The four upayas: what it cost to call a state a method

In Kashmir, some time around the turn of the eleventh century, Abhinavagupta finished the longest book anyone had yet written about tantra. Thirty-seven chapters and something near five thousand eight hundred and sixty verses, depending on how you count them. No work on tantra of that scale and ambition is known from before it, though a good deal of the literature is lost and some surviving scriptures run far longer. He built it around four ways to God, ranked from highest to lowest, and for his authority he named one scripture, the Malinivijayottara, and quoted three of its verses.

Those verses do not describe four ways to God. They describe three kinds of absorption, in the opposite order, and the scripture they come from never uses the word upaya, means, anywhere in its twenty-three chapters.

That gap is not a forgery, and the interesting question is not whether the word is there. Abhinavagupta never claimed it was. What he claimed was that the threefoldness was taught in scripture, and it was. The question worth a reader’s time is narrower and harder: what does it cost to take a classification of states and read it as a classification of methods? Somebody did that, deliberately, and the tradition has been living inside the result for a thousand years.

What the scripture actually classified

The passage Abhinavagupta names sits in the second chapter of the Malinivijayottara. The chapter is counting. It says that absorption into the power of Rudra is fivefold, subdivides those five into fifty, and then says the fifty are the anava, with the shakta and the shambhava each divided the same way. A hundred and fifty in all. In the middle of that arithmetic it stops to define three of them.

उच्चारकरणध्यानवर्णस्थानप्रकल्पनैः । यो भवेत्स समावेशः सम्यगाणव उच्यते ॥ २१ ॥

uccara-karana-dhyana-varna-sthana-prakalpanaih yo bhavet sa samaveshah samyag anava uchyate

“The absorption that comes about through the fashionings of utterance, of the organ, of meditation, of the phoneme and of position: that is rightly called anava.”

Mālinīvijayottara 2.21, KSTS 37 #

उच्चाररहितं वस्तु चेतसैव विचिन्तयन् । यं समावेशमाप्नोति शाक्तः सोऽत्राभिधीयते ॥ २२ ॥

uccara-rahitam vastu chetasaiva vichintayan yam samavesham apnoti shaktah so ‘trabhidhiyate

“Contemplating with the mind alone a reality that is free of utterance, the absorption one thereby attains is here called shakta.”

Mālinīvijayottara 2.22, KSTS 37 #

अकिंचिच्चिन्तकस्यैव गुरुणा प्रतिबोधतः । जायते यः समावेशः शाम्भवोऽसावुदाहृतः ॥ २३ ॥

akinchich-chintakasyaiva guruna pratibodhatah jayate yah samaveshah shambhavo ‘sav udahritah

“The absorption that arises in one who thinks of nothing at all, through the awakening given by the teacher: that is declared to be shambhava.”

Mālinīvijayottara 2.23, KSTS 37 #

What the three verses sort is samavesha, absorption, the state of being entered into. Each verse has the same shape: here is an absorption, here is what it comes about through, here is its name. Anava is the absorption of the limited soul, the anu; shakta belongs to the power, shakti; shambhava to Shambhu, which is Shiva. The instruments are in the instrumental case. Fashionings of utterance and posture. Contemplating with the mind. The awakening given by the teacher.

That last point matters more than it first looks, and it is the strongest thing a defender of the classical scheme has. A classification of states by the instrument that produces them is already most of the way to a classification of methods. Abhinavagupta did not wrench the verses into a shape they resist. He took a short step the grammar invites, and then did the thing the scripture had not done: he gave the category a noun.

One thing should be said plainly here, because it is a choice this article is making and not a neutral fact. Judging a commentator by whether his technical vocabulary appears in his root text is a philological standard, and it is not the tradition’s own. Classical exegesis does not require the word to be present for the matter to be taught, a tantra is compressed by design, and commentary is exactly where the technical register is expected to arrive. The concordance test is being applied here because it is checkable. It is not the only standard available, and a reader who rejects it will reach different conclusions from the same evidence.

Search the whole tantra for upaya and the count is zero, with the only near-hits being payu in a list of the organs of action. The word shambhava occurs twice in the entire text, at 2.20 and 2.23, inside a four-verse span. So the three absorptions are there, the threefoldness is there, and the category of means is not.

