The original review.
Lilian Silburn : Sivasūtra et Vimarśinī de Kṣemarāja. (Études sur le Śivaisme du Cachemire, École Spanda.)
Traduction et introduction. (Publications de l'Institut de Civilisation Indienne, Serie in-8°, Fasc. 47.) viii, 193 pp., 1 plate. Paris : Institut de Civilisation Indienne, 1980. (Distribution: Diffusion E. De Boccard, 11 rue de Medicis, Paris VIe.)
The author's promise in the title of this, her ninth major publication in the field of Kashmir Śaivism, to present a study within a smaller territory, within a specific 'school' ('le Śivaisme du Cachemire, école Spanda') will not allay for long the suspicions of those who have recognized in her past work a homiletic method which, careless of history, of the diversity of lineages and sectarian affiliations, has seemed to model itself on the Śaiva maxim that the whole (in this case the literature gathered under the modern rubric of Kashmir Śaivism) is equally present in each of its parts (sarvaṃ sarvatra).
The 'Spanda school' was founded, we are told (p. 1), by Vasugupta in the first half of the ninth century with his promulgation of the Śivasūtras. These were developed in the Spandakārikās composed by Vasugupta himself according to Kṣemarāja (c. 1000-1050) or by Kallaṭa, his pupil and a contemporary of King Avantivarman (855/6-883), according to Bhāskara (c. 925-975), Utpalavaiṣṇava (probably c. 950-1000) and Rāmakaṇṭha (c. 950-1000). The 'mystical lineage' of the Spanda school passed, she reports, from Vasugupta through Bhattasūri to Kallata (her Bhattasūri is in fact an epithet of Kallata in her source, tŚivasūtravārtika, upodghāta v. 4) and thence through four intermediaries to Bhāskara, the author of the Śivasūtravārtika, whom she assigns to the eleventh century forgetting that he is quoted by Rāmakantha (c. 950-1000). Since she has begun by defining ' school ' in terms of a lineage, and since this study in the Spanda school concerns the Śivasūtravimarśinī of Ksemarāja, we might have expected her to show that he was similarly connected ; but in place of historical continuity a much more intimate bond appears. Any separate identity which Vasugupta and his Spanda school might have disappears within that of Ksemarāja; for when it comes to determining what the former meant but did not say in his brief aphorisms the latter is her unquestioned guide. Thus, to take a case of great importance, she unhesitatingly attributes to Vasugupta and therefore to her Spanda school the categorization of spiritual disciplines into the three 'upāyas '. Now, that Kṣemarāja has superimposed this structure upon the three sections of the sūtras will be apparent to anyone who looks at the sūtras themselves, and indeed at Ksemarcāja's commentary. This evident artificiality and the absence of any reference to the upāyas in the sūtras, in the Spandakārikās, in Kallata's Spandakārikāvṛtti, in any of the commentaries and in particular in Bhāskara's organization of the same sections, have clearly counted for nothing in Silburn's judgement when weighed against the opinion of Kṣemarāja. In short, for Silburn Vasugupta is no more than an aspect of Kṣemarāja. This identity established, any claim to be expounding an independent school, if this term is to be more than a name for commentaries of any kind on the two root-texts, must evaporate. For the Vimarśinī, as the presence of these categories illustrates, is less a text of a Spanda school than a colony of the Trika and, more specifically, of the syncretistic Trika exegesis of Ksemarāja's teacher Abhinavagupta (c. 975-1025). The three upāyas (śāmbhava, śākta and ānava) out of their humbler origin in the Mālinīvijayottaratantra (2.21-23), Abhinavagupta's root-text for the Trika, had become in his exegesis the defining core of his entire system, more than a thousand verses being devoted to their definition in his Tantrāloka.
