Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Revelation: An Edition and Annotated Translation of Malinislokavarttika I 1-399.

• Author: Padoux, Andre

Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Revelation: An Edition and Annotated Translation of Malinislokavarttika I 1-399. Translated by JURGEN HANNEDER. Groningen Oriental Studies, vol. 14. Groningen: EGBERT FORSTEN, 1998. Pp. viii + 298.

The Malinislokavarttika (MSV)--also named Malinivarttika or Malinivijayavarttika--which, as its name indicates, is a versified commentary on the Malinivijayottaratantra (MVT), is one of the important works by the great Kashmirian tantric theologian and philosopher Abhinavagupta (tenth--eleventh c.). Because of its difficulty, it is also one of his less well known texts. For not only is its Sanskrit not easy (the difficulty being increased by the unsatisfactory state of the transmitted text), but the notions expounded in it are often obscure unless one is familiar with the theological-metaphysical doctrines of the nondualistic saivism of the Trika. These doctrines are also to be found, in a more accessible form, in Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka which, he says, contains nothing that is not explicitly or implicitly in the MVT. While the Tantraloka has been translated and is much studied, the MVT is little known, and the though (not badly) edited in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies in 1921, has remained pract ically unknown to this day. It used to be described as a protracted (1,470 slokas) and arcane commentary on the first stanza of the MVT, which in fact it is not. Only now, thanks to Hanneder's remarkable work (a doctoral thesis from Oxford), can others beside the few experts on the Trika discover the real scope and interest of this work.

Only the first part of the first chapter is here edited and translated, that is, 399 out of 1,136 slokas (the total MSV numbering 1,470 stanzas). This, we are told, is not only because an edition and translation of the whole first chapter would have entailed too much work, but also because these first 399 stanzas form a whole, being a kind of introduction to what follows. They present a philosophy of the saiva revelation (saivasastra), that is, its divine origin and the division of its scriptures into five currents (srotas) deemed to issue from the five faces or mouths (vaktra) of Sadasiva, the Eternal Siva. This division is to be found in earlier agamas or tantras, too, but Abhinavagupta interprets it in his own way so as to prove the superiority of his own non-dualistic saiva system over the other forms of the saiva tradition.

The introduction (pp. 3-56) first shows how this...