Notice also the order. The scripture runs anava, then shakta, then shambhava. It climbs.

The word itself, and who else had claimed it

Before going further it is worth asking what upaya meant to a reader in eleventh-century Kashmir, because the English-speaking world has largely met the word through one tradition, and that colours what the Shaiva usage sounds like.

Upaya is ordinary Sanskrit, and two traditions had already made something of it before the Trika did. One of them had made a fourfold scheme.

The statecraft manuals count four upayas as the means a king has against an adversary: saman, conciliation; dana, gift; bheda, division; and danda, force. That scheme is in the Mahabharata and in the Arthashastra tradition, it is genuinely fourfold, and it is about as far from Shaiva soteriology as a word can travel while staying itself. A reader in Kashmir who heard the four upayas without further context would have had some reason to ask which four.

In Mahayana Buddhism, upaya-kaushalya, skill in means, is a quality of the teacher. The Lotus Sutra tells in its third chapter of a father who lures his children out of a burning house by promising them toy carts, and the sutra is explicit that the father told no lie in making the promise. In the twenty-fifth chapter Avalokiteshvara takes whatever form the person in front of him requires. The skill belongs to whoever is doing the teaching, and it is exercised downward, on the hearer.

In the Trika the word has moved to the other end of the transaction. An upaya is a grade of the practitioner’s own access, and the ranking measures how much apparatus stands between a person and what they already are. The Buddhist means is a property of how a teaching is delivered. The Shaiva means is a property of the capacity that receives it.

The images invert too. The father’s toy carts are a fiction the children outgrow, and the fiction works: it gets them out of the house. The Shaiva tradition’s own figure for the means, which closes the chapter on the means-less and closes this article, says the opposite.

The reversal

In the first chapter of the Tantraloka, at verse 167, Abhinavagupta claims the authority, and at 168 to 170 he quotes the three verses. His claim is precise and it is worth quoting against the looser version of this argument: this very threefoldness was taught by the Supreme Lord in the scripture named Shripurva, in the determination of samavesha. He uses the scripture’s own word for its own topic. He is not pretending the scripture discussed means.

Then he prints the verses in reverse, shambhava first and anava last.

Two details complicate the tidy story here. The reversal is not necessarily a reranking: the Malinivijayottara already treats the shambhava as the highest of the three, and expounding downward from the highest is ordinary scholastic practice. And the quotation is not quite word for word. At 1.168 he gives utpadyate ya aveshah and udiritah where the printed Malinivijayottara has jayate yah samaveshah and udahritah. The Kashmirian editor records both readings at 2.23, though not in the same way: udiritah he gives from a manuscript, and utpadyate ya aveshah from a text he names by an abbreviation. He cites the Tantraloka elsewhere in the same apparatus under its own siglum and does not use it here, so the second note is not simply Abhinavagupta’s citation returning to him. A transmission difference, then, with one leg in a manuscript and the other in a book. The other two verses are verbatim.

Jayaratha, commenting in the thirteenth century, glosses the reversed reading directly: the intent is that by the relation of means and goal, of door and what the door opens on, the resting is principally in the shambhavopaya alone.

Two other things happen in that chapter. Abhinavagupta attaches a second set of names, mapping the three onto will, knowledge and action. And when he lists his chapters he uses a third set: paropaya, the supreme means, for the shambhava; naropaya, the means of the limited man, for the anava; and gatopaya, the means that has departed, for the means-less. Only shaktopaya carries the same name in both lists. Some of that is prosody, since a metrical chapter list reaches for metrically convenient forms and Sanskrit verse prizes synonym variation. But a reader meeting paropaya and naropaya for the first time has to be told what they are, which is a thing that happens to vocabulary still settling.

The fourth that is not a fourth

The cleanest statement of the whole system is a single sentence of prose at the end of the first chapter of the Tantrasara, Abhinavagupta’s own digest of his larger book.