More serious than this attribution to Vasugupta of Trika categories is the fact that she misinterprets them (pp. 11-17) and has done so throughout her voluminous output. Consequently in her commentary on the Vijñānabhairavatantra (1961) she disagrees again and again with the commentator Śivopādhyāya when he applies these categories to the meditations which that tantra enumerates. But it is Silburn not Śivopādhyāya who has misunderstood Abhinavagupta's painstaking definitions. It must suffice here to point out that she fails to distinguish between the first and highest 'means' (śāmbhavopāya or icchopāya) in which the yogin centres himself in the pre-discursive impulse (icchā) to cognition and action without the intervention of thought (akiñciccintaka), and the second (śāktopāya or jñānopāya) in which the yogin, incapable of approaching consciousness from a point so close to its undifferentiated essence, resorts to the field of cognition (jñāna), intensifying a 'truth'- perception ('I am omniscient', 'I am omnipotent', 'This universe is the expansion of my own identity', etc.) to the point of direct revelation (sākṣātkāra) unmediated by thought. Now Silburn omits all reference to this defining 'truth'-perception and makes Abhinavagupta's definition of this process, which he calls vikalpasaṃskāra (Tantrāloka 4.2), apply to all cognitive and affective states (p. 13, 11. 11-25) without distinction, and from this error it is but a short step which leads her to the statement that the yogin in śāktopāya 'can turn to his advantage the paroxysmal climax of such emotions as terror, anger and passion . . .' (p. 13, 11. 26-28). Clearly she has in mind here Spandakārikā 1.22 which Ksemarāja aptly connects with Vijñānabhairavatantra (Śivopādhyāya's recension), 101. Now the practice which the latter (and, by implication, the former) delineates belongs not to śāktopāya but to śāmbhavopāya, for it involves the obliteration of the act of thought within the spontaneous upsurge of non-cognitive states of intense emotion. As Śivopādhyāya, the last reliable Trika exegete, puts it, 'this is the śāmbhava plane because it is achieved without the intervention of a thought-act' (eṣā nirvikalpaupayikī śāmbhavī bhūḥ). As for śāmbhavopāya itself, which because of the encroachment of her śāktopāya now lacks any clear identity of its own, she divides it into two levels (p. 12, 11. 25-30) on the basis of a mistranslation of Ksemarāja's Spandanirṇaya (p. 19, 11. 16-20). She makes him say that udyama, the primal upsurge of pre-cognitive power which is the domain of śāmbhavopāya, is firstly sevanā ('un hommage assidu') and secondly 'a return to perfect interiority'. The Sanskrit (glossing udyamena) is paripūrṇāntarmukhasvarūpasevanātmanā. It is knowledge not of Śaiva doctrine but of Sanskrit language which tells us that her second level has been conjured up, against the laws of grammar, out of a simple description of her first.
The translation of the Vimarśinī (pp. 33-112) is far from exact, though generally her familiarity with Śaiva doctrine saves her from 'heresy' when she misconstrues the Sanskrit. Thus on 1.2 (. . . svasvātantryaśaktyābhāsitasvarūpagopanārūpayā mahāmāyāśaktyā . . . '. . . by his power ' Mahāmāyā', i.e. by that concealing of his true nature which his own autonomous agency manifests') Silburn gives (Sanskrit parentheses mine) '. . . grace a sa libre energie (svasvātantryaśaktyā), afin de voiler sa veritable nature (svarūpagopanārūpayā) spontanement lumineuse (ābhāsita- !) (le Seigneur se sert) de l'energie de la grande llusion . . .'. Orthodox, but not exactly what Kṣemarāja said.
The 'Analysis of the Śivasutras and their commentary' (pp. 113-82) which ends the work summarizes the translation and, rightly abandoning any attempt to treat the Vimarśinī as a text of an independent school, elaborates certain details by drawing on the Trika and Pratyabhijña literature of the author's famous teacher. Thus she achieves in her exegesis the sāmarasya, the sameness of flavour, which she so admires in the spiritual vision of the Kashmirian non-dualists.
ALEXIS SANDERSON
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