problem and must be removed, by knowledge, by devotion or by perspective. The VAP alone says the sense of being Lord is true, only misapplied. The mountains that crash together are not a rebuke of Indra's wish for power. They are a demonstration of what that wish really points to.
Lawrence is careful to say that "it is not clear that any of these particular narratives were of direct concern to the monistic Saiva authors". He uses them to show "the broad problematic", not to claim that the VAP is responding to them. The comparison is the scholar's, not the text's. The table above is therefore an aid to understanding, not a historical claim about influence.
Key Terms
- Indra: Vedic king of the gods, god of rain, slayer of Vrtra; later a figure of chastened pride.
- Virocana: the demon (asura) student of Prajapati who takes the body to be the Self.
- Prajapati: "Lord of creatures", the creator god of the Brahmanas and Upanisads.
- abhimana: pride, self-conception; Indra "presuming himself" (abhimanyamanam) to be the Lord.
- Airavata: Indra's elephant.
Reflection
- Which of the four cures for pride (abandon the body, surrender, gain perspective, expand) have you tried? Which actually worked, and for how long?
- The Chandogya ending describes the bodiless Self "laughing, sporting, having enjoyment". Is a bodiless enjoyment coherent? What would the VAP say?
- Notice one moment today when you feel proud. Instead of suppressing it, ask: what does this pride claim about me, and what would it mean for that claim to be true of everything?
The Odd-Eyed One's Teachings on the Tantric Self and Its Universal Body (pp. 25 to 38)
Chapter 3 is Lawrence's map of the VAP's teaching. The texts follow the basic Saiva pattern from Chapter 1: they lead Indra, and the reader, to recognise identity with Virupaksa-Siva by revealing that we possess his Sakti. Of the many benefits this brings, two are praised as highest: becoming the guru of the universe, and performing Siva's five cosmic acts. The texts use Pratyabhijna vocabulary throughout, and Vidyacakravartin twice says they set out an "inference for the sake of others". But they skip the technical epistemology. Here the myth of Indra's pride frames "a rigorous contemplative regimen founded on the Saiva philosophical psychology of egoity and the body".
The Two Highest Goals
Siva's five acts (pancakrtya):
- Creation of the universe at the start of each cosmic cycle.
- Preservation of the universe.
- Destruction of the universe at the end of each cycle.
- Delusion (concealment): bringing about the confusion of creatures that makes them suffer in samsara.
- Grace: liberating creatures from delusion and suffering, "which is essentially the same as being the guru of the universe".
Notice that the two highest goals overlap. The fifth act, grace, is being the guru of the universe. The VAP lists it twice because, as Lawrence argues in Chapter 4, it values the teaching role above all. The highest power is not to crash mountains together. It is to free others. The mountain trick is only the advertisement that gets Indra to listen.
1. The Transformation of Embodiment
This is the broadest framework of the text. At the very start of his teaching (verse 1.2), Virupaksa explains why his power exceeds Indra's:
"Well, this is [our] point of disagreement: I [recognize that I] have the nature of consciousness [and that] this universe, beginning with the void state and ending with the earth, is my body. This [fact that the universe is one's body] is proven because [the universe] is perceptible, like the fleshly body."
The void state. "The void state" (sunyapada) refers to the Siva principle (sivatattva), the first emanation from Supreme Siva (paramasiva), in which he separates himself from Sakti. It is consciousness abstracted from all action and content, and is homologised with states such as deep sleep. So Virupaksa's body runs from the very first and most rudimentary form of consciousness down to the earth, the last of the thirty-six principles.
The Siva Sutra source. The verse alludes to Siva Sutra 1.14 to 1.15: "The perceptible [universe] is [one's true] body. Through the concentration of the fluctuating mind [citta] within the heart, one experiences both the perceptible as well as sleep [which is deep and void of contents, as one's own body]."
The root problem. Virupaksa explains our predicament (verse 1.5):
"Having departed from the body that is the universe, one's I-hood becomes confined to a particular body that is a portion of that [universal one]. [Unenlightened] people are as if dead while living, as if their throats were gasping for breath."
The Saiva sage is "liberated while living" (jivanmukta); the bodily finitude of samsara is "a kind of living death".
The power that follows (verse 1.6):
"[You] whose I-am-ness refers to the [fleshly] body can, through mere intention, strike [your] two insentient arms together. Just so, [I, whose I-am-ness] refers to the universe can, through the force of that [intention, strike together] even two mountains."
The contrast with the Upanisad. "Now Indra's sense of embodiment must not be negated but rather vastly increased and universalized."
The argument of verse 1.6 is an argument from analogy with ordinary agency. You do not need special power to clap your hands; you only need to intend it, because your hands are part of what you take as "I". Virupaksa claims that power over mountains works the same way. The mountains move because they are in his body as your hands are in yours. The claim is not that he has a stronger will. It is that his will has a larger body. Try this as a contemplation: feel the effortless way intention moves your hand, and notice that this effortlessness depends entirely on identification.
2. The Expansion of I-am-ness
How do you come to feel that your body is everything? The most illuminating method, because it directly addresses Indra's pride, is the Pratyabhijna theory of egoity, "the other predominant framework of contemplation in the texts".
The key term: asmita. "I-am-ness" combines the verb asmi ("I am") with the abstract suffix -ta: the condition of positing oneself as "I". The term seems to have been introduced by the Yoga Sutra. Related terms used in the VAP: abhimana (pride, self-conception; the participle used of Indra at the start), ahamta (I-hood) and ahamkara (I-concept).
The Yoga Sutra view. Yoga Sutra 2.3 lists I-am-ness among the five afflictions (klesa). It expresses the confusion of purusa (the pure self) with prakrti (matter), a misidentification with one's reflection in matter, and must be removed by discriminating knowledge. I-am-ness is still present in samadhi with support (samprajnata) but is transcended in samadhi without support (asamprajnata).
The Saiva view. The monistic Saivas do not treat egoity as an affliction, and they reject the Yoga Sutra's negative view of consciousness identifying with its contents. Self and nature are not two separate realities but continuous, because the Self emanates nature. So the VAP equates the terms for egoity with other names for emanating Sakti: self-recognition (pratyavamarsa), Supreme Speech (paravak), universal agency (kartrta) and self-determination (svatantrata).
The six conditions of ordinary I-am-ness. Virupaksa and Vidyacakravartin analyse six things to which an unenlightened person attaches "I":
| No. | Object of I-am-ness | Example statement |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Possessions: house, land and other external things | "I am prosperous." |
| 2 | The fleshly body | "I am lean." |
| 3 | The senses | "I am relishing." |
| 4 | The inner organ or mind | "I am happy." |
| 5 | The vital breath (prana) | "I am breathing." |
| 6 | Apparently non-cognitive states such as deep sleep | "I am void." |
The contemplation. Vidyacakravartin explains:
"Contemplate this consciousness of I-am-ness that is well known in the six conditions for the entire course. That is, firmly recognitively synthesize this eternally pure recognition [of I-am-ness], as in the six conditions, everywhere, regarding everything, beginning with [the emanated, lower] Siva and ending with the earth. Then you will have the recognition of the universe as your body."
This is the most practical instruction in the whole text, and it is easy to try. You already say "I" about six different layers: your things, your body, your senses, your mood, your breath, and even your blankness. Each is already an act of extending I-am-ness beyond the bare point of awareness. The contemplation simply asks you to notice that the extending power is the same in each case, and to let it go further, to the room, the city, the sky, the earth. You are not asked to create a new feeling, only to stop the old one at no particular border.
3. Possession of Wheels of Saktis
Some contemplations go back directly to the basic tantric act of possessing Sakti. From the Krama stream of Tantra, the texts take the idea of the Self as possessor of wheels (cakra) of subordinate powers who emanate all features of experience:
"Consciousness should be contemplated as possessing innumerable wheels of its own Saktis. [Those wheels of Saktis] emanate this universe, which consists of the five sense fields, such as the visible; and takes the forms of objects of knowledge, the senses and the knower."
The Krama symbols. Following Krama tradition, the cognitive triad is given three luminous symbols:
| Element of cognition | Symbol |
|---|---|
| Object of knowledge (prameya) | Moon |
| Means of knowledge (pramana) | Sun |
| Knower (pramatr) | Fire |
4. The Five Modalities of Sakti (Table 3.1)
A second approach divides Sakti into five sub-Saktis. Each has a function, produces one of the five elements and, according to Vidyacakravartin, gives the power to perform one of Siva's five acts.
| Modality of Sakti | Function | Elemental effect | Act of Siva |
|---|---|---|---|
| Illuminator | manifestation | fire | creation |
| Cosmic Pulsation | agitation | air | preservation |
| Happiness | fulfilment | water | destruction |
| Smoky | concealment | earth | delusion |
| Omnipresent | pervasion | sky (ether) | grace |
One inferred link. Vidyacakravartin does not state one correlation, which Lawrence fills in by elimination: Happiness, whose function is fulfilment, goes with destruction. The logic seems to be a homology: creation and destruction are to the cosmos what delusion and grace are to limited subjects. Destruction is the universe fulfilled by returning to its source.
The verse that follows these Saktis (3.28) restates the universal body in the language of recognition:
"My Sakti has the nature of recognitive apprehension. She makes [one recognize that] awareness, of which [She herself is] the integral nature, is the essential nature of the multitude of the objects of awareness. [She] makes [one recognize that] everything is my body."
Lawrence is open that one of the five correspondences is his own inference. Readers who come across the "five Saktis" in other Kashmiri texts should not assume that this precise table is standard. The names (Illuminator, Pulsation, Happiness, Smoky, Omnipresent) and their links to elements and acts vary across traditions. Here they are one commentator's scheme, reconstructed by one translator.
5. Linguistic Contemplations
Several contemplations use the language theories from Chapter 1.
(a) The sixfold course. The Self is contemplated as possessing the six courses (adhvan) of the emanation of Supreme Speech, divided into two triads:
| Expressive speech (vacaka) | Referents (vacya) |
|---|---|
| Phonemes (varna), the subtlest | Cosmic segments (kala) |
| Mantras | Cosmic principles (tattva) |
| Words (pada), the most concrete | Cosmic worlds (bhuvana) |
This works as a "theosophical map of the cosmic-linguistic totality". The student contemplates all six courses as emanating from his or her own I-hood.
(b) The etymology of "aham". Following Abhinavagupta, the texts read aham through pratyahara, the abbreviation technique of the grammarian Panini, in which a set of sounds is named by its first and last members. In the traditional list, a is first and ha is last; together they make aha. So "I" as Supreme Speech "encompasses within itself all meaningful sounds that constitute mantras as well as ordinary speech".
(c) The bindu. Vidyacakravartin adds a grammatical point: aha alone is a noun stem, which must be declined to be used; the final -m is the declensional ending. Graphically, this m can be written as a dot above the previous letter, the bindu ("drop", "dot"). In the VAP the bindu is often treated as another equivalent for I-hood as Supreme Speech, and can be translated "germinal essence".
Lawrence reports David White's argument that "bindu" originally referred to the male sexual fluid, or the mixed male and female fluids, offered and ingested in Kaula rites. Lawrence says that "such a meaning is not explicit in the VAP and VAPV" and that "it is difficult to prove whether or not it is implicit". This is a fair statement of an open question. When a later text uses an older ritual term in a purely contemplative sense, the older meaning may be forgotten, deliberately sublimated or quietly understood by insiders. The text alone cannot tell us which.
(d) Agency and intention. The texts do not set out the full Pratyabhijna theory of noun-verb relations, but they equate I-hood with universal agency (kartrta) and self-determination (svatantrata) and repeatedly mention the decisive role of the agent's intention (iccha).
(e) The grammatical persons. The texts give more sustained attention to Abhinavagupta's theory of the three persons. Vidyacakravartin:
"The three [grammatical] persons are referred to by disjunctive designations as 'He,' 'You,' and 'I.' ... None of these are external to me who have the nature of recognitive apprehension and who, as inclusive of them, am the Great Person. ... The first and other [grammatical] persons are exclusive of each other. However, their creation and destruction depend upon me who have the nature of recognitive apprehension. They are experienced upon the background that is myself, as identical with myself."
And then the crucial step:
"There appears a differentiated form 'I,' which is the contrary of both of them [He and You]. Like 'He' and 'You,' that is a differentiated portion, a particular aspect of myself. It is not I, that is, not my ultimate form. The reason for this is that [my] eternal form [is as described in the statement] 'I am unitary.' That is, I am eternally an unlimited and unitary compact mass of awareness."
This passage is the clearest answer to the charge that the VAP inflates the ego. The ordinary "I" is explicitly not the perfect I. The "I" that stands against "you" and "him" is just one more differentiated portion, as limited as they are. The perfect I, the Great Person (mahapurusa), is the background on which all three grammatical persons appear. Indra's mistake was to think that the small I, the one that contrasts itself with others, was the Lord. The real Lord is the I that has no "other" to contrast with.
6. The Subsumption of Difference and Sequence
The principle. The description of the Great Person as a unitary compact mass (ekaghana) of awareness, inclusive (anuvrtta) rather than exclusive (vyavrtta), states another practical principle: the subsumption of difference and sequence. This reflects the influence of the Krama ("Sequence") tradition, but more broadly it expresses "one of the perennial quests of religious philosophy, for a monistic Ultimate that is simple and indissoluble and therefore above the temporal contingencies of transformation and decay".
Kinds of monism. Monisms differ. Advaita Vedanta teaches the negation of the diverse and temporary, using criteria drawn from the Upanisads and from Buddhist dependent origination; what remains is atman-brahman as an incorporeal substratum. Madhyamaka and other Buddhist schools are anti-substantialist. Monistic Saivism formulates a "substantialist" monism of a distinctive kind: the "integral or complete (purna) and paradoxically dynamic unity of Siva-Sakti subsumes multiplicity and sequence within itself". In every sphere, Saiva writers pursue "categories and corresponding modes of experience that are more and more inclusive or continuous rather than exclusive and sequential".
| School | What happens to multiplicity |
|---|---|
| Advaita Vedanta | Negated: only the incorporeal brahman is real |
| Madhyamaka | Emptied: no substance anywhere, only dependent arising |
| Monistic Saivism | Subsumed: included within the dynamic whole of Siva-Sakti |
"I" and "this". Some contemplations put the subsumption in terms of subject and object, the "I" and the "this" that Pure Wisdom joins in "I am this". Vidyacakravartin:
"There is reciprocal exclusion [between instances of] the presentation 'this,' as is illustrated by the observation 'This is blue and this is yellow.'"
but
"the presentation 'I' is inclusive [of manifestations of different objects, as is illustrated by the statement] 'I know both blue and yellow.'"
Place and time. An objection: "I am a subject here and now" involves sequence of place and time, so how can there be unity? Answer: "there is no sequence in it of either place or time." Differentiation is exclusiveness; non-differentiation is inclusiveness. Objects are differentiated by place and time; consciousness is their inclusive substratum. The delusion that consciousness itself is differentiated depends on objects that are "merely its accidental qualifications".
The proof from experience (Vidyacakravartin's commentary on verse 1.2):
"When one attends to a particular and distinct object of knowledge, for example [a color] such as blue or yellow, then one becomes an individual subject, that is, a delimited awareness. ... However, when one recognitively synthesizes everything in its universal nature [samanyato], then one [recognizes oneself to be] consciousness, that is, unlimited awareness. This is because it is impossible for the one who illuminates [limiting conditions] such as place and time to be limited by [those conditions such as] place and time."
The same subsumption applies to perception, memory and recognition: all three, with their objects, are absorbed in the recognitive apprehension of the unitary, non-sequential Self.
The argument "the illuminator of place and time cannot be limited by place and time" is the heart of the Pratyabhijna in one sentence. You can test its plausibility directly. The awareness that knows "this is here and that is there" is not itself located here or there; it holds both. The awareness that knows "this came first and that came later" is not itself first or later; it holds both. Whatever its metaphysical status, this structural feature of awareness is what the contemplation asks you to notice and rest in.
7. The Progressive Subsumption of Epistemic Entities (Figure 3.1, Tables 3.2 and 3.3)
Verses 3.32 to 3.37 (with 3.38 and 3.39 extending the method to memory and recognition) present the most complex contemplation in the text. Lawrence explains it in three levels "of what I understand of the process".
Level 1: five ever more inward natures. Starting with the standard epistemic triad of Indian philosophy, each item has as its "internal and less sequential essential nature" the next:
- Object (jneya), whose inner nature is
- Knowledge (jnana), whose inner nature is
- The limited knower (jnatr), whose inner nature is
- Unitary consciousness (citir eka), also identified with Sakti and recognitive apprehension (pratyavamarsa), whose inner nature is
- The higher "I", identified with awareness (prakasa).
Why is the I/awareness the inner nature of consciousness/recognition/Sakti? Because it is "the pure unity within which the latter occurs". Vidyacakravartin:
"Consciousness is defined as recognitive apprehension. When that aspect of recognitive apprehension submerges [back into its internal essential nature], there remains only the I, having the nature of abstract awareness. ... I, who have reached the summit, am alone the reality. There is 'no other.'"
Level 2: a threefold regrouping (Table 3.2). The five are regrouped by degree of sequence, matching the basic Trika triad of Nara, Sakti, Siva:
| Sequential (Human, Nara) | Sequential-cum-non-sequential (Sakti) | Non-sequential (Siva) |
|---|---|---|
| Object, Knowledge, Knower | Consciousness | I |
The whole ordinary epistemic triad, though internally graded, now counts as "sequential" in comparison with the two higher levels that overcome the distinctions of ordinary experience.
Level 3: the homologies (Table 3.3). Here "the contemplation begins to convolute". Virupaksa draws similarities between items of the triad and higher items, and Lawrence reads them as homologies (claims of ultimate identity to be contemplated), not mere analogies:
| Item of the epistemic triad | Homologue |
|---|---|
| Knower | the higher I |
| Knowledge | Sakti |
| Object | "like the triad": (a) the knower and I, (b) knowledge and Sakti, (c) other objects |
The first two are straightforward: the knower is like the higher I (the basis of the whole program of expanding human into divine egoity), and knowledge is like Sakti (a capacity exercised by a knower). The third is the puzzle. Virupaksa says the object is "like the triad". Vidyacakravartin explains that this triad includes the higher homologues of knower and knowledge (I and Sakti), and pairs the object in it with "other objects".
The result: a Mobius strip. When all the homologies are included, "the lowest member of the original fivefold scheme, the object, subsumes all other members with their higher degrees of inclusiveness or non-sequentiality". It "comprehends itself, again comprehending all items including itself, with a recursiveness somewhat like a Mobius strip". The most immanent and sequential item contains the transcendent and non-sequential. This recalls Flood's point that the human body is homologous with the whole cosmic hierarchy.