अनुपायमेव स्वात्मानं प्रकाशयति सोपायं वा सोपायत्वेऽपि इच्छा वा ज्ञानं वा क्रिया वा अभ्युपाय इति त्रैविध्यं शाम्भवशाक्ताणवभेदेन समावेशस्य तत्र चतुर्विधमपि एतद्रूपं क्रमेण अत्र उपदिश्यते ।

anupayam eva svatmanam prakashayati sopayam va, sopayatve ‘pi ichchha va jnanam va kriya va abhyupaya iti traividhyam shambhava-shakta-anava-bhedena samaveshasya, tatra chaturvidham api etad rupam kramena atra upadishyate

“He manifests his own Self either without means or with means. And even where there is a means, the means is will, or knowledge, or action, whence a threefoldness of absorption by the division into shambhava, shakta and anava. Of these, all four forms are taught here in order.”

Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra 1, KSTS 17, p. 7 #

All four. The fourth is the case where no means operates, and the Tantraloka gives it a chapter of its own, placed ahead of the other three. Its argument is uncompromising and it is made with verse numbers worth having. Action cannot be the means, because action arises out of the very thing it is supposed to reach (2.8). Knowing cannot be the means, because the thing is self-luminous and nothing else lights it (2.9). Those who try to discern it by a direct means are dullards who want to catch a firefly in order to see the sun (2.14). For such a person there is no mantra, no meditation, no worship, and no resting place in any grade from novice to teacher (2.37).

And then, in his verse commentary on the root scripture, the Malinishlokavarttika, the same man writes this:

upayabhedat traividhyam samaveshesu varnitam // 1.996 // anupayah shambhavo ‘sau chidupayas tatah param | jadopayas tv anavah syat sa chapi bahudha matah // 1.997 //

“A threefoldness among the absorptions has been described, by difference of means. That shambhava is the anupaya; after it the means of consciousness; and the anava would be the means of the insentient, which is also held to be manifold.”

— Abhinavagupta, Mālinīślokavārttika 1.996cd to 997, Hanneder’s data entry of KSTS 31

Threefold. Not four.

And the anupaya here is the shambhava: the limit at which the highest means stops being a means, not a rung standing above it. The grammar is an identity statement in apposition, and the word threefold in the preceding line rules out reading anupaya as a fourth item in a list. The second member is called the means of consciousness, chidupaya, and the word shakta is not used of it.

Is that a contradiction with the Tantrasara, which counts four? Possibly not. The Tantrasara is counting the forms of self-manifestation, with means and without, which makes four. The Malinishlokavarttika is counting the means proper, and the means-less cannot be one of the means, which makes three. Read that way the two statements are consistent and the scheme is stable. Read the other way they are two architectures by one author. The texts do not say which reading is right, and this article does not know either.

A note on that quotation, since this site makes a point of the difference. The three verse cards above are printed in Devanagari because the Devanagari was read and checked. This one is printed in transliteration because the text consulted was a romanised scholarly edition, and converting a transliteration back into Devanagari is how invented characters get into print. The first half of verse 996 is omitted and the omission is marked.

What the “an-” is doing

The 1918 Srinagar edition of the Tantrasara carries a short footnote on the first page of the anupaya chapter. Its editor, Mukunda Rama Shastri, observes that the negative particle here has the sense of “little”, as in the stock grammatical example anudara kanya, a girl called belly-less who is merely slender. On that reading an-upaya means minimal means, not no means.

The note belongs to the editor, and it should be attributed that way. But the editor was not inventing it. Jayaratha gives the same gloss with the same stock example, commenting on Tantraloka 2.2: the exclusionary negative, as in anudara kanya, carries the sense of “little”, and so the meaning is having little means. A thirteenth-century commentator and a twentieth-century editor arrive at the same reading independently of each other’s century.

It also matches what the chapter itself does, which is to concede at the outset that if the thing were truly means-less there would be no point teaching it, and to answer that the teaching happens once and the state is called means-less thereafter (2.2). One word from the teacher. Not nothing. The smallest possible something.

A verse that is not in the book

There is a line that circulates as the scriptural proof of the anupaya, quoted as though it were the Malinivijayottara speaking: effortless, without undertaking, means-less, of great fruit.

