The Aphorisms of Siva: The Sivasutra with Bhaskara's Commentary, the Varttika.

AuthorDavis, Richard H.

By Mark S. G. Dyckowski. SUNY Series in Tantric Studies. Albany: 1992. Pp. xvii + 247. $12.95 (paper).

This is the first translation into English of Bhaskara's interesting commentary on the Sivasutras of Vasugupta. The Sutras, a work of roughly the mid-ninth century, constitutes one of the fundamental texts of the Kashmiri Saiva tradition. Siva himself, Bhiskara tells us, revealed the Sutras to Vasugupta on Mahadeva Mountain to refute the many erroneous views then circulating about His Own Nature (by which he probably meant Saiva siddhanta), and Bhiskara locates himself in direct disciple succession to Vasugupta.

Previous Western-language translations of the Sutras, by Jaideva Singh into English (1979), Raffaele Torella into Italian (1979), and Lilian Silburn into French (1980), have based themselves on the better-known eleventh-century commentary by Ksemaraja, the Sivasutravimarsini. The Vimarsini represents what scholars have come to view as the mainstream of Kashmiri Saiva philosophical monism. Following in the lineage of Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta, Ksemaraja incorporates Tantric teachings of the Krama school and emphasizes the notion of Siva's "universal egoity" throughout his commentary, an idea first presented by Utpaladeva's writings, as Dyczkowski has elsewhere argued. Bhaskara's Varttika, by contrast, interprets the Sutras in terms of what Dyczkowski terms a "mysticism of light," and this vision may well represent more accurately Vasugupta's own views.

Dyczkowski includes in this volume not only...

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