The method. Virupaksa and Vidyacakravartin stress that the identity of the homologised terms must be contemplated without conceptual construction (vikalpa).
Do not worry if Table 3.3 resists you; Lawrence admits it resisted him. The point is simpler than the scheme. You might expect a spiritual ladder in which the object is lowest and must be left behind on the way up to the I. The VAP says the opposite: look closely enough at any single object and the whole ladder is inside it. A cup on your table contains the knowing of it, the knower of it, the power of consciousness and the I, because it is nothing but their display. The way "up" runs through the object, not away from it. That is the Saiva reversal of ordinary mysticism in its sharpest form.
8. Specific Cosmic Agencies and Yoga Discipline
The Book on Powers. Book 4 teaches contemplations for more limited powers (siddhi, vibhuti). Vidyacakravartin calls it the vibhutiskandha, "Book on Powers", on the model of the vibhutipada of the Yoga Sutra (its third chapter).
The Yoga Sutra parallel. The Yoga Sutra describes samyama, "discipline": concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana) and absorption (samadhi) focused on a single object, which gives knowledge of and power over that thing. The VAP formulates the procedure in Saiva terms: one identifies one's I-hood or I-concept with a specific cosmic agency, such as a deity, a heavenly body, the ocean, the submarine fire, lightning, a cloud, a cave, a forest or one of the five elements, and so can perform its work and gain its results.
The difference. The Yoga Sutra does not condemn these powers but says liberation comes only with detachment from them. The Saivas also say the powers gained by identifying with cosmic agencies are not the ultimate power. But they do not advise renouncing power. "The lower powers are consolidated and subsumed, or, we might say, overcoded, within the absolute power gained through corporifying the universe." Vidyacakravartin:
"[The yogin] himself exists in the forms of entities such as the sun. Due to weakness of recognitive apprehension, he is as if differentiated. Through strong recognitive apprehension, the subliminal tendencies for the delusion of differentiation are removed. One then exists as identical with the universe. [One recognizes that] all proficiencies are eternally established as one's own. ... They bring [this contemplation of identity with the sun and other entities] to its completion, that is, the contemplation of their identity with the universe."
| Yoga Sutra | VAP | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | samyama on an object | identify I-hood with a cosmic agency |
| Result | knowledge and power over the object | ability to perform its function |
| Status of powers | obstacles to final aloneness (kaivalya) if clung to | partial forms of the one power |
| Final step | detachment | completion: extend the identity to the whole universe |
9. The Pedagogical Outcome
The text ends by reporting success. Indra "abandoned the spiritual taint of presuming 'I am the king of heaven,' and truly became the Supreme Lord who is the guru preceptor of the universe." Vidyacakravartin stresses that the teacher-disciple dichotomy is overcome:
"Siva, who is the glorious and venerable preceptor, Lord Virupaksa, stood before him as the one who was enlightening him. Having thus been enlightened, [Indra] saw himself as him. ... There is not the slightest difference of degree between the knowledge of the enlightened and the enlightener. Rather, it has been established, without defects, that: I, perceptibly, am none other than the Supreme Lord, who is the guru of this universe."
The ending makes a claim that most guru traditions avoid: the student does not merely approach the teacher's realisation, he becomes the teacher without remainder. "Not the slightest difference of degree." This is consistent with the whole teaching (if there is only one I, there cannot be two grades of it), but it is also a challenge to any lineage that preserves a permanent hierarchy between master and disciple. Notice the line Indra ends on: he is now "the guru of this universe". His first act as Lord is to be a teacher, which is the fifth act of Siva.
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| pancakrtya | Siva's five acts: creation, preservation, destruction, concealment, grace |
| sunyapada | the void state; the Siva principle, consciousness without content |
| jivanmukti | liberation while living |
| asmita | I-am-ness |
| klesa | affliction (Yoga Sutra) |
| sakticakra | wheel or circle of powers |
| pratyahara | Panini's abbreviation technique; in Yoga, withdrawal of the senses |
| ekaghana | a single compact mass (of awareness) |
| anuvrtta / vyavrtta | inclusive / exclusive |
| jneya, jnana, jnatr | object, knowledge, knower |
| pratyavamarsa | recognitive apprehension, self-reflective awareness |
| prakasa | light, awareness |
| samyama | the combined discipline of concentration, meditation and absorption |
| vibhuti | power, manifestation; the Yoga Sutra's chapter on powers |
Reflection and Practice
- The six conditions. Sit for ten minutes. Name each of the six places where you already say "I": things, body, senses, mind, breath, blankness. Then let the "I" extend to the room, without forcing. Note what resists.
- "I know both blue and yellow." Look at two different coloured objects. Notice that they exclude each other but that your knowing of them does not. Rest in the knowing.
- The object contains the ladder. Choose one ordinary object and contemplate it as containing knowing, knower, power and I. Do not think it through; look.
- Question. The VAP keeps limited powers but places them under the one power. Is there a practical difference between "detachment from powers" (Yoga Sutra) and "subsumption of powers" (VAP) in how a practitioner would live?
Comparative Reflections: Cosmic Narcissism and Divine Self-Satisfaction (pp. 39 to 56)
Chapter 4 is Lawrence's own philosophical contribution. He sets out to create a dialogue between the VAP's teaching on the perfect I and Western thought about self-love and narcissism, from Neoplatonism and Christian mysticism through psychoanalysis. His aim is not to apply Western ideas as the standard for judging India, but to make the "inevitable evaluation" as dialogical and reflexive as possible. He reaches three conclusions:
- The Saiva perfect I is not a form of the West's "subversive individualism", because it de-individualises the ego even as it affirms it.
- Of the psychoanalytic theories, Heinz Kohut's idea of cosmic narcissism comes closest to the Saiva goal; on the premise that the Pratyabhijna is true, divine self-satisfaction may be the telos of human narcissistic desire.
- Monistic Saivism is compatible with ethics, and its highest aim, being the guru of the universe, is itself an ethical aim.
1. Method: Evaluation Cannot Be Avoided
Lawrence's starting point is hermeneutic. Every interpretation of culture includes "a component of evaluation, or hierarchization, on the basis of the scholar's own conceptual and axiological positions". There is "no neutral exegetical standpoint", in philology, history, postcolonial studies or anywhere else. Cultural relativism "reductionistically contextualize[s] and thus subordinate[s] all nonrelative claims", and even agnosticism "subordinates those who believe they know something". So comparative philosophy is "an open-ended effort to make the inevitable evaluation... as much as possible dialogical and reflexive, rather than dogmatic or insidious".
His previous position. In Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument, Lawrence defended the Pratyabhijna epistemology and metaphysics of divine self-recognition alongside Christian logos theologies, from the Church Fathers to Bernard Lonergan. The central disagreement was whether humans can fully possess divine self-recognition (the Saiva view) or only participate in it partially (the usual Christian view). He sided with the Saivas, on the basis of an idealist premise shared by both: "the original essence and ground of the intelligibility of all things is founded in the contents of divine subjectivity", which Berkeley put as esse est percipi, "to be is to be perceived".
2. The Problem: Self and Other
The VAP raises the problem from the side of psychology and ethics. If everything is my Self, what becomes of the Other?
| Thinker | Claim against monism |
|---|---|
| Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas | Differences between persons, and between persons and God, are the basis of relationship; monistic mysticism and metaphysics obstruct relationship |
| R. C. Zaehner, Arthur Danto | Monistic mysticism is non-ethical or amoral |
| Jeffrey J. Kripal | Exposes the Orientalist "Christian, ethical West" versus "mystical, unethical East" dichotomy, and grants monism ontological insight, but still argues for its non-ethical character on grounds of cultural psychology, embodiment, environmentalism and the ethical scandals of Asian teachers in the West |
Why the question presses on Saivism. The tradition is not only monistic. It pursues powers culminating in omnipotence, through practices that are in some respects antinomian. "Powers may be used in ways harmful to others and tantric transgressiveness may likewise be unethical. In monistic Saivism, Otherness is itself ultimately subsumed within Sakti."
3. The Cultural Legacy of Narcissism, Human and Divine
Narcissus and Echo. In the ancient legend, Narcissus could not love others because of fierce pride, and died grasping at his own reflection in a pool. The nymph Echo, cursed to repeat only others' last words, loved him unrequited; her body withered and her bones turned to stone, until she could only echo his desperate self-infatuation. A long moralising tradition followed, continuing in psychoanalytic theories of narcissistic individuals who cannot form healthy "object relations" and in social critiques of "the culture of narcissism".
Divine narcissism. But there is a wider tradition. Paul Zweig, in "The Heresy of Self-Love", shows that Western philosophy and theology since the Hellenistic period (Platonism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Judaeo-Christian thought) often describe God as creating the world and humans in his own image, and so as in a sense loving himself in loving creation. Lawrence thinks this follows from divine perfection: God contains everything desirable, so God is self-satisfied, and whatever God creates must reflect God. He quotes three witnesses:
- Plotinus: the Supreme "is also self-love in that He is lovely no otherwise than from Himself and in Himself"; he is "borne, so to speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is".
- Thomas Aquinas: God loves his essence for its own sake; since it cannot be multiplied in itself, it can be multiplied "solely according to its likeness, which is participated by many. God, therefore, wills the multitude of things in willing and loving His own essence."
- Meister Eckhart: "God loves himself and his own nature... and in the love he has for himself he loves all creatures, not as creatures but as God... God enjoys himself. His own inner enjoyment is such that it includes his enjoyment of all creatures."
The prohibition. Western traditions have generally forbidden humans to imitate God's self-love; Christians identify that presumption with original sin. Zweig: "the only virtue the good Christian must traditionally seek is to become less and less himself, so that God, through his act of personal self-effacement, may delight more purely in his own image."
Subversive individualism. Yet human narcissism, Zweig argues, has been a great source of Western creativity. Its prototype is Simon Magus, ancestor of the Faust legends, who embodies "the irrepressible desire to wield for oneself those powers of divinity". Faust wanted "to become the god of a universe which mirrored his most hidden potentialities". Zweig traces a tradition of "subversive individualism" or "subversive egotism", "heroic self-scrutiny and self-affirmation", through Gnosticism and Hermeticism, medieval mysticism, courtly love, Romanticism, German idealism and popular culture.
Lawrence's correction. These movements may subvert the norm of human "creatureliness", but not all are individualist. In classic Neoplatonic and medieval Christian spirituality, one realises divine self-love through the effacement of individuality:
- Plotinus deplores the person who does not trace the world's beauty to its transcendent source, comparing him to Narcissus perishing in the water. Julia Kristeva calls the resulting non-individual self-love "Narcissan".
- Bernard of Clairvaux: "as God himself willed that everything should be for himself, so we, too, will that nothing, not even ourselves, may be or have been except for him."
- William of St. Thierry: the soul desires "the fullness of the Holy Spirit who is the unity and the love of the Father and the Son"; "when man loves God, man is at work, but it is God who works".
- John Ruusbroec: the spirit "savors and sees, without measure, like God himself, the riches which it has itself become", yet "we are one with him in love, though not in being or nature".
Lawrence thinks it was Renaissance Humanism and Hermeticism that first combined the mystical quest with individual concerns for identity, agency, relationships, creativity and magic. Zweig's subversive egotism then flourished from Rousseau to the modern culture of "hedonic, psychological, and spiritual self-fulfillment".
Is the Saiva quest subversive individualism? Lawrence's answer is no, with qualifications:
- Tantra often subverts purity norms, and practitioners seeking limited magical powers may seek them for themselves. But that "nonideological individualism typifies pursuits of self-interest that are commonplace in every culture".
- Monistic Saiva texts present salvation as far more valuable than limited powers. Vidyacakravartin consolidates limited powers within the omnipotence of identity with Siva.
- The ego is not effaced, but "it is nevertheless not elevated with its prima facie characteristics". The contemplations "transfigure the ego into its essential nature as perfect I-hood by deindividualizing it". Saivism "might initially appeal to individual motivations for power", but these are "subsumed by identification with the supraindividual, cosmocratic egoity of God".
| Path | Ego | Divine self-love |
|---|---|---|
| Christian mysticism (Bernard, Ruusbroec) | Effaced | Participated in, with difference of nature preserved |
| Neoplatonism (Plotinus) | Surrendered | Realised as the One's own self-love |
| Faustian individualism | Inflated as it is | Seized for the individual |
| Monistic Saivism (VAP) | Affirmed and de-individualised | Realised as one's own, with no remaining difference |
The fourth row is the precise novelty. Christian mystics give up the self to share God's self-love. Faust keeps the self and grabs God's power. The VAP does something stranger: it keeps the sense of self and gives up its boundaries. The result is neither humility nor arrogance in the ordinary sense. It is an I that is proud in exactly the way God might be proud, which, if there is only one I, is not pride at all.
4. Psychoanalytic Theories of Narcissism
Lawrence enters this area "with trepidation", recalling the fierce controversy over Kripal's psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna, "Kali's Child", with accusations of Orientalism and of right-wing fundamentalism on either side. His goal is "not to apply psychoanalysis to Hinduism, but rather to suggest possibilities for a dialogue".
Freud: mysticism as regression. Freud set the standard interpretation of mystical unity as regression to primary narcissism, the infant's feeling that all its needs are met by its mother. He proposed this in his exchange with Romain Rolland about the "oceanic feeling":
"Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive, indeed, an all-embracing, feeling..."
The VAP also uses the image of the ocean for the unity of multiplicity, but Lawrence declines to build anything on it, since the image is common everywhere. He thinks Freud would also read the tantric quest for power as regression, since Freud used the same theory for the megalomania of the schizophrenic and for "primitive" belief in "the omnipotence of thoughts", "the thaumaturgic force of words" and "magic". Freud's theory has been applied to South Asian traditions in different ways by Sudhir Kakar, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and others.
Lacan: the mirror stage. Jacques Lacan posited a "mirror stage" in which the infant recognises and enjoys its image in mirrors and in the pleased eyes of others. This narcissistic enjoyment forms a cohesive sense of "I" and of the body out of disjointed experience. (Recall Indra and Virocana gazing into water.) But for Lacan this mirror identity begins a pervasive alienation, encoded in the social, linguistic-symbolic order, and the alienated self has no substance. His corrective is a "desubstantialized subjectivity". Lacan would have even more reason than Freud to call the Saiva expansion of the mirror-self to the universe "a pathological exercise in megalomania".
Kohut: transformations of narcissism. Heinz Kohut, building on the line from Lacan through Donald Winnicott, offers "the most promise for a sympathetic approach", because he accepts narcissism as constitutive of a healthy self. His model:
| Stage | Description |
|---|---|
| Primary narcissism | The baby experiences the mother's care not as "you" acting but within an undivided world; its expected control over her is like an adult's expected control over his own body |
| Split 1: the grandiose self | Expects others to mirror heightened self-esteem (the mirror transference); includes fantasies of omnipotence |
| Split 2: the idealised parental imago | Ascribes all perfection to another (the idealising transference) |
| Healthy development | The grandiose self becomes realistic self-esteem; the idealised imago becomes a healthy ego ideal |
| Cosmic narcissism | A rare, higher transformation in exceptionally healthy people, especially mystics and poets, driven by the acceptance of finitude and death |
Kakar on gurus. Kakar uses Kohut's idealisation to explain devotion to the guru in the Radha Soami movement: "You are great but I am a part of you." Lawrence notes the VAP's emphasis on the final identity of Virupaksa and Indra, but also that in Saiva metaphysics Virupaksa really is a full incarnation of Siva.
Cosmic narcissism in Kohut's words:
"...the genuine shift of the cathexes toward a cosmic narcissism is the enduring, creative result of the steadfast activities of an autonomous ego, and only very few are able to attain it."
The fit with the Indra stories. In the Saiva and other Indra myths, Indra's grandiosity is transformed after humiliation and through self-effacement, surrender or de-individualisation. That matches Kohut's sequence: humbling by finitude, then a non-grandiose identification "with the universe and all its beings, integrally and genetically linked to empathy".
The limit. Kohut's language of the "autonomous ego" and of "participation in a supraindividual and timeless existence" shows "a typical Western monotheistic presumption" that unity falls short of absolute identity. He might classify the Saiva claim of full identity with Siva and of omnipotence as the grandiose self, not cosmic narcissism. But since Saiva teaching requires de-individualisation, "there may nevertheless be some agreement" between Kohut and the VAP.
5. Lawrence's Constructive Proposals
The problem of premises. Classical psychoanalysis is usually atheist or agnostic and explains everything by biological drives and family and social development. Kohut "could not provide an epistemological or metaphysical rationale" for empathic identification with the universe.
Parsons's bridge. William B. Parsons, in "The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling", finds a bridge in psychoanalytic ideas of primal or archaic intuitive knowledge: Freud's notion of an unconscious mode of communication left over from earlier evolution (seen in insect colonies, crowds and alleged telepathy), and Arthur Deikman's theory of "deautomatization", in which mystical experience may recover a valid primal cognition of unity normally hidden by the "automatised" filtering of perception.
Lawrence's premise. His proposals rest on a premise "some would consider grandiose": that the Pratyabhijna arguments, as he interpreted them in Rediscovering God, are basically valid. Stated pluralistically:
- There is a religious Ultimate Reality, known to the Saivas as Siva with his emanating Sakti.
- It creates and controls the cosmos through self-recognition, originary Speech, agency.
- This is substantively the same Ultimate known in Christian logos theologies, despite deep disagreements.
- The Saivas are right that we are, in our deepest nature, identical with that Reality.
The proposals.
- Commonality. There is "a substantial commonality of insight" between the Pratyabhijna theory of egoity, Western ideas of divine narcissism and Kohut. "If we are all a monistic Ultimate that creates the world, it would seem appropriate for us to feel a cosmically narcissistic, empathic identification with that world."
- "Cathexis by identity." Robert K. C. Forman has argued that a "knowledge by identity", beyond the subject-object structure of ordinary cognition, marks monistic mystical experience. Lawrence proposes an analogous "cathexis by identity" (cathexis is the psychoanalytic term for investment of emotional energy) for what Abhinavagupta calls self-relishing (svatmasvada) and self-repose (svatmavisranti).
- Telos. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's dialectic of archaeology (where a desire comes from) and teleology (where it is going), Lawrence suggests that divine self-satisfaction is the telos of human narcissistic libido, prefigured in the intuitive knowledge of childhood narcissism. "In all our egoistic striving we may be searching for the metaphysically foundational, perfect self-sufficiency or contentment of divine consciousness."
