Abhinavagupta, Luce dei Tantra: Tantraloka & Gli Aforisini di Siva, con il Commento di Ksemaraja: Siva sutravimarsini.

• Author: Padoux, Andre

Abhinavagupta, Luce dei Tantra: Tantraloka. Edited and translated by RANIERO GNOLI. 2nd edition. Biblioteca Orientale, vol. 4. Milan: ADELPHI EDIZIONI, 1999. Pp. lxxxiv + 782. LIt 140,000.

Gli Aforisini di Siva, con il Commento di Ksemaraja: Siva sutravimarsini. Edited and translated by RAFFAELE TORELLA. 2nd edition. Milan: MIMESIS, 1999. Pp. 180. LIt 28,000.

If, in spite of a few pioneering studies, the study of saivism has long lagged behind that of visnuism, this is not so now. The change is due in part to the development--the fashion, too, unfortunately-of tantric studies, a fashion to which we owe a large number of mediocre or bad books, but also a few excellent ones, as the present case illustrates. To limit oneself to a particular European case, one would like to underscore the quality of the research now being pursued in this field in Italy, by or under the guidance of Professors Raniero Gnoli and Raffaele Torella, of the University La Sapienza, of Rome.

One of the first, and probably the most noteworthy, of Gnoli's contributions to tantric saiva studies was his Italian translation of Abhinavagupta's vast treatise, the Tantritloka (TA), "The Light of the Tantras," published in Turin in 1972. This translation, which was long out of print, has now been re-issued in a new, revised version under the title of Luce dei Tantra. The TA--which can be dated to the last years of the tenth century or the very first ones of the eleventh--is a particularly interesting text, expounding as it does Abhinavagupta's conception of the Trika, one of the non-dualist saiva traditions developed first in Kasmir, and one of the most intellectually attractive ones of India. This is not basically a philosophical work, though it includes many important metaphysical, cosmological, mystical, and (if one may say so) psychological developments. It contains mainly ritual prescriptions, its aim being, as Abhinavagupta states in its last chapter (37.83), "to expound logically and according to t he Tradition the truth concerning the tantras, so that, guided by this light, the devotee may find easily his way in the rites" (sukham samcarita kriyasu). Since the raison detre of most of these rites is to lead the initiated devotee to liberation by union with the godhead, the TA may also be described, to use Gnoli's words, as "un manuale de mistica"--a mystic, however, of a particular sort, since the complexity of the ritual and the intensity of the creative mental effort...