Raffaele Torella noted in 2019, in a footnote to an article on Abhinavagupta’s attitude to yoga, that the passage cannot be found in the edited text of the Malinivijayottara (p. 656 n. 22). He also records that another of Abhinavagupta’s works transmits the line with sphutopayam, “of manifest means”, where the familiar version has anupayam. Those two readings say close to opposite things.

The claim is checkable, so it was checked here. In the complete edited text, all twenty-three chapters, the words anayasam, anarambham, anupayam and mahaphalam each occur zero times, with positive controls holding on the same file. The absence is real in that edition.

Calling it a floating citation, though, understates what is going on. At Tantraloka 1.244 Abhinavagupta refers the matter to the Malini, chapter eighteen, in these very words. Jayaratha, commenting on that verse, writes for there and supplies the line along with several more. None of it is in the printed chapter eighteen, which begins quite differently.

Jayaratha is sourcing his own author’s reference, so this is one claim and one commentator honouring it, not two independent sightings. And there are at least three ways it could come out. They may have known a recension that has not survived. Abhinavagupta may be pointing at the larger Malinivijaya, of which the surviving text is the latter portion. Or the attribution may be loose in the ordinary scholastic way, from memory and at speed. Nothing available here settles which.

It is a better question than the one about the word, and it is open.

The commentary that fixed the scheme to another book

Most English readers never meet Abhinavagupta. They meet the four upayas in the Shiva Sutras, where the three sections are routinely described as the three means. That identification has an author and a date. It is Kshemaraja’s, writing in Kashmir in the first half of the eleventh century, in the commentary he called the Vimarshini.

He puts the names in his section colophons, in the standard form, so they are not passing remarks: the illumination of the shambhava means, named the first unmesha, an opening. The illumination of the shakta means, the second. The illumination of the anava means, the third.

Four things complicate the picture, and all four are in his own text.

His stated warrant is the lineage. He opens by announcing that the existing vrittis, the short prose commentaries already in circulation, are incoherent and that he expounds the work from the gurvamnaya, the tradition handed down from the teachers, and the edition’s own note remarks that he chose amnaya over the ordinary word for a statement, for the sake of authority. A defender would call this a boast, and would be right that for Kshemaraja the transmitted tradition is the higher warrant, and he is claiming it rather than apologising for it. It remains true that the warrant he names is not the sutras.

He imports the definition. Closing the second section he defines the shakta means by quoting the Malinivijayottara verse printed above, marked ityamnatam, thus transmitted in scripture.

He describes the transition as an appendage. At sutra 2.10 he writes that the text gave an opening, by way of appendage, for the exposition of the anava means.

And he accounts for a misfit. At the close of the first section he notes that the nature of shakti was stated in the middle of it, and supplies a motive: that was with the intention of displaying the shakti-possession of the shambhava form. Material inside his first section does not match his label for it, he sees this, and he explains it. That is harmonising work, and it is the clearest evidence in his own text that the scheme is being fitted onto the book.

The sutras themselves, in both surviving recensions, never use the words upaya, shambhava, shakta or anava. There is no section-opening formula and no verse that announces a transition.

What the text does have is a real contour. It opens on pure consciousness, the second section opens on mantra, and the third carries the material on breath, channel, seat and seed syllable. A movement from the immediate to the technical is genuinely on the page. Kshemaraja did not invent it. He named it, and the names came from somewhere else.

This argument-form is not new here, and the person who used it first should be named. Mark Dyczkowski applied it to the Shiva Sutras in 1987, in a footnote: the striking absence of the Spanda tradition’s key terms from the aphorisms is evidence that the aphorisms belong to no particular school. He was arguing about spanda. It works the same way for upaya.

The witness outside the line

Three of the four surviving commentaries on the Shiva Sutras use the upaya names. That looks like strong corroboration. It weakens considerably once you ask where each of them got it.

Varadaraja, whom Dyczkowski places as Kshemaraja’s junior contemporary (p. 21), writes a commentary in verse whose section-opening stanzas follow Kshemaraja’s prose clause by clause, phrase answering phrase, and whose colophons carry the upaya names in a formula word for word the Vimarshini’s. He is Kshemaraja in metre. What he adds is a versifier’s compression and, here and there, a gloss his source does not have.