- Indra was not wholly wrong. "According to the monistic Saivas, Indra was not entirely misguided in his presumption to be the Supreme Lord. He only had to learn how properly to realize that status."
Why the Pratyabhijna reached this view. Lawrence names a constellation of factors:
- An Ultimate that is both monistic and theistic, with "some kind of personality and ego". (Abrahamic mystics such as Eckhart and al-Hallaj "found trouble by gravitating too closely to monism".)
- The strategy of overcoding limited powers within omnipotence, which "paradoxically affirms individual 'egoistic' or 'selfish' motivations while exploiting and deindividualizing them". This sets up a "scale of transformation" between the human ego and Siva's.
- The tantric themes of Sakti's simultaneous transcendence and immanence and the ritual subversion of purity norms, which make binding experiences into media for revealing Sakti. Ego becomes God's ego; body becomes the universe; pleasure becomes Siva's bliss; argument becomes good reasoning.
- The genius of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta and the rich culture of medieval Kashmir.
Other views. A sceptical psychoanalyst would call all this, including Lawrence's suggestions, "extravagant rationalizations of narcissistic regression". Other traditions would relate pride and bliss differently; a Buddhist sympathetic to the psychology might speak of the non-contingency of nirvana while rejecting its egoity or foundational status.
Lawrence is explicit that his proposals depend on accepting the Pratyabhijna arguments as valid, which is a philosophical position, not a finding of the study. Readers who do not share that premise can still use the chapter. Its comparative map (Christian participation, Faustian seizure, Saiva de-individualisation; Freud's regression, Lacan's alienation, Kohut's transformation) is useful on any view. What changes is whether one reads the VAP's perfect I as a truth about reality that psychology partly glimpses, or as a psychological state that the tradition dresses in metaphysics. The book argues for the first; it does not prove it.
6. The Guru's Ethical Concern with Universal Redemption
Against the Western critics, Lawrence argues that there is "abundant evidence for the compatibility, and frequent affinity, between monistic religions and ethics".
Both-and logic. Advaita and Buddhist distinctions between ultimate and provisional truth put unity and ethical difference in separate spheres. Even where unity negates difference, ethics is maintained in practice, along the lines of what G. William Barnard calls a "both-and" rather than "either-or" logic. Monistic Saivism mediates unity and difference through threefold, fivefold and other hierarchies, and its emanationism, which subsumes rather than negates, gives further support to the value of immanent experience.
Compassion. Like the bodhisattva ideal, monistic Saiva authors hold that great compassion, including empathy, applied to freeing others, is integral to liberation. The two highest powers in the VAP are becoming "the grace-bestowing guru, the eminent preceptor, of the entire universe" and performing the five acts. The theodicy of the five acts may "transcend considerations of morality", but the separate and redundant theme of grace embodied in the guru shows its pre-eminent value.
Utpaladeva's motive. The first verse of the Isvarapratyabhijnakarika:
"Having somehow been caused to attain servitude to the Great Lord and desiring the benefit of humanity, I am establishing the recognition of Him, which is the cause of obtaining all prosperity."
Servitude (dasya) here is a name for high realisation, recognised as identity with Siva. In his autocommentary, Utpaladeva says he created the system because he was ashamed that he alone was fortunate, and so that leading humanity to recognition would give him complete satisfaction.
Abhinavagupta on purpose. Abhinava justifies "benefit of others" as a real purpose using the Nyaya Sutra definition ("that object aiming at which a person acts") and argues that "there is not a divine curse such that a purpose is only the advantage of oneself and not the advantage of others". He reads "humanity" as "those who are afflicted by incessant birth and death" who "as objects of compassion, should be helped".
Caste. Abhinava emphasises that Utpaladeva put no caste restriction on following the system. In his commentary on Bhagavad Gita 9.33 to 9.34, he argues that God saves low castes, women and animals, and strongly criticises commentators who deny it. In the Tantraloka he says one must not treat fellow Saivas differently by caste, but see them all as Siva. Those perfect in identity with Bhairava are occupied only with the benefit of humanity.
7. Ethics in Saiva Practice
The samayas. In Tantraloka chapter 15, Abhinava sets out eight groups of eight rules (samaya) for initiates, many ethical:
| Group | Examples |
|---|---|
| Not to be said | The untrue and the harmful |
| To refrain from | Injury, touching another's wife, arrogance, deceit, cursing others with evil spirits, poison or sickness |
| To be venerated | The guru, the guru's family, scripture, and women |
| To be satisfied | The destitute, the afflicted, one's parents, the multitudes of living beings, birds |
| To be struck | Passion, aversion, displeasure, timidity, envy, conceit, and those who break the rules |
| To be confounded | The cruel, the hostile, the treacherous, the evil, those who obstruct |
Discursive ethics. The Pratyabhijna works follow the sixteen Nyaya categories of debate, the most widely accepted Indian standards. Abhinava's ranking of other traditions rests on the validity of the Pratyabhijna, which must be argued. Even the act of possessing Sakti is construed as an inference for others, and the VAPV reads the VAP the same way. "It is on the basis of this discursive ethics that the monistic Saiva claims we have discussed are in principle open to further questioning and dispute."
The samaya list cuts both ways. It shows real ethical content (truthfulness, non-injury, care for the afflicted, respect for women). It also shows sectarian enforcement: "those who break or do not follow the rules" are to be "struck", and "those who create obstructions" are to be "confounded". Lawrence himself marks the first with an exclamation mark in his text. A balanced reading should hold both: Saiva ethics is real, and it is the ethics of an initiatory community with boundaries and sanctions, not a universal liberal ethic. Similarly, Abhinava's arguments against caste restriction are striking for his time, but they apply within the Saiva fold and sit alongside a ritual hierarchy that the same texts maintain.
8. Transcendence and Immanence Today
Many modern retrievals of monistic Saivism follow a common strategy for making old religions relevant. Modern critics have called traditional religions too otherworldly for this-worldly values: science, social progress, comfort, sexuality, the environment. In response there have been many attempts to recover metaphysics that stress the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of the Ultimate: the process thought of Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead and Hartshorne; the hermeneutics of Eliade, Ricoeur and Tracy; Macquarrie's Heideggerian theology; new readings of Taoism and Confucianism. The same agenda appears in modern interest in Saivism and Tantra, in Gopinath Kaviraj, Swami Lakshman Joo and Sir John Woodroffe; in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of the Supermind, a basically tantric metaphysics joined to modern values of social development; and in Rita Dasgupta Sherma's ecofeminist reading of Sakti. Lawrence ends hopeful: it is "not anachronistic but rather faithful to the monistic Saivas' own concerns with universal felicity" to see promise in their philosophy for modern religious and ethical concerns.
This hope is reasonable but should be read alongside Lawrence's own warning to "exercise interpretive caution". Modern readers often present Kashmir Saivism as world-affirming, egalitarian and ecological. Some of that is there in the texts, as the Abhinava passages show. Some of it is the modern reader's selection. The VAP's world-affirmation is a claim about consciousness (the world is my body, my Sakti); it does not by itself say anything about social reform, and its Book on Powers is plainly interested in power over things, not care for them.
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| primary narcissism | Freud's term for the infant's undivided, all-including ego-feeling |
| oceanic feeling | Romain Rolland's term for a persistent sense of limitless union |
| mirror stage | Lacan's stage in which the infant forms a sense of I from its reflected image |
| grandiose self / idealised imago | Kohut's two configurations of early narcissism |
| cosmic narcissism | Kohut's term for a mature, empathic identification with the universe |
| cathexis | Investment of psychic energy in an object |
| knowledge by identity | Forman's term for knowing by being, not by intending an object |
| svatmavisranti / svatmasvada | Rest in the self / self-relishing |
| dasya | Servitude; in Utpaladeva, high realisation |
| samaya | A rule or pledge binding on initiates |
Reflection
- Where do you sit on the four-row table: effacement, surrender, inflation or de-individualised affirmation? Which one does your own religious or secular upbringing assume?
- Kohut says cosmic narcissism is driven by the acceptance of death. The VAP's Indra is driven by humiliation. Is there a version of the Saiva path that skips the humbling? Should there be?
- Lawrence suggests that all egoistic striving secretly seeks divine self-sufficiency. Take one ambition of yours and ask what final satisfaction it promises. Is that satisfaction available now?
- Read the samaya table again. Which rules would you keep, and which reveal a community protecting itself?
On the Translation (pp. 57 to 58)
A short chapter on editions and method. Lawrence translates from Gopinath Kaviraj's edition with reference to T. Ganapati Sastri's, aims to be as literal as readable English allows, and keeps the Sanskrit tradition's verse numbering.
Teaching Notes
Editions.
| Year | Editor | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 1908 | L. D. Barnett | The VAP verses alone |
| 1910 | T. Ganapati Sastri | First edition of VAP with VAPV (Trivandrum Sanskrit Series), from a Malayalam-script manuscript |
| 1970 | Gopinath Kaviraj | Largely duplicates Sastri, with minor changes, in the anthology Tantrasamgraha; Lawrence's main base |
| 1971 | Henri Lenaerts | Ph.D. thesis at Banaras Hindu University; "a rough and problematic paraphrase", not used |
Lawrence has been collecting manuscripts and may publish a new edition.
Obscurities. The meaning is often straightforward, but there are "many obscure points", some from esoteric tantric symbolism and ritual, some perhaps from manuscript problems. "There are likely points that I have misunderstood."
Method.
- Sastric sentences are long and convoluted, especially in the commentary, which mixes word glosses with interpretations of whole verses. Lawrence often splits one Sanskrit sentence into several English ones and divides the commentary into paragraphs.
- He renders abstract constructions directly: akramatame (VAP 3.33) becomes "I am without sequence", not "There is nonsequentiality of me".
- He avoids Sanskrit terms in the translation where possible, keeping a few in brackets so their use can be traced; the index lists more.
The count of verses. A pancasika should have fifty verses; there are fifty-three. Vidyacakravartin says the first and last are not counted (introduction and conclusion), and suggests that 4.50 is also not counted because it is incidental. Nobody knows when the text was split into four books. The numbering is continuous: 1.8 is followed by 2.9.
The translation choice "I am without sequence" is more than style. Sanskrit philosophical prose favours abstract nouns ("there is non-sequentiality of me"); the VAP's teaching is that the I is a living subject, not an abstraction. By turning abstract nouns back into first-person statements, Lawrence makes the English do what the contemplation does: it turns doctrine into self-statement. When you read the translation, read the first-person verses aloud as your own.
Key Terms
- Tantrasamgraha: Kaviraj's 1970 anthology of tantric texts.
- pancasika: a work of fifty verses.
- Trivandrum Sanskrit Series: the early twentieth-century series in which Ganapati Sastri published the first edition.
Orientation to the Translation
Before working through the four books, it helps to have the whole sequence in view. The table below is assembled from Lawrence's Chapter 3 and from the translation itself.
| Book | Verses | Theme | Key contemplations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book 1 | 1.1 to 1.8 | The universe is your body | The setting and Indra's question; the point of disagreement; I-am-ness in six conditions; the living dead; clapping hands and crashing mountains; possessing and impelling bindu, breath and body; Lordship as I-hood |
| Book 2 | 2.9 to 2.21 | The universe is awareness | Consciousness as I-hood and Supreme Speech; "this" and "I"; the ocean of milk and the waves of Sakti; moon, sun and fire; the sixfold course and the Supreme Sun; the four divisions of the world-egg |
| Book 3 | 3.22 to 3.40 | Modes of recognitive apprehension | "I am unitary"; the three persons and the Great Person; the five Saktis and the five acts; the fire of recognition and its ashes; the five ever-inward natures and the homologies; memory, experience and recognition |
| Book 4 | 4.41 to 4.53 | The Book on Powers | Five types of subject; identifying with sun, moon, cloud, ocean, deities, elements and tattvas; the incidental verse on the sages (4.50); the two supreme proficiencies, guru of the universe and Siva; Indra sees himself as Siva |
The exact boundaries of Books 2 and 3 in the guide below follow the translation's own headings.
The Universe Is Your Body (Verses 1.1 to 1.8)
Book 1 opens with Vidyacakravartin's introduction to the whole work and then gives seven verses (1.2 to 1.8) that, in his words, "demonstrate by arguments" that the universe, which we normally experience as external to our body, is our body. The structure is a debate: Virupaksa states a thesis, a voice raises an objection, Virupaksa answers. Each answer is also a contemplation to be practised.
The Commentator's Introduction
The benediction. "Homage to Sambhu, whose body is the universe, who shines in unity with the universe, who has eternal recognitive apprehension, and whose [yogic] proficiency is the universe." Sambhu ("the benevolent") is a name of Siva. The benediction packs the whole teaching into four epithets: universal body, unity, self-recognition, and power.
The genre. Vidyacakravartin calls the verses "a summary of the established facts that comprise the Doctrine of Consciousness" (the Pratyabhijna).
Grace as Siva's only pleasure. "The only pleasure of the glorious Lord, the Supreme Siva is bestowing grace on the universe. Once, in sport, he assumed a body." Lawrence notes that because God is self-sufficient, his actions transcend comprehensible purposes, and Hindu traditions call them play (lila).
Mere intention. Virupaksa produced the fight of the mountains "through his mere intention". This phrase returns in verse 1.6 and is the key to the book.
The book plan. Vidyacakravartin then sets out the architecture of the text. It is worth having in full, because it corrects any loose summary:
| Book | Verses | Opening words | Purpose (Vidyacakravartin) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 to 8 (seven verses) | "the point of disagreement" | To demonstrate by arguments that the universe is one's body |
| 2 | 9 to 21 (thirteen verses) | "has the nature of recognitive apprehension" | To show the universe is identical with awareness, removing the delusion that body and body-possessor differ |
| 3 | 22 to 40 (nineteen verses) | "I am unitary and have the nature of unsetting awareness" | To explain the modes of recognitive apprehension, so there is no doubt or misunderstanding |
| 4 | 41 to 51 (eleven counted verses) | "established within myself" | Modes of experience of the unenlightened and enlightened; the higher and lower proficiencies; the great proficiency |
| Frame | 1 and 53 | Introduction and conclusion, not counted | |
| Incidental | 50 | "of Suka, Vamadeva" | Not counted |
So 7 + 13 + 19 + 11 = fifty counted verses, with three uncounted ones making fifty-three.
Two problems the text guards against. Vidyacakravartin says Book 3 removes two errors about the identity of the universe and awareness: "a doubt as to its possibility or a misunderstanding of it". The Sanskrit pair is asambhavana and viparitabhavana, technical terms in Indian pedagogy for the two obstacles that remain after one has heard a teaching: thinking "this cannot be" and thinking "this means something else". Hearing the argument is not enough; doubt and distortion must be cleared by contemplation.
Five kinds of subject. Vidyacakravartin's introduction to Book 4 distinguishes five subjects: the unenlightened, the almost enlightened, the enlightened, the almost completely enlightened, and the completely enlightened. Keep this scale in mind; the VAP does not treat realisation as a single switch.
Verse 1.1: The Setting
"Virupaksa displayed the battle of the two mountains. Having been asked, he then explained the seed of his innate proficiency to that Indra who had enjoyed the fight of rutting elephants."
Teaching notes.
- "Having been asked." Because Indra asked, "it must be inferred that Indra has experienced a gracious descent of Sakti (saktipata)". So he is eligible (adhikara) for instruction. Lawrence notes that eligibility is a standard opening topic in Sanskrit texts. The desire to know the source of omnipotence is itself a sign of grace.
- "He explained" means that Virupaksa "began to perform a verbal initiation" (sabdi diksa). The implication, Lawrence says, is that the text initiates the reader too, which fits Utpaladeva's and Abhinavagupta's view of the Pratyabhijna as both public philosophy and a re-enactment of tantric ritual.
- "Seed" (bija). In Tantra, bija is also the seminal syllable of a mantra. Here it means the seminal cause of Virupaksa's power.
- "Innate proficiency." Lawrence translates siddhi as "proficiency" because the text holds that such powers are innate and need only be awakened. "Proficiency" carries both achievement and innateness.
Vidyacakravartin says Virupaksa "prepares the setting", literally "prepares the seat", the metaphor of sitting down for instruction. Every element of the frame is turned into a lesson about the reader. Indra's question is a sign of grace; therefore if you are curious about the source of power in consciousness, that curiosity is the same sign. The text treats wanting to know as the first stage of being initiated.
Verse 1.2: The Point of Disagreement
"Well, this is [our] point of disagreement: I [recognize that I] have the nature of consciousness [and that] this universe, beginning with the void state and ending with the earth, is my body. This [fact that the universe is one's body] is proven because [the universe] is perceptible, like the fleshly body."
The syllogism. Vidyacakravartin says Virupaksa propounds "a syllogism that is established through five parts", the classical Nyaya inference for others:
| Part | Nyaya name | Here |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Thesis | pratijna | The universe is my body |
| 2. Reason | hetu | Because it is perceptible |
| 3. Example | drstanta | Like the fleshly body |
| 4. Application | upanaya | The universe is likewise perceptible |
| 5. Conclusion | nigamana | Therefore it is my body ("it is proven") |
"Well." The address "Well" makes Indra turn toward Virupaksa. Lawrence: the student must sincerely and devoutly face the guru.
The debate. "You, presuming yourself to be an individual subject, understand this universe... to be external to your body. I, who [recognize that I] have the nature of consciousness, understand it to be my body." For the limited subject, the fleshly body is the body because it is perceptible; for unlimited consciousness, the universe is the body because it is perceptible.
The proof from experience. This is the passage Lawrence quotes in the Introduction:
"When one attends to a particular and distinct object of knowledge, for example [a color] such as blue or yellow, then one becomes an individual subject, that is, a delimited awareness... However, when one recognitively synthesizes everything in its universal nature, then one [recognizes oneself to be] consciousness, that is, unlimited awareness. This is because it is impossible for the one who illuminates [limiting conditions] such as place and time to be limited by [those conditions]."
The idealist step. "If it were not so [that one is such a consciousness], then even the fleshly body could not be the body of the individual subject because it would not be perceptible." In other words, perceptibility is only intelligible if there is a consciousness for which things appear; and whatever appears to a consciousness is, in this sense, its body.
The gist. "The definitive characteristic of the individual subject is its particular [objects of knowledge]. When there is the dissolution of those [particular objects into their universal nature], you will [recognize that you] have the nature of consciousness and have the universe as your body."
Lawrence's notes worth keeping.
- Contemplation, not proof. The VAP and VAPV present "not so much a series of contemplations that are simultaneously technical philosophical syllogisms" as contemplations based on the Pratyabhijna arguments. Vidyacakravartin's syllogisms "do not have the same demonstrative force" as Abhinavagupta's.
