An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy: The Paramarthasara of Abhinavagupta with the Commentary of Yogaraja.

• Author: Nemec, John
• Position: Book review

An Introduction to Tantric Philosophy: The Paramarthasara of Abhinavagupta with the Commentary of Yogaraja. Translated by Lyne Bansat-Boudon and Kamaleshadatta Tripathi. Introduction, notes, critically revised Sanskrit text, appendix, indices by Lyne Bansat-Boudon. Routledge Studies in Tantric Traditions, vol. 3. London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. 462 + xiv. $150 (paperback rpt., 2013, $42.95.)

The Paramarthasara ("Essence of Ultimate Reality") of Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025) is a concise propaedeutic work, and scholars count it as one among a number of opuscules that may authentically be attributed to him. It offers in 105 verses a conspectus of Trika Saiva theology that is punctuated by echoes of the author's tantric writings, most notably the Tantraloka, and its central concern, as Lyne Bansat-Boudon's introduction to this impressive volume indicates (see, especially, pp. 22-23), is to examine the nature of jivanmukti, or "liberation in this life." What is most striking about the text, as she further notes, is the fact that it explicitly rewrites Adisesa's text of the same name, "appropriating, transforming, even investing another text" in doing so, in order "to make it better able to express an improved doctrine" that nevertheless is held to be "already present in seed form in the older doctrine (of Adisesa)" (p. 7).

Abhinavagupta's Paramarthasara adopts much of the substance and tone of the work on which it is based, which for its part "conflates Samkhya dualism and the nondualism of the Vedanta--[offering] a kind of pre-Sankara Vedanta halfway between the dvaitadvaitavada of Bhartrprapanca and the advaitavada of Gaudapada, but one which, imprinted with devotion to Visnu, remains profoundly theist, in the manner of epic Samkhya" (p. 3). Indeed, as Bansat-Boudon indicates (p. 7), Abhinava repeats verbatim, or nearly so, dozens of stanzas from Adis'esa's text, and adds some twenty verses to them. He also engages the ideas of Adis'esa's principal interlocutors--the Samkhya and Vedanta--though the former is addressed primarily via a silent synthesis of that school's ontology into a Trika framework, and criticism of the latter school is coupled with that of the Buddhist Vijnanavada, another idealist tradition (p. 52). Finally, Abhinavagupta echoes the first Paramarthasara by speaking in the language of metaphor and analogy (see karikas 6, 7, 8, 9, 12-13, 18, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32, 36, 37, 42, 51, 57, 62, 85-86, and 87-88), rather than in the sort...