The anonymous Vritti is usually called a prose epitome of Kshemaraja, and its gloss on the opening of the second section is near-verbatim his. But near-verbatim agreement establishes dependence while leaving its direction open, and there is a complication worth raising: Kshemaraja’s own opening verse complains about the incoherence of the vrittis, which says that vrittis existed before him. If the anonymous Vritti is one of those, the dependence runs the other way. This article cannot settle it, so it sets the Vritti aside and counts neither way.

Which leaves Bhaskara. He is placed before Kshemaraja, he gives his own line of descent from Kallata, and Dyczkowski judges that his commentary appears to represent an independent commentatorial tradition. That judgement, and his priority, are what the rest of this section rests on. If either fails, the witness fails with it.

He divides the Shiva Sutras into three sections, as everyone does. He calls the unit a prakasha, an illumination, where the others call it an unmesha. And he names his three sections the illumination of the general light of consciousness, the rising of innate wisdom, and the vibhuti spanda, the vibration of manifested power.

Not one upaya among them.

The detail that matters is in his own preface, where he sets out his plan for the three. He describes the second section as treating the rising of innate wisdom with the nature of shakti predominant. He sees the shakta character of that section. He says so in those words. And he still does not call it shaktopaya.

Both commentators are looking at the same sutras. Both see the same colouring in the middle section. One turns the colouring into a doctrine and the other does not. Where Kshemaraja writes anavopaya, Bhaskara writes spanda, and the choice of word is the choice of a whole system.

Navjivan Rastogi set this out as two schools of interpretation (pp. 108 to 109): Bhaskara explaining the work as embodying the Spanda doctrine and following Kallata, and Kshemaraja with Varadaraja reading it in the light of the Trika and dividing it according to the three upayas. Rastogi treats Kshemaraja as the harmonising party. Kshemaraja had already settled the Spanda side in a separate commentary of his own, and in the opening pages of the Vimarshini he makes the Spandakarika a summary of the Shiva Sutras, which brings both halves of the tradition under one hand.

There is a further detail in Bhaskara’s preface, and it would be decisive if the reading were secure. He reports that Vasugupta transmitted the Shiva Sutras to Kallata in four sections, and that Kallata expounded three of them with the Spandakarika and the last with a separate commentary. On that account his three sections are an artefact of what Kallata happened to cover. The edition records variant readings at this point which cannot be resolved from print, so it is offered as what his line appears to have believed, with the reading unsettled.

And the word Kshemaraja uses for his sections, unmesha, is defined by a Spandakarika verse that he quotes in his own commentary. The division is shared because it comes from the Spanda side. The labels are his.

What the ranking tracks

What is the ladder measuring? Two answers have text behind them and they are not the same answer.

One is immediacy. Torella’s reading of the non-dual Shaiva tradition puts it that only knowledge is entitled to be a means to liberation, with the lowest means identified with action and also called kriyopaya (p. 648). Abhinavagupta’s own naming in the Malinishlokavarttika points the same way without argument. The lowest means works on the insentient. The middle works on consciousness as thought. The highest works on nothing at all, because nothing stands between. On this reading the ordering is one of decreasing mediation, and effort has nothing to do with it.

The other is effort, and it is not a modern invention. The line most often quoted for the anupaya calls it anayasam and anarambham, effortless and without undertaking. Those are words about labour, and they sit at the top of the scheme. The phrase is a floating one, as the previous section showed, so it carries less weight than a located verse would. But anayasam and anarambham are stable across the witnesses that transmit it, while only the third word varies. The vocabulary of ease is what the tradition reached for there.

The familiar teaching analogy of cart, train and aeroplane, which entered the popular literature through Swami Lakshmanjoo’s lessons in twentieth-century Kashmir, tracks the second reading. It is often presented as though the first were not also available. Both are in the sources, and this article does not think the sources choose.

The same welding happens to whole books. The hundred and twelve contemplations of the Vijnana Bhairava are commonly assigned to the shakta means as a body. The text never uses the word upaya, and Abhinavagupta never names the book anywhere in the Tantraloka. The two places he leans on it, a reworking of one of its verses at 10.204 and an unattributed “as has been said” at 5.135 that Jayaratha identifies, both fall inside the anava block. Jayaratha, who does name the book, quotes it in the shambhava chapter as readily as in the anava ones. Lakshmanjoo, introducing the text, declined to sort it at all and told readers to work out for themselves which contemplation was shambhava and which anava, which is a more careful position than the one now in circulation.