- A different thesis. Abhinava's inference is "I am Siva" with Sakti as the reason. Vidyacakravartin's is "the universe is my body" with perceptibility as the reason. Lawrence calls the difference "more rhetorical than substantive", since the result in both is identity with omnipotent Siva.
- The objection of over-breadth. "It may seem, prima facie, that the class of the perceptible is too wide in its concomitance. One does not normally understand everything that is seen as one's body." The answer depends on Pratyabhijna idealism, which the rest of the text clarifies.
- Reversal of Advaita. "Whereas perceptibility (drsyatva) is an indication of illusion in Advaita Vedanta, here it is an indication of one's Power and Lordship." In Advaita, whatever is seen is unreal because it is an object. In the VAP, whatever is seen is mine because it is an object.
- Universal versus particular. The contemplation cultivates universal (samanya) rather than particular (visesa) cognition, a theme found also in the Spanda doctrine of particular pulsations (visesa spanda) within universal pulsation (samanya spanda).
- Tracy's phrase. Using David Tracy's terms, Lawrence says the Self is the transcendental "limit of" the "limits to" ordinary experience, such as place and time, and so cannot itself be limited.
Lawrence himself states the weak point of the argument: "the class of the perceptible is too wide". In ordinary logic, "whatever is perceptible is my body" fails at once, because I perceive a tree and the tree is not my body in any usual sense. The verse only works if you already accept that to be perceived is to be a modification of the perceiving consciousness, which is the idealist premise the Pratyabhijna argues for elsewhere. Read the verse as a pointer to that premise, and as a contemplation that tests it in experience, rather than as a self-standing proof.
Verse 1.3: I-am-ness in Six Conditions
The objection. "The mere fact that [something] is perceptible is not a reason [that establishes that it is] the body. It must also be experienced as 'I'. The fleshly body is experienced as 'I'. However, the universe is experienced as 'this'."
"I-am-ness is observed in the six conditions 'I am prosperous,' 'I am lean,' 'I relish with the senses,' 'I am happy,' 'I am breathing,' and 'I am void [of experience].'"
The analysis.
| Statement | Quality | Belongs to |
|---|---|---|
| I am prosperous | prosperity | objects such as a house and a field |
| I am lean | leanness | the fleshly body |
| I relish with the senses | relish | the sense organs such as the eye |
| I am happy | happiness | the inner organ, the mind |
| I am breathing | breathing | the vital air |
| I am void | voidness | deep sleep, "a synonym for Maya" |
The answer. "One does conceive as 'I' even objects that one understands to be external to the [fleshly] body. Therefore, the object... is also the body, because it is perceptible. When they are not conceived as 'I', even the fleshly body and the senses are not [understood as] the body." The objection that the body is "I" and the external thing is "this" is "a mere delusion resulting from a lack of recognitive apprehension of that [I-am-ness]".
Lawrence's gloss. "One who believes 'I am prosperous' identifies himself or herself with his or her belongings. Our various self-identifications should be expanded into the realization that everything observable is our body."
The answer has two edges. The first is familiar: you already say "I" about things outside your skin, so the skin is not the border of I-am-ness. The second is subtler and is easy to miss: "When they are not conceived as 'I', even the fleshly body and the senses are not the body." Think of a numb limb, or the way the body vanishes from awareness in deep absorption. What makes something "my body" is not its physical attachment but the act of I-identification. That act is what the contemplation trains.
Verse 1.4: Contemplate It for the Entire Course
The objection. Granted that I-am-ness appears in six conditions, "it is not [observed] everywhere".
"I-am-ness is well known [in the six conditions]: objects, the [fleshly] body, the senses, the intelligence, the breath and mental arrest. The one who contemplates this consciousness [that I am] for the entire course has [the realization of] the universe as his body."
Teaching notes.
- Mental arrest (nirodha) is the Yoga Sutra's word for the suppression of mental activity (Yoga Sutra 1.2). Here it is correlated with the "void" of the previous verse.
- "The entire course" (akhile 'dhvani) refers to the doctrine of the six courses (adhvan) of emanating Speech.
- Why it belongs to consciousness. The I-am-ness in the six conditions "can belong only to consciousness. It could not belong to the individual subject, because that [individual subject] is submerged when in the void state." Lawrence notes the parallel with Ramana Maharshi's frequent point about deep sleep: since the individual is absent there, a deeper subjectivity must be aware of that state.
- The instruction. "Firmly recognitively synthesize this eternally pure recognition [of I-am-ness], as in the six conditions, everywhere, regarding everything, beginning with [the emanated, lower] Siva and ending with the earth."
- Two Sivas. Lawrence warns that "Siva" has two meanings: the ultimate deity (Paramasiva, Paramesvara) and the lower cosmic principle called Siva (the sivatattva), emanated by Paramasiva. When the commentary says "beginning with Siva and ending with the earth", it means the lower Siva principle, the top of the thirty-six tattvas.
- No partial I. "It is impossible that I-am-ness could belong only to a particular aspect [of that consciousness] rather than to the entirety of it."
Verse 1.4 adds a logical point to the practical one. If the I-am-ness that appears in sleep, breath and possessions belongs to consciousness rather than to the individual, then it cannot be rationed. Consciousness has no parts that could be "I" while others are "not I". The individual's sense of a border is not a feature of I-am-ness but a lapse in recognising it.
Verse 1.5: The Living Dead
"Having departed from the body that is the universe, one's I-hood becomes confined to a particular body that is a portion of that [universal one]. [Unenlightened] people are as if dead while living, as if their throats were gasping for breath."
Teaching notes.
- The cause of this spiritual death "has been determined to be Maya, which is defined as the lack of recognitive apprehension of oneself". When one attains recognitive apprehension, "one is none other than Siva, who has the universe as his body".
- "Having departed" (utkramya) literally means "having risen above". In yogic practice the derivatives of ut-kram refer to the yogin leaving the fleshly body by an ascent of vital energy through the brahmarandhra at the crown. Lawrence translates "having departed" to avoid suggesting that leaving the universal body is an ascent: "In terms of spiritual value, it is more of a descent."
- Dead while living (jivanmrta) inverts jivanmukta, liberated while living. "What we normally call life is a death to our true life." Lawrence cites Shashibhusan Dasgupta's paraphrase of a Natha text: "Where an ordinary man lives (in his physical form) the yogin is dead, and where there is the death for all (in the physical form) there is no death for the yogin."
Most yogic texts describe liberation as a rising up and out of the body. The VAP inverts the direction. The ordinary person has already "risen out", out of the universal body into a fragment. Liberation is not leaving the body but returning to the larger one. If you practise with ascent imagery (energy rising to the crown, leaving the body), this verse invites you to try the opposite feeling: not going up, but spreading out.
Verse 1.6: Hands and Mountains
"[You] whose I-am-ness refers to the [fleshly] body can, through mere intention, strike [your] two insentient arms together. Just so, [I, whose I-am-ness] refers to the universe can, through the force of that [intention, strike together] even two mountains."
The two factors. Vidyacakravartin isolates exactly two causes: "You have [1] a firm conviction that 'I' refers to the [fleshly] body, and [2] an intention. Those [two factors] alone cause your hands to strike together. There is no other cause. Similarly, I have [1] a firm conviction that 'I' refers to the universe and [2] an intention."
The diagnosis of Indra. "You lack Lordship because your conviction has diminished that 'I' refers to the universe. However, through firmness of that [conviction], your Lordship, which is [in reality] established eternally, will be revealed."
Indra's arms. Lawrence notes that Indra's powerful arms are a frequent theme of his mythology, and that in metaphysical readings his limbs are identified with features of the cosmos and he is seen as the animating power in human arms. "For the VAP, this will be true of Indra only when he is enlightened."
"Your Lordship, which is established eternally, will be revealed." Lordship is not acquired; it is uncovered. The method is not to strengthen intention but to strengthen conviction about the extent of "I". This is why the VAP is a text of contemplation and not of willpower. Willing harder will not move a mountain; recognising that the mountain is in your body, on this view, would.
Verse 1.7: Possessing the Six and Impelling Them
The objection. We do not observe that mere I-am-ness and intention move the hands. Movement needs "a constellation that consists in the impulsion of the [various elemental factors of the human being, such as] the germinal essence, breath, and so on".
"Possessing the germinal essence, breath, Sakti, the mind, the collection of senses and the [fleshly] body, contemplate I-hood as impelling all of them."
The six entities, as Vidyacakravartin reads them:
| Entity | Vidyacakravartin's explanation |
|---|---|
| Germinal essence (bindu) | The subtle conception of I that precedes particular conceptions of subject and means of knowledge; it "flows from its own ecstasy" and is universal in nature |
| Breath (prana) | The vital breath (asu), cause of the activation of the inner organ |
| Sakti | Here, the intelligence and the I-concept, because conceptions of identity and ascertainment "have the nature of Sakti" |
| Mind | The inner organ |
| Senses | The collection of sense powers |
| Body | The fleshly body |
The practice. "Contemplate I-hood as impelling all of them, that is, activating them through the majesty of your slightest touch." In ordinary experience you already feel the I as possessing and moving your fleshly body. "You should in the same way contemplate [I-hood as possessing and impelling] all of these. Then you will realize as yours such eternally established proficiencies."
Lawrence's notes.
- "Possessing" (avisya) comes from a-vis, which also means "enter into", "submerge in" and "possess". Its background lies in ideas of spirit and deity possession. The Malinivijayottara Tantra describes three mystical samavesas. In the VAP, "there is a blending of the ideas of the adept possessing realia and being possessed by them". Among the studies Lawrence cites is Navjivan Rastogi's "The Philosophy of Krama", vol. 2, pp. 367 to 383.
- A puzzle about bindu. If bindu is the ultimate I-hood (as in 2.15), why would one contemplate I-hood as impelling the ultimate I-hood? Lawrence considers two readings: (a) Virupaksa uses bindu here for a limited constituent of the personality, against the commentator; or (b), which he favours, the verse teaches how to expand one's prima facie I-hood to its full reality: "In possessing the ultimate bindu, the limited I-hood would be realized actually to be that bindu."
- "Flows from its own ecstasy" (svarasavahini) alludes to Utpaladeva's description of consciousness as svarasodita, "risen out of its own ecstasy" (Isvarapratyabhijnakarika 1.5.13), following B. N. Pandit's translation.
- Inconsistency in the commentary. Lawrence notes that Vidyacakravartin reads "Sakti" in this verse as only limited faculties generated by Sakti, while reading "bindu" as the ultimate. The commentator is not always consistent.
The ladder in verse 1.7 runs from subtlest to grossest: bindu, breath, Sakti (intellect and ego), mind, senses, body. Ordinary experience lives at the bottom rung and feels "I move my body". The contemplation reverses the gaze: feel the I as the mover of the senses, then the mind, then the intellect and ego-sense, then the breath, then the bare subtle sense of "I" before any thought. Each step is still "I impel this". At the top, the impeller and the impelled meet. This is a practical sequence you can follow in meditation.
Verse 1.8: Lordship Is a Synonym for I-hood
The objection. "I-hood is manifested through mere contemplation. However, one does not [thereby] experience oneself to be endowed with such lofty qualities as Lordship and [universal] agency."
"The wise verily say that Lordship, [universal] agency, agential self-determination, and being of the nature of consciousness are synonyms for I-hood."
The answer. "That very I-hood that has been recognized by you is Lordship, [universal] agency (kartrta), agential self-determination (svatantrata), and consisting of consciousness (citsvarupata). Every excellence in proficiencies [that is described] in the religious literature... consists of nothing but I-hood." Hence the doubt is dispelled: "Inasmuch as one has a firm recognition [of that I-hood], one displays one's eternally established powers."
The closing formula. The commentary on each book ends "Thus Siva" (iti sivam), and Book 1 closes: "Thus ends the first book... which demonstrates that the universe is one's body."
Verse 1.8 is a definitional move, and it is the logical hinge of the whole VAP. If "I" and "Lord" are synonyms, then to be fully "I" is to be Lord, and any lack of lordship is only a lack of full I-hood. Indra's error was not claiming to be Lord; it was not being enough "I" to be Lord. You may or may not accept the definition, but notice how much depends on it: the entire Book on Powers in Book 4 is an elaboration of this one equation.
Book 1 Summary Table
| Verse | Objection answered | Teaching | Contemplation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | None (frame) | Indra's question shows grace; the teaching is an initiation | Notice your own wish to know as a sign of eligibility |
| 1.2 | Is the universe outside me? | The universe is my body because it is perceptible | Shift from particular to universal seeing |
| 1.3 | Only what I call "I" is my body | You already call many things "I" | Name the six conditions of I-am-ness |
| 1.4 | But not everything | I-am-ness belongs to consciousness, which is whole | Extend I-am-ness through the whole course |
| 1.5 | (statement of the problem) | Ordinary life is a living death caused by Maya | Feel "return" rather than "ascent" |
| 1.6 | (consequence) | Conviction plus intention move hands, and mountains | Feel how intention moves the body effortlessly |
| 1.7 | Movement needs physical causes | Possess and impel bindu, breath, intellect, mind, senses, body | Climb from body to bindu |
| 1.8 | I feel no Lordship | Lordship, agency, freedom, consciousness are names of I-hood | Rest in the I as the Lord |
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| lila | Divine play, sport |
| saktipata | Descent of Sakti; grace |
| adhikara | Eligibility for a teaching |
| sabdi diksa | Verbal initiation |
| bija | Seed; seminal syllable of a mantra |
| drsyatva | Perceptibility |
| samanya / visesa | Universal / particular |
| nirodha | Arrest of mental activity |
| jivanmrta / jivanmukta | Dead while living / liberated while living |
| avesa, samavesa | Possession, immersion |
| svarasodita | Risen out of its own ecstasy |
| kartrta, svatantrata, citsvarupata | Agency, self-determination, being of the nature of consciousness |
Reflection and Practice
- The universal glance. Sit before a scene with many objects. First attend to one object; notice the slight contraction into "a subject who sees this". Then take in the whole scene at once. Notice the widening. Verse 1.2 says the second is nearer to what you are.
- The six layers. Spend a day noticing each time you say "I am" about something: "I am tired", "I am late", "I am rich", "I am out of breath". Each is a case of I-am-ness extending. Do not judge; count.
- The slightest touch. In meditation, follow verse 1.7 upward: body, senses, mind, intellect and ego-sense, breath, the subtle sense of I. At each step feel "I impel this" lightly.
- Question. Is the equation "I-hood = Lordship" a discovery or a definition? What would count as evidence either way?
The Universe Is Awareness (Verses 2.9 to 2.21)
Book 1 showed that the universe is one's body. But a gap remains: even if the universe is my body, is the body different from the one who has it? Book 2 closes the gap. It demonstrates "that the universe has the nature of awareness, to refute the delusion that there is a difference between the body and the one who possesses the body". It does so in three movements: consciousness is I-hood and Supreme Speech (2.9 to 2.12); objects are waves of consciousness's Saktis (2.13 to 2.17); and the sixfold course and the world-egg are established in me (2.18 to 2.21).
Verse 2.9: Consciousness Is I-hood
The objection. When particulars dissolve, one realises a consciousness that is universal and flows from its own ecstasy. "That [universal consciousness] is not experienced as 'I'. Therefore, how can it be said to be I-hood?"
"That consciousness has the nature of recognitive apprehension, flows from its own ecstasy, is Supreme Speech, and comprises the collection of phonemes as abbreviated into the first and the last. [That consciousness] is in reality I-hood."
The source. Lawrence shows that the verse "closely corresponds" to Utpaladeva's Isvarapratyabhijnakarika 1.5.13:
"Consciousness has the nature of recognitive apprehension; it is Supreme Speech; it has risen out of its own ecstasy; it is agential self-determination; and it is therefore the chief Lordship of the Supreme Self."
Vidyacakravartin's gloss, phrase by phrase:
| Phrase | Gloss |
|---|---|
| has the nature of recognitive apprehension | has the nature of recognitive judgment (vimarsa) |
| "that" consciousness | "that" because it is observable, proven to everyone in their own experience |
| consciousness | "the abiding of the sentient being in its essential nature when there is the dissolution of all colorations by objects of consciousness" (an allusion to Yoga Sutra 1.3) |
| flows from its own ecstasy | "bursts into manifestation continuously because it has no obstructions" |
| Supreme Speech | Speech because it consists of recognitive apprehension; Supreme because it illuminates everything as within itself, not, like Seeing (pasyanti), objects distinguished from itself |
| first and last | from a to ha, by Panini's method of abbreviation |
| I-hood | "not merely that [limited identity that deluded people] conceive as 'I'" |
The four levels of speech. Lawrence explains that the Saiva traditions since Somananda read Bhartrhari as positing four descending levels of language: Supreme (para), Seeing (pasyanti), Intermediate (madhyama) and Gross (vaikhari). Whether Bhartrhari himself put a Supreme level above Seeing is debated. For the Saivas, "even Seeing involves some degree of the duality between language and objects".
Abhinavagupta's commentary on Utpaladeva's verse, which Lawrence quotes: Supreme Speech "is the life of language sounds of the realm of Maya"; it is "the inner foundation of recognitive apprehensions such as 'This is blue' and 'I am Caitra'"; "it is called Speech because it speaks the universe by means of recognitive apprehension"; and it is the "always unset, eternal 'I'".
The objection in 2.9 is the one most meditators raise. In deep stillness there is awareness, but it does not feel like "I"; it feels impersonal, vast, nobody's. The VAP's answer is that the impersonal-seeming awareness has a reflexive character: it knows itself (vimarsa), and that self-knowing is what "I" most deeply means. The sense of "I" you usually have is a contracted echo of this reflexivity. So the answer to "is pure awareness personal or impersonal?" is: neither in the usual sense; it is self-aware, and that is the root of personhood.
Verse 2.10: The Unitary "I"
The question. If I-hood is the quality of the I, who is the other? Someone else might also call themselves "I".
"That awareness is the Self of the universe, which is able to manifest both itself and that which is [apparently] other. It is explained to be a unitary 'I'. I-hood is its abstract condition as such."
Teaching notes.
- The verse alludes to Utpaladeva's Ajadapramatrsiddhi 13: "There is only the awareness of one's Self as oneself and others."
- Awareness can manifest "itself" (abstract awareness) and "the other", "beginning with recognitive apprehension [reified as a distinct faculty] and ending with [objects such as] blue".
- Awareness "cannot [properly] be designated as either self or other, because those [when conceived as distinct entities] are both objects of knowledge". The ordinary self and its other are defined by their contrast, so both are objects.
