Svacchandoddyota

A commentary that argues. The Uddyota is Kshemaraja’s gloss on the Svacchanda Tantra, and it is not a neutral exposition of a scripture. It is an attempt to take a text the dualists had been reading their way for generations and establish that it was non-dual all along.

What it is

Uddyota means illumination, and Kshemaraja wrote several: on the Svacchanda, on the Netra Tantra, on the Vijnana Bhairava. He worked in Kashmir in the first half of the eleventh century, as the pupil of Abhinavagupta and the most industrious systematiser the tradition produced.

The Svacchanda itself is a large Bhairava scripture, fifteen patalas, concerned with initiation, mantra, the structure of the cosmos and the rites for a Shaiva officiant. It had a commentarial tradition before Kshemaraja, and that tradition was dualist. His Uddyota reads the same verses and finds Kashmiri non-dualism in them.

Where the argument shows

The commentary is worth reading for the places where the polish drops. The gloss on 2.136 is the clearest of them.

The scripture prescribes an offering of sura, liquor. Earlier commentators had read the word as meaning water. Kshemaraja does not treat this as a possible reading to be weighed. He writes that those who, even within the Bhairava system, explain sura as denoting water are jatigrahagrasta, seized by the demon of caste, and closes by calling them pashu, beasts, which in this vocabulary is the technical term for the unliberated.

He names nobody. He writes only ye tu vyacaksate, but as for those who explain. Who he meant is contested. Alexis Sanderson reads it as an attack on a practice current in his own day, the substitution of water for alcohol at the rite. William Arraj reads the target as the earlier commentators themselves. The readings are compatible if the living practice simply was the dualist one.

A numbering trap

Anyone following his citation should know that the Kashmir Series edition prints the verse he quotes as 5.45 inside the gloss, and then numbers the same verse 5.48 when it comes to print it in the body, at page 41 of the third volume. The Pondicherry electronic text agrees with 5.48. The discrepancy is the edition’s, not the commentator’s.

The edition

The standard text is Svacchandatantram with the Uddyota of Kshemaraja, edited by Madhusudan Kaul Shastri for the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, numbers 31, 38, 44, 48, 51, 53 and 56, published at Bombay by the Nirnaya Sagar Press between 1921 and 1935: six volumes in seven parts. It is public domain. The Muktabodha Indological Research Institute carries an electronic text, and the Shaiva reading group of the EFEO at Pondicherry has prepared an electronic text of the mula alone, which is the better witness for verse numbering.

What is not in it

A translation. There is no complete published English rendering of either the Svacchanda Tantra or the Uddyota. William Arraj’s 1988 Chicago dissertation remains the fullest study in English and is unpublished. Anyone working on this text is working from Sanskrit editions or from the handful of passages scholars have translated in passing.