- aha + m. "Although the stem 'aha-' is meaningful, there cannot be verbal usage with a stem alone. Therefore, in usage it is combined with the termination [-m], as 'aham'." Graphically, the bindu is the dot that represents this final -m.
- -ta. The suffix in ahamta signifies abstraction: "I-hood" is "the abstract nature" of aham "in the state of a cause".
- Lawrence notes that VAP 2.10 is quoted by Bhaskararaya in the Yoginihrdayasetubandha and by Natanandanatha in the Kamakalavilasa commentary, which shows the VAP's influence on the South Indian Srividya tradition.
Verse 2.11: "This" and "I"
The objection. There is the object ("this"), the subject ("I") and awareness: three. How can they be one?
"That [awareness] has two presentations. One, which is differentiated, is referred to as 'this'. The other, which is undifferentiated, is referred to as 'I'. The first appears in the aspect of the object of consciousness as that which is manifested. The other appears in the aspect of consciousness as that which manifests."
Exclusion and inclusion. "There is reciprocal exclusion [between instances of] the presentation 'this', as is illustrated by 'This is blue and this is yellow.' When that [exclusion] does not arise, there do not appear manifestations of objects such as blue. However, the presentation 'I' is inclusive... 'I know both blue and yellow.'"
Lawrence's note on the terms. Here the commentator introduces the dichotomy of anuvrtta (inclusive, continuous) and vyavrtta (exclusive, discontinuous). In Paninian grammar, anuvrtti refers to the continuing scope of an earlier rule over later rules. The VAP borrows a grammarian's term to describe consciousness.
Verse 2.12: No Sequence of Place or Time
"As the Self, that [awareness] is unitary, because there is no sequence in it of either place or time. However, as associated with objects of consciousness that are differentiated from each other, that [awareness] is the substratum of differentiation."
The objection and the answer: "I am a subject here and now" seems to involve place and time. But "in this awareness, there is no sequence due to differentiation of either place or time". Objects are differentiated as "this is blue, this is yellow"; awareness is "associated with, and thus inclusive of" them, as "I know blue and yellow".
The formula. "What we call differentiation is exclusiveness. Non-differentiation is inclusiveness. Objects of consciousness are differentiated by both place and time. Consciousness is the [inclusive] substratum of that differentiation. The delusion that consciousness is itself differentiated is predicated upon those objects that are merely its accidental qualifications."
"Awareness and the subject are not two." Verses 2.11 and 2.12 make a precise claim: the subject is not a third thing between awareness and its objects. It is awareness in its inclusive aspect. The everyday sense "I, here, now" borrows "here" and "now" from the objects. Strip those borrowed qualifiers away and the subject is just the inclusive awareness again. Try saying "I" while noticing that the sense of location belongs to the body and the sense of time belongs to the sequence of thoughts. What is left?
Verse 2.13: The Ocean of Milk and the Waves of Sakti
"Its body is the sky of consciousness. In that, it, which is like the ocean of milk, creates and destroys the universe through the conjunction and disjunction of the waves of its Saktis."
Teaching notes.
- "Its body" means its essential nature, "a background that consists of undifferentiated consciousness".
- Creation is the conjunction of its Saktis, "directing them toward the cognition of specific objects"; destruction is their disjunction from cognised objects.
- The Saktis are "rays of its splendor taking the forms of Khecari and so on". The Khecari ("moving in the sky") and Gocari ("moving in the sense fields") are names from a classic Kashmiri series of Sakti-groups (with Dikcari and Bhucari), which Ksemaraja also uses in the Spanda commentaries.
- The process: before the cognition of anything, "there is only consciousness, which is like the sky. When it desires to manifest... it creates through the conjunction of its Saktis in the succession of Khecari, Gocari, and so on." When reality is recognised, consciousness withdraws them, dissolving "each particular thing" "successively back into their causes".
- The metaphor's purpose: "To firmly convince [his audience] that neither Saktis nor the universe exist externally to awareness, [Virupaksa] uses metaphors: He describes awareness as the ocean and Saktis as waves, with the implication that the universe is surf."
The myth behind the image. The ocean of milk is the cosmic ocean that gods and demons churned in Purana myth, using Mount Mandara as the churning stick; the moon, among other treasures, rose from it. Verse 2.20 develops the myth fully.
Verse 2.14: Wheels of Saktis
"Consciousness should be contemplated as possessing innumerable wheels of its own Saktis. [Those wheels] emanate this universe, which consists of the five sense fields, such as the visible; and takes the forms of objects of knowledge, the senses and the knower."
How the five fields produce the triad. "The visible sense field becomes an object of knowledge. Then the eye establishes the cognition of that [object of knowledge], and takes on its character. Then the individual subject appropriates its visible form. It is similar with taste and [the other sense fields]."
Why contemplation is hard. "Because there are an infinity [of things], contemplation is difficult." That is why the next verse simplifies.
Verse 2.15: Moon, Sun, Fire and the Germinal Essence
"The object of knowledge, the senses and the knower are [respectively] symbolized by the moon, the sun and fire. The germinal essence consists in the corporification of their manifestations. [That germinal essence] has the nature of recognitive apprehension, and is the sole life-breath of the six courses."
Why these symbols.
| Element | Symbol | Reason given |
|---|---|---|
| Object of knowledge | Moon | Its form is external |
| Senses (means of knowledge) | Sun | They are both external and internal |
| Knower | Fire | Its nature is internal and unitary |
What the germinal essence is. It is "the manifestation that is common to them when their distinctions... have dissolved", that is, their recognitive apprehension. The six courses are its "secondary transformations".
The true deities. "The three divinities conceived as the moon, and so on, are actually the triad of the object of knowledge, and so on. Their true forms are not their sportive appearances, corporeal forms, discs, and so on. Discs and so on are [actually] objects of knowledge."
Here the commentary quietly demythologises. The moon god, the sun god and the fire god of Vedic and tantric worship are not, at bottom, beings in the sky. They are the three moments of every act of knowing: what is known, the knowing, and the knower. The visible discs of moon and sun belong, the commentator notes, to the first category only: they are objects. This is the Pratyabhijna's typical treatment of older ritual: keep the symbol, change its referent to an aspect of consciousness.
Verse 2.16: Manifest and Unmanifest
"Indeed, when it is manifest, this universe consists of objects. [Nevertheless] it constantly depends upon that [germinal essence]. When it is unmanifest, it has the nature of Sakti and submerges back into that."
The two forms. The universe is gross (manifest) and subtle (Sakti). In origination, persistence and withdrawal it "always depends upon the Sakti of the germinal essence". "In no case could it be external to consciousness... Similarly, waves, and so on, could not be external to water."
Verse 2.17: Many Analyses, One Essence
"The learned analyze this [consciousness/germinal essence] as sixteenfold, ninefold, sixfold, and threefold. Thus it is symbolized by a variety of contemplative supports, and produces manifold proficiencies for those who seek those proficiencies."
Teaching notes.
- Practitioners "contemplate it with reference to sixteen contemplative supports as having a sixteenfold nature", and similarly ninefold, sixfold, threefold. These are "secondary qualifications", because "it is impossible for there to be differentiation in the essential nature" of the bindu.
- The ranking. "The [highest, quintessential] proficiency is the recognition of the essential nature of that [germinal essence]. Those who meditate with a diversity [of contemplative supports] are limited yogins who have not attained [that]. Those who have attained it do not worship in such a manner. Their only relish is that of liberation while living, which may be defined as the firmness of the realization that consciousness is a unity. They incessantly worship consciousness in oneness with it."
The numbers sixteen, nine, six and three refer to well-known tantric schemes (for instance, the sixteen digits or kalas of the moon, nine-fold divisions of the Kaula and Srividya cakras, the six courses, the three Trika goddesses). Vidyacakravartin does not spell them out, and Lawrence's notes point only generally to such schemes. Treat any precise identification as a guess. What the verse does make clear is its overcoding move: all these elaborate systems are acknowledged, then placed below the simple recognition of unity, and their users are called "limited yogins".
Verses 2.18 and 2.19: The Sixfold Course and the Supreme Sun
Vidyacakravartin says these two verses give the positive and negative concomitance of the bindu, using the "well-known example of the sun and the world-egg", to demonstrate: "You verily are that."
2.18. "The threefold Speech, consisting of word, mantra and phoneme, is a minute part of recognitive apprehension. The [threefold] referent-object consisting of cosmic realm, cosmic principle and cosmic segment is correspondingly [a minute part] of awareness, which has that [recognitive apprehension] as its essential nature."
2.19. "That Supreme Sun enlivens the world-egg by the force of its possession of it. [That world-egg would] be dead without it. Do you not see that [Sun] in the highest heaven?"
Teaching notes.
- The sixfold course in two triads, as in Chapter 3: phoneme, mantra, word on the side of speech (aspects of recognitive apprehension); segment, principle, realm on the side of objects (aspects of awareness). Note the pairing: speech goes with vimarsa, objects with prakasa.
- The Supreme Sun is awareness. It is "Supreme because it illuminates the lower sun of this world". Lawrence cites the Katha Upanisad 5.15 (also in the Mundaka and Svetasvatara): "The Sun shines not there, nor the moon and stars... After Him, as He shines, doth everything shine." He adds Plato's analogy of the Good with the sun in the Republic.
- "Dead" translates nimisitam, literally "having the eyes shut". In Kashmir Saivism, nimesa ("eye-shutting") is Siva's non-manifestation of the cosmos, and unmesa ("eye-opening") is its manifestation, as in Spanda Karika 1.1. So the world-egg without the Sun is the world with Siva's eyes closed.
- "The highest heaven" is not the physical sky but "the Supreme Space that is the heart". Lawrence points to Paul Muller-Ortega's "The Triadic Heart of Siva" for the heart symbolism.
- "Do you not see?" The question is rhetorical and implies "you do". It "removes [the delusion that the Supreme Sun] is not [actually] perceived throughout the three times". "Without seeing it, it would be impossible to see anything else."
- Self-luminosity. Lawrence: "We are always aware of our true nature as Siva... Spiritual teaching only removes the delusion that we are not aware of this."
- The conclusion. "That unlimited awareness of yours is [in the ordinary deluded condition] experienced in the heart as limited. [However, by this discussion you] are made to recognize that 'You verily are that' [unlimited awareness]."
"Do you not see that Sun?" is one of the most practical lines in the text. The usual spiritual question is "how do I see it?" The VAP's question is "how do you not see it?" You cannot see anything at all without the light of awareness, so you are seeing it now, in every perception. What is missing is not the experience but the recognition of the experience. This is the whole Pratyabhijna in a rhetorical question. Notice too the phrase "You verily are that", which deliberately echoes the Upanisadic tat tvam asi, "you are that". The VAP reads it in the light of the perfect I.
Verse 2.20: Churning the Ocean
"He, by himself, churns the ocean of milk that is the sky of consciousness with the Mandara that is intention. He thereby, through the waves of his Saktis, brings up the moon that is called the world-egg."
Teaching notes.
- "By himself" means "through nothing but agential self-determination".
- Mandara is "the mountain that has the nature of the will to manifest". With it he "churns the ocean that consists of unlimited consciousness, that is, he leads it to extroversion toward its effect".
- The waves are his Saktis, Khecari and the rest.
- The meaning: "You have been made to recognize yourself as awareness. [That awareness], through the force of its will, manifests the universe which is not different from itself upon the background that is itself."
Compare the myth. In the Purana, gods and demons churn together, using a mountain and a serpent, and many treasures and a poison emerge. In the VAP there is one churner, one mountain (intention) and one ocean (consciousness), and the treasure that rises is the whole universe. The cooperative, conflicted myth of many agents becomes a picture of a single self-determined act. Notice also the mountain: the text began with mountains crashing together, and here a mountain is the will itself.
Verse 2.21: The Four Divisions of the World-Egg
"The world-egg has four divisions: Sakti, Maya, matter, and earth. Each division, again, is also manifold. All that is established in me."
The divisions and their courses:
| Division (cause) | Its effect |
|---|---|
| Sakti, which is the germinal essence | The pure course (the higher tattvas) |
| Maya | The mixed course |
| Matter (prakrti) | The impure course |
| Earth | The gross: experienced objects and the fleshly body |
"Established in me." "The expression 'established' is not intended to signify that which is past... The establishment [of all things within me] pertains to all three times." The universe is not something that was once placed in the Self; it is in the Self, always.
The close of Book 2. "Thus Siva. Thus ends the second book... which demonstrates the unity of awareness."
Book 2 Summary Table
| Verse | Teaching | Key image or term |
|---|---|---|
| 2.9 | Consciousness is I-hood, Supreme Speech, a-to-ha | svarasodita; IPK 1.5.13 |
| 2.10 | One awareness manifests self and other; aha + m | Ajadapramatrsiddhi 13; bindu |
| 2.11 | "This" excludes; "I" includes | anuvrtta / vyavrtta |
| 2.12 | No sequence of place or time in the Self | substratum of differentiation |
| 2.13 | The universe as waves of Sakti on the ocean of consciousness | ocean of milk; Khecari, Gocari |
| 2.14 | Wheels of Saktis emanate the five fields and the triad | sakticakra |
| 2.15 | Object, senses, knower as moon, sun, fire; bindu as their common essence | the six courses as transformations |
| 2.16 | Manifest and unmanifest forms both depend on bindu | gross and subtle |
| 2.17 | Many contemplative schemes, one essence; limited yogins | overcoding of rival methods |
| 2.18 to 2.19 | Sixfold course as parts of recognition and awareness; the Supreme Sun | "You verily are that"; nimesa |
| 2.20 | One churner, one mountain of intention | the moon of the world-egg |
| 2.21 | Sakti, Maya, matter, earth; all established in me | pure, mixed and impure courses |
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| vimarsa, pratyavamarsa | Reflective awareness, recognitive apprehension |
| prakasa | The light of awareness |
| para, pasyanti, madhyama, vaikhari | The four levels of speech |
| anuvrtti / vyavrtti | Inclusiveness / exclusiveness |
| Khecari, Gocari | Classes of Saktis "moving in the sky" and "moving in the sense fields" |
| brahmanda | The world-egg |
| nimesa / unmesa | Closing / opening of Siva's eyes; dissolution / manifestation |
| Mandara | The mountain used to churn the ocean of milk |
| pure, mixed, impure courses | The three levels of the emanated tattvas |
Reflection and Practice
- Blue and yellow. Place two coloured objects before you. Say: "This is blue. This is yellow." Feel how each excludes the other. Then say: "I know both." Feel how the knowing holds both. Stay with that holding.
- Waves. In meditation, notice each thought or sensation as a wave rising and settling. Do not follow it; notice the water.
- "Do you not see?" Ask yourself the rhetorical question of 2.19 several times today, especially when absorbed in something. What is the light by which you see this?
- Question. Verse 2.17 calls practitioners of elaborate schemes "limited yogins". Is this a fair judgement or a sectarian one? Can a simple recognition really replace structured practice?
The Modes of Recognition (Verses 3.22 to 3.40)
Books 1 and 2 have established, "on the basis of both direct experience and reasoning", that the Self is the essential nature of the universe. Book 3 exists because that conclusion "must not be obscured either by doubt as to its possibility or misunderstanding". So it works through every place where a gap might reopen: between the container and the contained (3.22), between persons (3.23 to 3.24), between the Self and place and time (3.25 to 3.27), between the knower and the known (3.28 to 3.37), and between the modes of memory, experience and recognition (3.38 to 3.40). Vidyacakravartin's closing label is simple: this book "is about recognitive apprehension".
Verse 3.22: I Am Unitary
The error removed. "All that is established in me" (2.21) could suggest a locus (me) and a located (the universe), two things. Verse 3.22 removes the suggestion.
"I am unitary and have the nature of unsetting awareness. I am established within lights and darknesses. And lights and darknesses are [established] within me who am unitary."
Teaching notes.
- "Unsetting awareness" means "awareness that is eternally arisen", a sun that never sets.
- Lights are "what are ordinarily conceived as lights, including faculties such as the intelligence and [apparently external] lights such as the sun". Since I shine as them, I am their inner nature.
- Darknesses are such things as the germinal essence (in its unmanifest aspect) and Maya. "Since I shine as darkness, I am established as internal to darknesses."
- The result: "Therefore, light can shine as light and darkness as darkness." Each is inside the other. "I burst into manifestation as the universe that comprises both existence and nonexistence."
Verse 3.22 makes a claim that is easy to read past: awareness is inside darkness too. Not only the bright moments of insight but sleep, confusion, concealment and Maya itself are shining with the same awareness, as darkness. This removes the common picture in which spiritual life is moving from dark to light. On this view darkness is also the Self, shining as darkness. What changes in recognition is not which states occur, but whether they are known as "mine".
Verses 3.23 and 3.24: The Three Persons and the Great Person
3.23. "The three [grammatical] persons are distinguished from each other as first, middle, and last. However, they are not external to me who am the Great Person and have the nature of recognitive apprehension."
3.24. "Here [in ordinary unenlightened experience] there appears a differentiated form, 'I,' that is exclusive of 'You' and the rest. These differentiated portions [of the Self] are not the eternal [Self explained in the statement] 'I am unitary...'"
Teaching notes.
- Sanskrit order. Sanskrit grammar numbers the persons in reverse of the English: the first person is "he/she/it", the middle is "you", and the last is "I". The VAP builds on this order.
- The three persons "are exclusive of each other". But "their creation and destruction depend upon me", and "they are experienced upon the background that is myself".
- The objection of 3.24. If you say "I" as opposed to "you" and "he", you yourself make a distinction. How can there be unity?
- The answer. The "I" that excludes "you" "is a differentiated portion, a particular aspect of myself. It is not I, that is, not my ultimate form." The ultimate form is "an unlimited and unitary compact mass of awareness". The pronoun "I" in ordinary speech is "adventitious" because it is defined by contrast.
- Great Person (mahapurusa): here a grammatical pun. Just as the "I" is the "last person" of grammar, the Self that includes all three persons is the "Great Person". The term also carries its older Vedic and Upanisadic sense of the cosmic Person.
This is one of the most important clarifications in the text, and it prevents a serious misreading. The VAP's "I" is not the "I" that competes with "you". If you hear "I am the universe" as an ego inflated to cosmic size, you have heard the pronoun of 3.24, the one that excludes others. The pronoun of 3.22 includes "he", "you" and "I" equally. Practically: when you contemplate "I am all this", check whether the "I" you feel is defined against someone. If it is, it is the small pronoun.
Verse 3.25: Place and Time as Emanations
"Places such as the sky and the earth and times such as day and night are the emanations of my two Saktis that act to manifest and conceal the multitude of things."
Teaching notes.
- Place and time "embrace all other objects of knowledge". If they are emanations of my Saktis, everything is.
- "The manifestation of things is nothing but the conjunction of my Saktis. The concealment of things is nothing but the disjunction", as already said in 2.13.
- Place and time "are established through the opposition of existence and nonexistence". Here, a thing is present; there, it is absent. Now it is; then it was not. Opposition of being and non-being is the very structure of place and time. "They do not exist as external to myself."
Verses 3.26 and 3.27: The Five Saktis
3.26. "In concealment there is Smokey. In fulfillment there is Happiness. In manifestation there is Illuminator. In agitation there is Cosmic Pulsation. In pervasion there is Omnipresent. Those are [my] five Saktis."
3.27. "Smokey is manifest in the earth, Happiness in water, Illuminator in fire, Cosmic Pulsation in the air, and Omnipresent in the sky. The universe is pervaded by those [Saktis]."
Teaching notes.
- Vidyacakravartin: "Since Saktis are imperceptible, their natures are known from their effects." The five elements are the "principal effects" by which we know the five Saktis.
- "Cosmic Pulsation" translates parispanda. With the feminine ending, Lawrence notes, Virupaksa refers to a goddess of that name. All five are goddesses.
- The five cosmic acts. Vidyacakravartin makes the link explicit: "[I] who have the nature of consciousness eternally perform the five cosmic acts... Manifestation is creation. Agitation is preservation. Withdrawal and concealment have already been indicated by their respective designations. Pervasion is grace." (Lawrence's Table 3.1, covered in Chapter 3, sets out the full homology.)
| Sakti | Activity | Element | Cosmic act |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smokey | concealment | earth | concealment |
| Happiness | fulfilment | water | withdrawal |
| Illuminator | manifestation | fire | creation |
| Cosmic Pulsation | agitation | air | preservation |
| Omnipresent | pervasion | sky | grace |
The ordering in 3.26 begins with concealment and ends with grace. It mirrors the arc of the whole text: Indra begins concealed in his own pride, and ends pervaded by recognition. Notice also the elements: concealment is earth, the densest; grace is sky, the most open. Read the list as a gradient from heavy to open and it doubles as a description of how recognition feels from the inside.
Verse 3.28: Sakti Makes One Recognise
Vidyacakravartin introduces four verses (3.28 to 3.31): Saktis such as manifestation "accomplish this universe. However, through the mere touch of the Sakti of recognitive apprehension [this universe] again becomes a unitary ocean of awareness."
"My Sakti has the nature of recognitive apprehension. She makes [one recognize that] awareness, of which [She herself is] the integral nature, is the essential nature of the multitude of the objects of awareness. [She] makes [one recognize] that everything is my body."
Teaching notes.
- vimarsarupa is glossed as pratyavamarsarupini: Sakti is the power of reflective self-recognition.
- Awareness is "the substratum or background upon which [its own integral] nature [namely, Sakti, accomplishes] creation, destruction, and so on".
- She "demonstrates on the strength of one's own experience that awareness remains unsublated until the end, as the essential nature of this entire multitude of objects".
Why this verse matters. It closes the loop with Book 1. Book 1 argued "the universe is my body". Here the same statement is made, but now it is Sakti, the power of recognition, that makes it known. The argument has become a power.
Verses 3.29 to 3.31: The Fire of Recognition
3.29. "The flame of the fire that is my recognitive apprehension burns up everything that comprises the knower, knowledge and the object of knowledge; and leaves white ashes that have the nature of awareness."
3.30. "When [everything...] has been [only partially] consumed by a weak fire of my recognitive apprehension, there [remains] a delusional appearance of the multitude of individuals. That [appearance] appears like ashes that contain charcoal."
3.31. "Just as a forest, city, and so on, are entirely possessed by fire, so the universe [is entirely possessed] by me. [Thereby] having shaken off manifold diversity, [the universe] indeed assumes a unitary form."
Teaching notes on 3.29.
- The flame "pervades all the courses" and destroys "in that very instant" the particular aspects, knower and so on.
- Ashes as power. The ashes are vibhuti, and Lawrence explains the pun: vibhuti means both "power, Lordship" and the ashes with which Siva and his devotees smear their bodies. The ashes left by the fire of recognition are Lordship.
- They are "only existence" (sanmatra), consisting of "awareness in its universal nature". They are "white" because "unsullied by the afflictions" (the klesas of Yoga Sutra 2.2 to 2.3), and "a compact mass of inartificial bliss".
- Ritual background. Lawrence notes that burning and sprinkling are central to the tantric purification of the elements (bhutasuddhi) performed before worship. Abhinavagupta gives an internalised interpretation of burning the universe to ashes in consciousness (Tantraloka 4.116 to 117). Burning returns in 4.51.
Teaching notes on 3.30.
- The objection. Recognition may destroy differences among objects. But "some differentiation between those aspects that are individual knowers never ceases. Recognitive apprehension is an action. The agents [who perform] that [action] must be differentiated."
- The answer. That remainder is the sign of a weak fire. "There remains differentiation of the aspect 'I', [as might be expressed] 'I have recognitively apprehended.'" One has been possessed by recognition, "however, that [recognitive apprehension] does not shine fully".
- "Although objects of knowledge have been withdrawn, an aspect of objectivity still remains." Like ashes with subtle charcoal inside.
Teaching notes on 3.31. "Entirely possessed" means "recognitively apprehended without a remainder". "With the word 'indeed', he points out that this is established in everyone's experience [if they discern it properly]."
Verse 3.30 is a sharp piece of spiritual diagnosis. The last thing left after a partial awakening is the thought "I have realised". It looks like the fruit of practice, but the text calls it charcoal in the ash: unburnt individuality hiding inside the insight. Many traditions warn of this "spiritual ego". The VAP's image is unusually exact. The test is not whether objects have dissolved; it is whether the recogniser has dissolved too. If there is still someone who has recognised, the fire was weak.
The fire imagery can sound violent or nihilistic, as if everything is destroyed. The commentary is careful to say the opposite. What burns is the particularity of knower, knowing and known; what remains is "only existence", "awareness in its universal nature", "inartificial bliss". The forest and city in 3.31 are not annihilated; they are "possessed" by fire, as a log in a fire becomes fire. Nothing real is lost; the boundaries are.
Verse 3.32: The Five Ever-Inward Natures
Having described the result, Virupaksa now "meticulously describes that way toward the total possession [of the universe]".
"Knowledge is the internal essential nature of the object of knowledge. The knower is [the internal essential nature] of that [knowledge]. The unitary consciousness is [the internal essential nature] of that knowledge that has [been recognized in its internal] form as the knower. I am [the internal essential nature] of that [unitary consciousness]. There is no other."
The theory of two natures. "According to this system, entities have two natures, the external and the internal. The first of these is gross and exclusive. It is not the true [essential nature]. The second, internal [essential nature] is subtle and inclusive. It is the true [essential nature]."
The ladder, step by step.
| Step | Outer | Inner nature | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The pot (object) | The knowledge "pot" | The pot's external form "arises" from, "exists only as attached to", and "dissolves back into" that knowledge |
| 2 | The knowledge "pot" | The limited knower | Knowledge "has its origin, existence, and dissolution" in the knower |
| 3 | The knower (knowledge undifferentiated by objects) | Unitary consciousness, which is recognitive apprehension | Knowledge freed of objects "attains the state of a knower", whose innermost nature is consciousness |
| 4 | Consciousness (recognitive apprehension) | I, abstract awareness | "When that aspect of recognitive apprehension submerges... there remains only the I, having the nature of abstract awareness" (see 2.10) |
| 5 | I | There is no other | "I, who have reached the summit, am alone the reality" |
The psychological purport. "Immediately after an object contacts the senses, a conceptual construction arises, such as 'This is a pot.' Before that [construction] arises, a pot cannot be designated as a pot or as anything else. There is only knowledge." The ladder can be watched in the instant before naming.
The phrase "before that construction arises" gives you a practical doorway. In any perception there is a brief moment before the mind labels the thing. In that moment, the text says, there is only knowing, not yet "a pot". Train attention to notice that pre-verbal moment, and you are standing on step 2 of the ladder. From there, notice that the knowing depends on a knower (step 3), that the knower is a contraction of reflexive consciousness (step 4), and that consciousness rests in bare "I" (step 5).
Verse 3.33: Sequence and Non-sequence
This is the verse that Lawrence calls "the greatest interpretive difficulties in the text".
"I am without sequence. The knower, and so on, are sequential. Consciousness is both sequential and nonsequential. The knower is like myself. Knowledge is like Sakti. The object of knowledge is like the triad."
What the verse is doing. It introduces "a series of homologies between members of the fivefold hierarchy", aiming "ultimately to demonstrate the unity of all of them". The scheme pairs a lower member with a higher one:
| Lower | Is like | Higher | Shared feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knower | is like | I (awareness) | Both are inclusive, so non-sequential in relation to what they hold |
| Knowledge | is like | Sakti (consciousness) | Both are sequential in relation to what is below them, non-sequential in relation to me |
| Object | is like | The triad | The object, properly seen, includes knower-and-I, knowledge-and-Sakti, and other objects |
The levels of reading. Vidyacakravartin says "These are the modes of understanding that belong to one who is enlightened." Then he adds "Actually..." (vastutastu). Sthaneshwar Timalsina suggested to Lawrence that this word marks the mode of the completely enlightened (suprabuddha), above that of the enlightened (prabuddha). The stages are defined in 4.41 to 4.44.
The forest and the trees. "In [the cognition] 'This is a forest', the forest is inclusive in relation to the trees and the trees are inclusive in relation to the forest. There is no differentiation at all between them. Take the cognitions of mango and campaka. The mango and campaka are inclusive in relation to the forest... However, [the mango and campaka] are exclusive in relation to each other." So "As [ultimately] awareness, there is no difference between individual things and the aggregate of them. However, [individual things] are distinct in relation to each other."
The conclusion. "The unity of awareness is the ultimate reality. Differentiation appears only for the one who lacks recognitive apprehension."
Lawrence is unusually frank here. He finds it "perplexing" that consciousness is called the unitary inner nature of the epistemic triad in 3.32 and then "sequential in relation to the same" in 3.33. On one passage he offers four possibilities: perhaps consciousness, as an expression of awareness, is not really bifurcated; perhaps, "as Rastogi has suggested", because consciousness (called Sakti) is identified with knowledge it does not have two forms; "perhaps we are missing the point entirely, or perhaps the text is corrupt." He also notes several places where he chose Ganapati Sastri's reading over Kaviraj's. If 3.33 does not make sense at first reading, that is not your failure. The best scholarly reading admits the knot. Take the forest-and-trees example as the clearest key and leave the rest open.
Verse 3.34: Blue, Sight and Hearing
"Indeed, there is no blue in yellow. [However,] visual knowledge appears both in this [blue] and in those [other visual objects]. Nevertheless that [visual knowledge] does not [appear in] the auditory. [Again, however,] the knower is inclusive of both."
This is the worked example for 3.33:
| Level | Excludes | Includes | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object (blue) | yellow | nothing | sequential |
| Visual knowledge | auditory knowledge | blue, yellow and all colours | both sequential and non-sequential, "like Sakti" |
| Knower | nothing | visual, auditory and all knowledge | non-sequential, "like myself" |
3.34 turns the abstract 3.33 into something you can check in a few seconds. Look at a blue thing: blue shuts out yellow. Now notice seeing: seeing holds blue and yellow alike, but shuts out hearing. Now notice the one who sees and hears: it holds both. Each step up the ladder includes more and excludes less. The top is what includes everything and excludes nothing. That is the "I" of the VAP.
Verse 3.35: Contemplation Without Conceptual Construction
"One contemplates without conceptual construction that the knower is myself, that knowledge is Sakti, and that the object of knowledge is the triad. [These contemplations are expressed:] 'I am he', 'That is that', and 'That is the triad'."
Teaching notes.
- "Without conceptual construction" means "one does not provide occasion for the arising of conceptual constructions". The subliminal tendencies for differentiation cease, and "an inner conviction that is firm" remains.
- Each contemplation yields a specific proficiency: the elimination of the delusion of difference between knower and me; the recognition of the non-difference of Sakti and knowledge; and the eradication "together with its root cause" of the delusion that objects differ from awareness, from Sakti and from each other.
- No verb. "[Virupaksa] has not employed a verb in the three sentences." This discloses "that there is nothing but identity". Sanskrit allows nominal sentences without "is"; the VAP turns that grammatical fact into a teaching.
- Not something to establish. "This identity of theirs is not something to be established. Rather, the preceptor's intention is that, through the stated arguments, one recognizes that [identity] as eternally established."
Verse 3.36: The Limited Soul in the Flow of Series
"The knower assumes exclusive appearances and becomes sequential in the flow of alternate phenomenal series. As such, it is called the limited soul. From union with me, it can, like me, manifest nonsequentially."
Teaching notes.
- The flow: "Immediately after the phenomenal series of focusing attention upon, and the conceptual construction of blue, there flows the phenomenal series of the focusing attention upon, and the conceptual construction of yellow."
- The subject has cognitions such as "I am the manifestor of blue" and "I am the manifestor of yellow". "Therefore it is sequential. When it assumes sequence in this way, it is called the limited soul. In reality it is Siva." It is "limited" "only with regard to that limited duration".
- Union "is a merging having the character of the recognitive apprehension of reality".
- The decisive point. Some believe there are only two possibilities: either you are Siva (in contact with the whole universe) or you are an individual (in contact with particular objects), and so "the subliminal tendencies of a limited soul... will always remain". Virupaksa "has completely refuted that delusion". "The stated position is that one has the essential nature of Sankara even while in the condition of knowing [particular objects] such as yellow."
This answers a question that troubles many practitioners: if I return from meditation and start seeing particular things again, have I lost the realisation? Verse 3.36 says no. Sequence belongs to the flow of objects, not to the knower. You can be non-sequential "even while in the state of knowing... yellow". The goal is not a permanent blank, but recognition that persists through ordinary seeing. Lawrence's word "intercourse" with the universe (a literal rendering of the Sanskrit) underlines that the enlightened person is not withdrawn from the world but fully engaged with it.
Verse 3.37: Foam, Wave and Ocean
"Objects of knowledge, such as the [fleshly] body and [other external] objects, enter knowledge. [Knowledge] is [thereby] penetrated by their sequence. By way of knowledge, the [object of knowledge] dissolves in the knower and takes on its character."
Teaching notes.
- "Knowledge is itself without form. Its particularity comes only from the object." (A principle the commentary quotes.)
- "When there is no longer interest in cognizing, the operations of the sense organs cease. Then [the object] is realized to have the nature of knowledge, [as might be expressed] 'The knowledge of yellow has occurred to me.'"
- Foam, wave, ocean. "This is just like when foam dissolves in a wave. By way of the dissolution of the wave, [the foam dissolves] in the ocean."
- The core definitions. "Phenomenal multiplicity is nothing but the bursting forth of awareness." "Identity with Siva is nothing but the recognitive apprehension of this fact. Enlightenment is strong recognitive apprehension. Bondage is the lack of recognitive apprehension. This is the essence of the teaching."
Vidyacakravartin calls three short sentences "the essence of the teaching". They are worth memorising: phenomena are the bursting forth of awareness; identity with Siva is recognising this; enlightenment is strong recognition, bondage is its lack. Nothing about special states, visions or powers. The entire Book on Powers that follows must be read through these three sentences.
Verses 3.38 and 3.39: Memory, Experience, Recognition
3.38. "I, who am free, manifest the universe as 'That', 'This', and 'This is that' [respectively] due to the force of memory, direct experience, and recognitive synthesis. And these are differentiated from each other through conceptual exclusion."
3.39. "The wise know: Memory is the manifestation of a [past] direct experience [expressed] 'That.' [Direct experience is the manifestation] of an object. Recognitive synthesis [is the manifestation] of the two together. This triad [of manifestations] would not be possible without myself, who am unitary and devoid of sequence."
Teaching notes.
- "And." "The word 'And' indicates that they are also undifferentiated from each other. Such is the majesty of the one who is free."
- Closures. "Exclusion of one another is reciprocal closure... Recognitive apprehension is solely of the nature of devouring [those closures]." When recognition weakens, "That", "This" and "This is that" arise; when it is brought about, they dissolve.
- The argument of 3.39 is the classic Pratyabhijna argument from memory and recognition, which Utpaladeva develops at length. Memory refers back to a past experience; recognition joins a present experience with a past one ("This is that Devadatta"). Neither could occur unless a single awareness "threads through all cognitions".
- The image: without that awareness, the triad "would be like a painting without a background surface".
Verse 3.39 compresses the Pratyabhijna's most famous argument. Every act of recognition, "this is the person I met last year", requires that something links last year to now. Sequential moments cannot link themselves; each is gone when the next comes. What links them must be outside the sequence. The text calls that link "myself, who am unitary and devoid of sequence". The name Pratyabhijna, "recognition", comes from this very act: the school's whole argument is that you can recognise anything only because you are the non-sequential awareness that recognition requires.
Verse 3.40: The River in the Ocean
"Having shined as if differentiated, the collection of objects reaches its sunset in me, its manifestation having stopped. As one with my illumination, it subsists [within me] like a river [subsists after merging] within the ocean."
"When the knowledge 'this blue' has ceased, the blue has reached its sunset." Note the inversion of 3.22: I am "unsetting awareness"; it is the objects that set, and they set in me.
The close of Book 3. "Thus ends the third book... which is about recognitive apprehension."
Book 3 Summary Table
| Verse | Doubt or error removed | Teaching | Image |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.22 | Locus and located are two | I am in lights and darknesses; they are in me | unsetting sun |
| 3.23 to 3.24 | Persons are many | He, you, I are aspects of the Great Person; the "I" that excludes "you" is adventitious | grammatical persons |
| 3.25 | Place and time are outside | They are emanations of manifesting and concealing Saktis | sky, earth, day, night |
| 3.26 to 3.27 | Powers are many | Five Saktis, five elements, five cosmic acts | Smokey to Omnipresent |
| 3.28 | Sakti as recognition makes everything my body | ||
| 3.29 to 3.31 | Knowers remain distinct | Recognition burns all; residual "I have realised" is charcoal | fire, ashes, forest |
| 3.32 | Object, knowledge, knower, consciousness, I | the pot before naming | |
| 3.33 to 3.34 | The levels differ | Homologies of inclusion and exclusion | forest and trees; blue, sight, hearing |
| 3.35 | Contemplate without concepts: "I am he" | sentences with no verb | |
| 3.36 | Particular knowing binds forever | One is Sankara even while seeing yellow | flow of series |
| 3.37 | Enlightenment is strong recognition; bondage its lack | foam, wave, ocean | |
| 3.38 to 3.39 | Memory and experience are many | They need a non-sequential synthesiser | painting and background |
| 3.40 | Objects set in me | river and ocean |
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| asambhavana / viparitabhavana | Doubt as to possibility / misunderstanding |
| mahapurusa | The Great Person |
| parispanda | Cosmic pulsation, here a goddess |
| vibhuti | Power, and sacred ash |
| sanmatra | Only existence |
| klesa | Affliction (Yoga Sutra) |
| bhutasuddhi | Ritual purification of the elements |
| krama / akrama | Sequence / non-sequence |
| prabuddha / suprabuddha | Enlightened / completely enlightened |
| nirvikalpa | Without conceptual construction |
| smrti, anubhava, pratyabhijna | Memory, direct experience, recognition |
Reflection and Practice
- Before naming. Ten times today, catch the instant before a thing is named. Rest there, just for a breath.
- The ladder of inclusion. Use 3.34: object, sense, knower. Feel each widening.
- The charcoal test. After a good meditation, ask: is there someone who had it? Notice without fighting.
- No verb. Sit with "I he", "that that", in the verbless Sanskrit way. Let identity be stated, not argued.
- Question. Lawrence admits 3.33 may be corrupt. How should a practitioner treat an obscure verse in a sacred text: as a puzzle to solve, a koan to sit with, or a passage to set aside?
The Book on Powers (Verses 4.41 to 4.53)
"Now begins the fourth book, on powers." It falls into three parts. First, four verses (4.41 to 4.44) analyse the five types of subject, from the unenlightened to the completely enlightened. Second, eight verses (4.45 to 4.52) describe the powers: lower proficiencies obtained by identifying the I with sun, moon, deities, elements and tattvas, an incidental verse on the sages (4.50), and the two supreme proficiencies (4.51 to 4.52). Third, the conclusion (4.53): Indra is enlightened.
The Five Types of Subject
Vidyacakravartin's list, with the verses that describe each:
| Subject | Verse | How the universe appears | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unenlightened (bhavin, "having worldly existence") | 4.41 to 4.42 | As external, due to Maya | Bound creature |
| Almost enlightened (with "a foot in worldly existence") | 4.41 | Both internal and external, through Pure Wisdom | Wisdom subjects; lower samadhi |
| Enlightened ("feet in both") | 4.43 | "This is I" | State of Isvara |
| Almost completely enlightened | 4.44 | Submerged in the inner state | State of Sadasiva |
| Completely enlightened ("complete") | 4.44 | Both submerged in and emerged from me | Through the transmental |
Verse 4.41: Worldly Existence and a Foot in It
"The collection of cosmic realms is established within myself. However, for those who have worldly existence, it appears as if external to me due to Maya. Then, for those who have [only] a foot in worldly existence, it can, through Wisdom, be [experienced as both] internal and external."
Teaching notes.
- The cosmic realms run "beginning with the unsupported and ending with the fire of time". Kalagni, the "fire of time", refers here to this earth; in subtle physiology it is located at the big toe of the right foot.
- Worldly existence "is the experience of differentiation". Those who have it are "those who hold doctrines such as Samkhya". Maya "is the experience of the undifferentiated reality as if it were differentiated".
- A foot in it. "Those who do not have worldly existence, but who still have a foot in it, in the form of subliminal tendencies." They are Wisdom Subjects (vidyapramatr), "who have entered the lower level of samadhi with objective discernment" (samprajnata samadhi, Yoga Sutra 1.17). The universe appears internally "in forms such as intentionality" and also externally.
- Pure Wisdom (suddhavidya), Lawrence explains, "is the knowledge that one is the emanator and controller of the universe", with the typical expression "I am this".
Verse 4.42: Who Should Be Taught
"[The first type] believes that the individual subject is sentient, and that the object of knowledge is insentient and other. Deluded by Maya, he is a limited individual who has worldly existence. He should be enlightened by the wise."
Teaching notes.
- "Maya is the experience of something presumed to be an object as insentient and other." One deluded by it "has not recognized his essential nature" and is "a bound creature".
- "He should be instructed by gurus who have recognized their essential nature."
- Lawrence's link to the frame. "It is important to understand the connection between this discussion and the original problem of the deluded egoistic identity (abhimana) of Indra and all unenlightened individuals." Indra is exactly this bound creature.
The exclusion clause. The commentary then says something harsh: "Those such as Tarkikas and Mimamsakas distinguish consciousness from objects of consciousness. They have not recognized their essential nature as consciousness. It has been taught that they are not eligible for instruction in the noble philosophy. According to the Sruti, it is a sin to disclose the Doctrine of Consciousness to them... 'The one who explains without justification will obtain an untimely death.' Therefore the meaning of the Doctrine of Consciousness should be hidden."
This passage sits awkwardly with the rest. The verse says the deluded "should be enlightened by the wise"; the commentary then says certain deluded people, the logicians (Tarkikas, likely Naiyayikas) and the Mimamsakas, must not be taught, on pain of death. Lawrence observes dryly: "Evidently, some stubborn philosophers fall outside the purview of the program of universal redemption discussed in the Introduction." He also notes the Sanskrit is "obscure" and "may be corrupt", and that he cannot identify the scriptural quotation. Two readings are possible. A charitable one: the restriction is about eligibility, since a teaching heard by someone committed to debate tends to become a mere position to attack. A critical one: this is ordinary sectarian boundary-making, dressed as a divine command. Both can be true. Note that the Pratyabhijna's own founders, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, argued at length with the logicians in public philosophical works.
Verse 4.43: "This Is I"
"This-ness is insentience. I-hood is sentience. The one who has feet in both knows them in the apposition 'This is I'."
Teaching notes.
- "Feet in both" means subliminal tendencies of both worldly existence and its transcendence. Such a person "abides in the conditions of both diversity and nondiversity".
- He "submerges the aspect of their differentiation through [contemplatively] superimposing nondifferentiation". "He perceives the two like his own body."
- "This is the state of Isvara." In the thirty-six tattvas, the Isvara principle has the experience "this is I", with the emphasis on "this".
Verse 4.44: Abstract Knowledge and the Transmental
"For those who have transcended worldly existence through abstract knowledge, [the object of knowledge] shines as submerged in the inner state. However, through the transmental, [the object shines as] both submerged in, and emerged from me, who am complete."
Teaching notes.
- Abstract knowledge (kevala drk, kaivalya) has a background in the Samkhya and Yoga ideal of the self's "isolation" from matter. Lawrence notes the VAP's state is "not exactly one of isolation": it is "an experience of only transcendence, whereas the highest realization is of the monistic Self pervading both transcendence and immanence."
- For these subjects, the object "is experienced to be unmanifest". "This is the state of Sadasiva, in which this-ness is covered by I-hood and is indistinct."
- The completely enlightened. The object "is experienced in two ways, as both unmanifest and manifest. The waves in the ocean are both unmanifest and manifest, but in all conditions there is only the ocean."
- The transmental (unmana) "is nothing but abiding in one's essential nature". A scriptural line, possibly from the Yogavasistha: "The transmental should be known as that [condition] in which the mind is not known." For Gopinath Kaviraj, unmana represents the highest stage of jivanmukti.
- Completeness (purnatva). Lawrence's note: completeness is "a basic epistemological, metaphysical and psychological concept in Pratyabhijna thought". It overlaps with absolute egoity and the subsumption of difference and sequence. He cites Navjivan Rastogi's "Theory of Error According to Abhinavagupta" (Journal of Indian Philosophy, 1986) on the epistemology of rectifying incomplete knowledge.
Verse 4.44 places a famous spiritual goal one rung below the top. The "almost completely enlightened" know only transcendence: the world sinks into the inner state and vanishes. This is close to classical Samkhya-Yoga kaivalya and to many descriptions of nirvikalpa absorption. The VAP honours it and then says: higher still is to see the world both submerged and emerged, at once. The complete person does not need the world to vanish. The waves can rise, because it is always the ocean. This is the Kashmiri Saiva signature, and it is why the tradition is often described as world-affirming.
Verse 4.45: Identifying With the Forces of Nature
Vidyacakravartin introduces eight verses: "That yogin who contemplates this realizes, through the transmental, the unwavering proficiency that is completeness... Through his mere intention, he displays whatever powers he desires."
"The yogin who firmly contemplates as being his Self sun, moon, lightning, thunderbolt, cloud, submarine fire, ocean, mountain, cave, and forest accomplishes their karmas."
Teaching notes.
- "Their karmas", for instance the sun's illumining of the world, "are established eternally". The yogin, "through firmness of recognition", conducts them to completion.
- The deeper purport. "[The yogin] himself exists in the forms of entities such as the sun. Due to weakness of recognitive apprehension, he is as if differentiated. Through strong recognitive apprehension, the subliminal tendencies for the delusion of differentiation are removed."
- The direction of travel. "Those who desire all-embracing proficiency" bring the contemplation of identity with the sun and other things "to its completion, that is, the contemplation of their identity with the universe."
- The list. It is a catalogue of the great powers of the visible world. The submarine fire (vadavagni) is the mythic mare-headed fire under the ocean that will consume the world at the end of time.
Verse 4.46: Identifying With a Deity
"A deity accomplishes a [particular] purpose. One who has that purpose firmly concentrates his I-concept on that [deity]. His purpose is instantly realized."
Teaching notes.
- "A deity", "according to common usage", refers to such as Heramba (Ganesa), Bharati (Sarasvati), Hari (Visnu), Hara (Siva). Each "produces an effect such as the destruction of obstacles, motivation for speech, preservation, destruction".
- The yogin "unwaveringly recognitively synthesizes his identity [with that deity]".
- Influence. Lawrence notes that VAP 4.46 is quoted by Mahesvarananda in the Maharthamanjari (the Krama-Mahartha text of the Cola country).
This verse restates, in the language of recognition, a principle found across Hindu tantric practice: to worship a deity, become the deity (nadevo devam arcayet, "one who is not a god should not worship a god"). The VAP's twist is that the identification is not with an external god you visualise but an act of moving the "I-concept" onto the deity's function. Ganesa removes obstacles: become the remover. Sarasvati moves speech: become the mover. The deity is a function of your own Sakti.
Verses 4.47 to 4.49: Elements and Tattvas
4.47. "The [five] elements have as their special characteristics [the actions of] bearing, accumulating, cooking, arranging, and being unobstructed. [Those elements] are possessed by the I-hood of the yogin. They thus bring about the action that he desires."
| Element | Characteristic |
|---|---|
| Earth | bearing |
| Water | accumulating |
| Fire | cooking |
| Air | arranging, "the placing together of parts" |
| Space | being unobstructed, "expansion without restraint" |
4.48. "Likewise, [the yogin] concentrates Sakti, which is consciousness, on the sense fields, the organs of action and knowledge, the mind, the I-am-ness, the intelligence, the unmanifest [matter], and the person. He thus comes to possess their karmas."
4.49. "[The yogin] similarly makes his I-hood on attachment, causal necessity, time, [limited] knowledge, limited agency, the Cave, Sarasvati, Isa, Sadasiva, Sakti, and [the emanated, lower] Siva."
Teaching notes.
- Verses 4.47 to 4.49 climb the tattvas: the five gross elements, the subtle elements and senses, the inner organ, the unmanifest prakrti and purusa (4.48); then the five kancukas or "coverings" (attachment, necessity, time, limited knowledge, limited agency), Maya ("the Cave"), Pure Wisdom ("Sarasvati"), Isvara, Sadasiva, Sakti, and Siva (4.49).
- So this section is a thirty-six-tattva ascent of identification.
- In 4.48, Lawrence notes, Sakti is presented as an equivalent to consciousness.
Verse 4.50: The Incidental Verse
"Indeed, in the writings of the sages Suka, Vamadeva, Krsna, Dadhici, and Vainya, identity with the universe is explained to be born of the yoga of identification with the elements."
Teaching notes.
- Vidyacakravartin calls this "incidental", which is why he does not count it among the fifty.
- "In the writings of the sages" means "in texts such as traditional histories" (itihasa), that is, the epic literature.
- The ranking of proficiencies. "Among the proficiencies that have been explained, those that are not supreme are the [series of] proficiencies ending with [that resulting from identification with the] 'cave'. The other five that are supreme begin with... 'Sarasvati'." So: everything up to and including Maya is lower; Pure Wisdom, Isvara, Sadasiva, Sakti and Siva are supreme.
Verse 4.51: Burning, Sprinkling, Becoming the Guru
Vidyacakravartin: "With two verses [Virupaksa] explains the two proficiencies that are preeminent among all proficiencies."
"In burning the knots of [one's] bonds, strongly remember Sakti as blazing with crores of the fires of time. In satiation, [strongly remember Sakti] as the embodiment of the shower of the stream of nectar. Become [thereby] the guru of the universe."
Teaching notes.
- Burning. Sakti blazes "as a net of unlimited brilliance that is capable of burning up all the courses, like the crores of the fires of time aroused in the cosmic dissolution". Purification takes "the form of the burning of the bonds that are the six courses".
- Sprinkling. "Purification may take the form of sprinkling. In that, strongly remember [Sakti] as consisting of the unbroken descent of thousands of oceans of nectar."
- Making whole (sakalikarana). "By [the references to] burning and sprinkling, there is also implied the practice of making whole." Lawrence explains this "multivalent technical term" for "a process of divinization of the body related to bhutasuddhi/nyasa"; other possible meanings include displaying the limbs of the deity and the guru's imposition of mantras on the body.
- The hymn. Vidyacakravartin quotes "the excellent preceptor", in fact the Ambastava (a hymn in the Devi Pancastavi collection), addressed to the Goddess as "O Mother": "In the purification of the six courses your ladyship has the splendor of crores of the fires of time. In the sprinklings [you are] a shower of the stream of nectar. In making whole, [you are] dark, bending over from breasts that are firm masses. Those who meditate on you in this way become the gurus of the world."
- "Making whole is defined as meditation on the universe as consisting of crores of desires, and as the embodiment of one's chosen deity."
- Why the universe. "The purification is performed not only of the quantity of the six courses contracted as one's [fleshly] body, but rather of the entirety. For... every preceptor has the universe as his body. Indeed, preceptor-hood does not consist in having a body that is a particular body."
- The internal reading. Realising "the identity of the universe with awareness, and thus abid[ing] in one's essential nature... is the burning of all the courses. Sprinkling is the relishing (camatkara) of consciousness."
- Yogisvara is quoted: "Recognition is a unitary compact mass of recognitive apprehension. From the firmness [of that recognition] of awareness, there is making whole. [That making whole] is the revelation of supreme bliss."
Verse 4.51 takes the three standard steps of tantric ritual purification, which a priest performs on his own body before worship, burning the impure elements, sprinkling the body with nectar, and installing the deity's limbs, and reads them at cosmic scale. The guru purifies not his own small body but the universe as body. This is why the guru role is the highest power: on the VAP's logic, only one whose body is the universe can purify the universe, and only such a one can free others. Notice too the shift into the feminine: "O Mother". The final powers are given in the voice of devotion to the Goddess, a reminder that the Pratyabhijna's Sakti is not an abstract force but a deity.
Verse 4.52: Complete Knowledge and the Five Acts
"Destroy incomplete knowledge by firmness of possession of complete knowledge. According to your intention, create, preserve, withdraw, conceal, and illumine the worlds. This is the essence, the crux of all your lessons."
Teaching notes.
- "There are only two types of knowledge: incomplete and complete." Complete knowledge "is that which is authentic". Incomplete knowledge "is inauthentic because it is contingent".
- Destroy it "every moment": "eradicate [incomplete knowledge] every moment [that it may arise] through the firmness of recognitive synthesis".
- Conceptual constructions transformed. "Conceptual constructions are the Saktis that manifest entities. They are believed to conceal the respective essential natures [of entities]. However, for one who persists in this way, those [conceptual constructions] are recognized as creating, [preserving, withdrawing, concealing and illumining] the universe. They reveal one's Supreme Lordship."
- "Thus, eternally abide in your essential nature. This is the sum of all the teachings."
The verdict on powers. Vidyacakravartin now says plainly what Book 4 has been doing: "With the verses beginning with '... accomplishes their karmas' [4.45], [Virupaksa] displays indifference toward the powers, starting with those of 'sun, moon' and ending with that of '[the emanated, lower] Siva'. Then he reveals his preference" for the two highest powers. "Therefore, for one who has in this way recognized his essential nature, all other proficiencies are semblances. One should not devote oneself [to realizing] them."
Here the Book on Powers turns on itself. Twelve verses list powers, from moving the sun to becoming Sadasiva, and the commentator then calls all of them "semblances" and tells you not to seek them. What survives is two things: being the guru of the universe (freeing others) and destroying incomplete knowledge (which turns your very thoughts into Siva's five acts). The second point is subtle and practical. You do not stop thinking. Each thought, recognised as Sakti, becomes an act of creation or withdrawal by the Lord. The ordinary flow of mental life is reclassified as divine activity.
Verse 4.53: Indra Sees Himself as Siva
"Thus, having been enlightened, that Indra abandoned the impurity of his [presumed] sovereignty over the gods. Having possessed the Sakti principle, he perceived his own Self as Siva."
The commentator's recapitulation of the four books:
- The first book, "through arguments", causes entities presumed to be outside the body "to be recognized as the body".
- The second "purifies" that teaching: the universe is "a compact mass of awareness", removing the difference between possessor and possessed.
- The third "teaches the diverse modes of recognitively apprehending that one is the Self of the universe", so there may be no doubt or misunderstanding.
- The fourth "explains the display of the proficiencies. Two great proficiencies are being the guru of the universe and being Siva. The unfaltering great proficiency is the recognition that both of those are eternally established."
Indra's change. He "forsook the condition of a bound creature, defined by the contraction of one's supreme essential nature", which was reflected in his presumption "I am the king of heaven".
Guru and disciple. "Siva, who is the glorious and venerable preceptor, Lord Virupaksa, stood before him... Having thus been enlightened, [Indra] saw himself as him. This is because it is impossible that [Indra] could be other than Siva, in the sense of being separate from his guru. There is not the slightest difference of degree between the knowledge of the enlightened and the enlightener."
The final sentence of the commentary: "I, perceptibly, am none other than the Supreme Lord, who is the guru of this universe." Lawrence compares the Akulaviratantra on sahaja: "He himself is the goddess, himself the God, himself the disciple, himself the preceptor; he is at once the meditation, the meditator and the divinity."
The colophon. "This light commentary was composed by the glorious Vidyacakravartin, and placed on the touchstone named the intelligence of Govindacandra." Vidyacakravartin calls it "lucid", for "those desiring easily to obtain the recognition of their essential nature".
Notice what Indra gives up. Not his kingdom and not his power. He gives up "the impurity of his presumed sovereignty", the belief "I am the king of heaven". The king of heaven is a limited title held against others; it is the "I" of 3.24 that excludes "you". In its place he receives an identity with no rivals, Siva. The story's lesson about pride is not that Indra was too proud, but that his pride was too small: he claimed one throne when the universe was his body.
Book 4 Summary Table
| Verse | Topic | Key line |
|---|---|---|
| 4.41 | Worldly and nearly free subjects | "due to Maya"; "through Wisdom" |
| 4.42 | The bound creature should be taught | "He should be enlightened by the wise" (but not the logicians) |
| 4.43 | The enlightened | "This is I" (Isvara) |
| 4.44 | Almost complete, complete | Submerged; submerged and emerged (Sadasiva; the transmental) |
| 4.45 | Identity with forces of nature | "accomplishes their karmas" |
| 4.46 | Identity with a deity | "His purpose is instantly realized" |
| 4.47 | Identity with the elements | bearing, accumulating, cooking, arranging, unobstructed |
| 4.48 to 4.49 | Identity with the tattvas up to Siva | the climb through the thirty-six |
| 4.50 | Sages and elemental yoga (incidental) | lower and supreme proficiencies |
| 4.51 | First supreme proficiency | "Become the guru of the universe" |
| 4.52 | Second supreme proficiency | "Destroy incomplete knowledge"; all else is semblance |
| 4.53 | Conclusion | Indra "perceived his own Self as Siva" |
Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| bhavin | One who has worldly existence |
| vidyapramatr | Wisdom subject |
| suddhavidya | Pure Wisdom, "I am this" |
| samprajnata samadhi | Absorption with an object |
| kaivalya, kevala drk | Isolation, abstract seeing |
| unmana | The transmental |
| purnatva | Completeness |
| kalagni | Fire of time |
| vadavagni | Submarine fire |
| kancuka | The five coverings of limited experience |
| sakalikarana | Making whole, divinising the body |
| camatkara | Relish, aesthetic wonder of consciousness |
| jagadguru | Guru of the universe |
Reflection and Practice
- Locate yourself. Read the five types of subject. Do not choose the highest. Which one honestly describes most of your day? Which describes your best meditation?
- Identification. Choose one natural power: the sun's warmth, the ocean's depth. Sit with "I am this, and this is my action". Notice what it does to your sense of size.
- Burning and sprinkling. Use 4.51 as a short practice: imagine the whole world burnt in a blaze of clear light, then sprinkled with cool nectar. Then rest in what remains.
- Incomplete knowledge. Each time you catch a thought that makes you small ("I am only this"), recognise it as Sakti creating, and let it be withdrawn. This is 4.52 in everyday form.
- Question. The text ends by calling all powers but two "semblances". Why then spend twelve verses on them? Is it a concession to readers who want power, a trap for them, or a genuine teaching?
Master Glossary
This glossary gathers the terms used across the guide. It follows Lawrence's own glossary where he gives one, and adds terms from the commentary. Transliteration is without diacritics.
Persons, Texts and Schools
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Virupaksa | "The Odd-Eyed One"; a name of Siva, who in the frame story takes a body in sport and teaches Indra |
| Virupaksapancasika (VAP) | "Fifty Verses of Virupaksa"; 53 verses in four books, probably Kashmiri, eleventh to twelfth century |
| Vivrti (VAPV) | Vidyacakravartin's "light commentary" on the VAP |
| Vidyacakravartin | The commentator, probably South Indian; author also of a commentary on Ruyyaka's Alamkarasarvasva |
| Indra | Vedic king of the gods; in the VAP the proud student |
| Utpaladeva | Founder of the Pratyabhijna, author of the Isvarapratyabhijnakarika (IPK) and Ajadapramatrsiddhi |
| Abhinavagupta | The great systematiser; author of the Tantraloka and commentaries on Utpaladeva |
| Somananda | Utpaladeva's teacher; author of the Sivadrsti |
| Bhartrhari | Grammarian-philosopher whose theory of language the Saivas adapted |
| Pratyabhijna | "Recognition"; the philosophical school of monistic Saivism |
| Trika | The tantric tradition of the three goddesses, from which the Pratyabhijna grew |
| Krama | Tantric tradition of contemplating sequences of Saktis in the phases of cognition |
| Kaula | Tantric movement known for its esoteric and sexual rites |
| Spanda | Tradition stressing Sakti as creative pulsation |
| Srividya | South Indian goddess tradition that quotes the VAP |
| Tarkika, Mimamsaka | Logicians; Vedic ritual exegetes; excluded from instruction in 4.42 |
| Samkhya | Dualist school whose followers exemplify "worldly existence" in 4.41 |
Consciousness and the Self
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| prakasa | Awareness, light; the revealing aspect of consciousness |
| vimarsa, pratyavamarsa | Recognitive apprehension; the reflexive, self-knowing aspect |
| citi, cit, samvid | Consciousness |
| aham, ahamta | I; I-hood |
| purnahamta | Complete or perfect I-hood |
| asmita | I-am-ness; an affliction in the Yoga Sutra, the root of power in the VAP |
| abhimana | Presumed, egoistic identification |
| mahapurusa | The Great Person who includes he, you and I |
| atman | The highest Self, identified with Siva |
| svatantrya, svatantrata | Agential self-determination, freedom |
| kartrta | Agency |
| aisvarya | Lordship |
| purna, purnatva | Complete; completeness |
| apurna | Incomplete, contingent knowledge |
| camatkara | Relish, wonder of consciousness |
| svarasodita | Risen from its own ecstasy (IPK 1.5.13) |
Power and the Cosmos
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sakti | Power; the goddess; Siva's integral consort |
| saktiman | Possessor of Sakti, Siva |
| saktyaviskarana | Revealing of Sakti; the Pratyabhijna's basic method |
| saktipata | Gracious descent of Sakti |
| sakticakra | Wheel of Saktis |
| Dhumavati | Smokey; Sakti of concealment, manifest in earth |
| Hlada | Happiness; Sakti of fulfilment, manifest in water |
| Bhasvati | Illuminator; Sakti of manifestation, manifest in fire |
| Parispanda | Cosmic Pulsation; Sakti of agitation, manifest in air |
| Vibhvi (Omnipresent) | Sakti of pervasion, manifest in sky |
| Khecari, Gocari | Sakti classes moving in the sky and in the sense fields |
| pancakrtya | The five cosmic acts: creation, preservation, withdrawal, concealment, grace |
| bindu | Germinal essence; I-hood as Supreme Speech; the dot of the final m |
| brahmanda | The world-egg |
| adhvan | Course; the sixfold course of emanation |
| varna, mantra, pada | Phoneme, mantra, word: the speech side of the courses |
| kala, tattva, bhuvana | Cosmic segment, cosmic principle, cosmic realm: the object side |
| suddha, misra, asuddha adhvan | Pure, mixed and impure courses |
| tattva | Cosmic principle; there are thirty-six |
| sivatattva | The emanated, lower Siva, top of the tattvas |
| Paramasiva | Supreme Siva |
| Sadasiva, Isvara | Tattvas three and four; states of "I am this" and "This is I" |
| suddhavidya, sadvidya | Pure Wisdom; "I am this"; called Sarasvati in 4.49 |
| Maya, guha | Delusive power; "the Cave" |
| kancuka | The five coverings: limited agency, knowledge, attachment, necessity, time |
| prakrti, purusa | Matter (the unmanifest) and person |
| kalagni | Fire of time; here the earth; in the body, the right big toe |
| vadavagni | Submarine fire |
| nimesa, unmesa | Siva's eye-closing and eye-opening; dissolution and manifestation |
Knowledge and Speech
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| pramatr, jnatr | Knower |
| pramana, jnana | Means of knowledge, knowledge |
| prameya, jneya | Object of knowledge |
| drsya, drsyatva | The perceptible; perceptibility |
| samanya, visesa | Universal, particular |
| anuvrtta, anuvrtti | Inclusive, inclusiveness |
| vyavrtta, vyavrtti | Exclusive, exclusiveness |
| apoha | Conceptual exclusion |
| krama, akrama | Sequence, non-sequence |
| santana | Phenomenal series |
| vikalpa, nirvikalpa | Conceptual construction; free of it |
| smrti, anubhava, pratyabhijna | Memory, experience, recognition |
| anusamdhana, pratisamdhana | Recognitive synthesis |
| paravak, pasyanti, madhyama, vaikhari | Supreme, Seeing, Intermediate, Gross speech |
| pratyahara | Paninian abbreviation by first and last, as in a to ha |
| purusa (grammar) | Grammatical person: first (he), middle (you), last (I) |
| pararthanumana | Inference for others, the five-part Nyaya syllogism |
| pratijna, hetu, drstanta, upanaya, nigamana | Thesis, reason, example, application, conclusion |
| anvaya, vyatireka | Positive and negative concomitance |
| mahavakya | Great Upanisadic sentence: "I am brahman", "You are that" |
| asambhavana, viparitabhavana | Doubt of possibility; misunderstanding |
Practice and Attainment
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| bhavana | Contemplation |
| siddhi | Proficiency, power; innate, only awakened |
| samavesa, avesa | Immersion, possession |
| diksa, sabdi diksa | Initiation, verbal initiation |
| adhikara | Eligibility |
| lila | Play |
| nirodha | Mental arrest |
| samprajnata, asamprajnata samadhi | Absorption with and without an object |
| kaivalya, kevala drk | Isolation; abstract, transcendence-only seeing |
| unmana | The transmental, abiding in one's nature |
| bhava, bhavin | Worldly existence; one who has it |
| vidyapramatr | Wisdom subject |
| prabuddha, suprabuddha | Enlightened, completely enlightened |
| jivanmukta, jivanmrta | Liberated while living; dead while living |
| bhutasuddhi | Purification of the elements |
| nyasa | Placing mantras on the body |
| sakalikarana | Making whole, divinising the body |
| vibhuti | Power, and sacred ash |
| klesa | Affliction |
| samskara | Subliminal tendency; also purification |
| jagadguru | Guru of the universe |
| dasya | Servitude, read by the Pratyabhijna as identity with Siva |
Master Synthesis
The Book in Ten Sentences
- The VAP is a short, late Pratyabhijna manual that turns the school's arguments into contemplations, framed by a myth of Indra's pride.
- Its diagnosis is unusual: Indra's error was not that he felt like the Lord but that he felt it about too small a body.
- Book 1 argues that the universe is one's body, because it is perceptible and because I-am-ness already spills beyond the skin.
- Book 2 argues that the universe is awareness: objects are waves of Sakti on the ocean of consciousness, and that consciousness is reflexive I-hood, Supreme Speech.
- Book 3 removes doubt and misunderstanding by working through inclusion and exclusion: object, knowledge, knower, consciousness and I form a ladder in which each higher term includes more and excludes less.
- Its central formula is "Enlightenment is strong recognitive apprehension. Bondage is the lack of recognitive apprehension."
- Book 4 sorts subjects into five grades and lists the powers one gains by identifying the I with forces of nature, deities, elements and tattvas.
- It then calls all those powers "semblances" and keeps only two: being the guru of the universe and destroying incomplete knowledge so as to perform Siva's five acts.
- Lawrence's Introduction places this in its history, its mythic genealogy and a comparison with Western ideas of self-love and narcissism, arguing that the Saiva perfect I resembles Kohut's cosmic narcissism and can ground an ethic.
- The reader is meant to finish as Indra does: having "abandoned the impurity of his presumed sovereignty" and "perceived his own Self as Siva".
The Four Movements as One Arc
| Movement | Gap closed | Main tool | Practical form |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book 1 | Me / the world | Perceptibility; I-am-ness | Widen the sense of body |
| Book 2 | The body / its owner | Waves and ocean; Supreme Speech | See objects as waves of awareness |
| Book 3 | Any remaining gap | Inclusion and exclusion; the fire | Climb from object to I; burn the residue |
| Book 4 | Recognition / action | Identification; purification | Act as Siva: teach, and turn thought into the five acts |
Three Ideas to Keep
1. The ego is to be completed, not destroyed. Most Indian traditions treat I-am-ness (asmita, ahamkara) as the root affliction. The Pratyabhijna, and the VAP most explicitly, treat it as the human trace of Siva's self-recognition. The problem is contraction, not the I itself. The test, from 3.24, is whether the I you feel excludes "you". If it does, it is the small pronoun. The perfect I includes he, you and I.
2. Recognition, not new experience. "Do you not see that Sun?" (2.19). Awareness is already present in every perception; what is missing is recognition. This is why the text uses arguments: arguments do not produce a new state; they point at what is already there until it is noticed. Lawrence's term for this is the Pratyabhijna's rhetoric of self-luminosity.
3. The world returns. The highest grade in 4.44 sees the object "both submerged in, and emerged from me". The almost completely enlightened see only transcendence; the complete see transcendence and immanence together. This matters for practice: the goal is not to keep the world away but to see it rise from and fall into the same awareness, and to act in it, above all by teaching.
Practice Path
The following path is drawn from the contemplations the VAP itself prescribes. It is a reading aid, not a substitute for a qualified teacher, and the tradition assumes initiation and guidance.
| Stage | Verses | Practice | Sign of progress |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Orientation | 1.1 | Notice the wish to understand as a sign of grace; read slowly | Interest sustained without striving |
| 2. Widening | 1.2 to 1.4 | Shift from particular to universal seeing; note the six conditions of I-am-ness | The border of "my body" feels less fixed |
| 3. Inner ladder | 1.7 | Feel the I impelling body, senses, mind, intellect, breath, bindu | Sense of a subtle "I" before thought |
| 4. Waves | 2.11 to 2.16 | Watch thoughts and sensations as waves; feel the holding of "I know both" | Ease with whatever arises |
| 5. Self-luminosity | 2.19 | Ask "Do you not see?" in ordinary moments | Brief flashes of recognition in daily life |
| 6. Before naming | 3.32 | Catch the instant before an object is labelled | Ability to rest in pre-verbal knowing |
| 7. Inclusion | 3.33 to 3.35 | Object, sense, knower; then the verbless "I he" | Stable sense of non-exclusion |
| 8. Fire | 3.29 to 3.31 | Contemplate recognition as fire burning knower, knowing, known | Bliss that is "inartificial" |
| 9. The charcoal test | 3.30 | Notice and release "I have realised" | Recognition without a recogniser |
| 10. Return | 3.36, 4.44 | Keep recognition while seeing yellow, talking, working | No loss on leaving the cushion |
| 11. Purification | 4.51 | Burning, sprinkling, making whole at cosmic scale | Feeling of service rather than achievement |
| 12. Complete knowledge | 4.52 | Each contracting thought recognised as Sakti and released | Thought itself felt as Siva's play |
Critical Lens Summary
Gathered in one place, the main cautions raised in this guide:
- Assertion and argument. The VAP's syllogisms are, in Lawrence's words, contemplations "based on" the Pratyabhijna arguments and lack their demonstrative force. The reason "because it is perceptible" is too wide unless you already hold the idealist premise.
- Obscure and possibly corrupt passages. Lawrence admits that 3.33 may be corrupt and that parts of 4.42 are obscure. He chooses between the Kaviraj and Ganapati Sastri editions in several places. A confident reading of every line is not available.
- Sectarian boundaries. The exclusion of logicians and Mimamsakas in 4.42 and the dismissal of practitioners of rival schemes as "limited yogins" in 2.17 are partly polemic. They sit uneasily with the text's universal message.
- Reconstructed schemes. The five Saktis' link to the five acts is partly Lawrence's inference; the numbered schemes in 2.17 are not spelled out. Do not treat the tables as standard Kashmir Saiva doctrine.
- Comparative frame. Lawrence's psychoanalytic comparison (Freud, Lacan, Kohut) is his own interpretive lens. It is illuminating, but readers within the tradition may find the word "narcissism" misleading, and readers from psychology may find the analogy loose.
- Grandiosity risk. A text that tells you that you are Lord of the universe can be heard as permission for inflated ego. The text's own safeguards are 3.24 (the excluding "I" is not the Self), 3.30 ("I have realised" is charcoal) and 4.52 (all powers but teaching and complete knowledge are semblances). Read the claims of Lordship through those safeguards.
Where This Text Sits in Kashmir Saivism
| Text | Relation to the VAP |
|---|---|
| Isvarapratyabhijnakarika (Utpaladeva) | The VAP's philosophical source; VAP 2.9 echoes IPK 1.5.13 |
| Ajadapramatrsiddhi (Utpaladeva) | Source of the "self and other" idea in 2.10 |
| Pratyabhijnahrdayam (Ksemaraja) | A sister manual that also compresses the Pratyabhijna for practice; see No. 346 in this series |
| Spanda Karika | Shared ideas of pulsation and of nimesa and unmesa |
| Tantraloka (Abhinavagupta) | Source for the internalised reading of burning and purification |
| Maharthamanjari (Mahesvarananda) | Krama work that quotes VAP 1.2, 2.18 and 4.46 |
| Yoginihrdaya commentary (Bhaskararaya), Kamakalavilasa commentary (Natanandanatha) | Srividya works that quote VAP 2.10 |
| Siva Purana, Kailasa Samhita | Enjoins recitation of the VAP's "Siddhi Skandha" in ritual |
Final Reflection
The VAP takes the most conventional story in the Indian repertoire, the proud god humbled, and gives it an unconventional ending. Indra is not told to be smaller. He is told to be larger, until there is nothing outside him to be proud against. Whether one reads this as metaphysics, as a contemplative technique or, with Lawrence, as a theory of healthy self-love, the text's own last words are a sentence to test in experience rather than to believe: "I, perceptibly, am none other than the Supreme Lord, who is the guru of this universe."
Sources
- David Peter Lawrence, "The Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One: A Study and Translation of the Virupaksapancasika, with the Commentary of Vidyacakravartin" (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). Publisher listing: SUNY Press, Tantra list; ebook record: OverDrive
- Sanskrit editions used by Lawrence: Gopinath Kaviraj, ed., Tantrasamgraha, part 1 (1970); T. Ganapati Sastri, ed., The Virupaksapancasika, with the Commentary of Vidyacakravartin, Trivandrum Sanskrit Series 9 (1910).
- Reviews: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2010; Loriliai Biernacki in The Journal of Hindu Studies, 2011.
- All quotations in this guide are from Lawrence's translation and notes. Page references follow the printed edition.