The other thing usually welded on is shaktipata, the descent of grace, which circulates in teaching material as a neat correspondence table against the four means. The grades are real and elaborate, and the ninefold scheme usually quoted is not the scripture’s. It is worked out in the thirteenth chapter of the Tantraloka, and Abhinavagupta closes the passage by saying whose it is: this ninefold descent of power was described by Shambhunatha (13.254), his own teacher. A named man in a living lineage, two generations deep, not a revelation. What the Malinivijayottara itself has is smaller and worth being exact about, because the exactness cuts against a lazy version of this article. Its first chapter, at 1.42 to 1.47, runs a graded series of outcomes: one man released the instant the power touches him, another whose identity with ignorance simply ceases, a third led to a teacher, others released at initiation, or at the end of enjoyment, or at death. That is a gradation, and a careful one. The word shaktipata appears exactly once in the whole tantra, in a ritual chapter, where the officiant is told to test the descent by the movement of tooth-sticks and to read it as mild or intense. So the scripture does grade grace, in its own way and in its own place. It simply never grades means. As for the correspondence table, the firm link is narrow and single: Jayaratha restricts the anupaya teaching to those touched by the most intense descent. That licenses one correspondence at the top. It does not license the table.

A system doing two jobs

The question the scheme was built to answer has a two-part reply, and most of the confusion about it comes from insisting on one part.

It sorts people who present themselves, diagnosing a capacity already there. That is how the ritual tradition behaved, reading the intensity of the descent off the initiand’s own responses, and it is why Jayaratha can restrict the highest teaching to a named class.

It also teaches people who stay. Abhinavagupta says in his own second chapter that means are still taught for those whose consciousness is not yet pure (2.44 to 2.46), and Torella notes that having dismissed yogic practice he nevertheless allows ordinary practitioners a yoga for limited souls inside the anava means.

A scheme doing both jobs at once will look inconsistent to anyone who insists it is doing only one, and the tidy ladder of the popular accounts is what insisting looks like.

What the sources could not be asked

Three things bearing directly on all this were not available for this article, and a reader should know which.

Alexis Sanderson wrote a commentary on the opening verses of the Tantrasara in 2005, which is the passage leaned on hardest above. Bettina Baumer wrote in 1978, in German, on the unmediatedness of the highest experience in Abhinavagupta, which is very nearly the title of the question this article has been asking. Navjivan Rastogi’s 1987 introduction to the Tantraloka may well explain why its second chapter exists at all. None of the three was read here, and the Rastogi and Dyczkowski pages cited above were taken from a research summary, not from the printed books.

One more, and it is the most awkward omission. Somadeva Vasudeva’s 2004 critical study of these very chapters of the Malinivijayottara is the standard scholarly treatment of the text this article has spent its length anatomising, and it is the work most likely to have already settled the recension question raised two sections ago. It was not consulted.

If one of those has already made this argument, the credit belongs there. If one of them has already answered it, so does the correction.

What is left when the scheme is taken apart

None of this makes the four upayas spurious. It makes them a construction with a history, and the history is more interesting than the ladder.

A scripture classified three kinds of absorption, distinguishing each by what it comes about through, and counted them as a hundred and fifty. A philosopher read those three as means, reversed the order of exposition, named them twice over, and set beside them a fourth that his own commentary elsewhere may be identifying with the first. A second philosopher carried the finished scheme to a different book, where the words do not occur, and fitted it to a division that a commentator placed before him had made, on the evidence available, on entirely different grounds. An English readership met the result in the twentieth century as settled doctrine. Jaideva Singh’s 1979 introduction states flatly that the first section describes shambhavopaya, the second shaktopaya, the third anavopaya, with no indication that this is a commentator’s overlay, and that is the book most English readers have held.

The tradition was never confused about any of it. Jayaratha glosses the reversal. Kshemaraja explains his misfit. Abhinavagupta concedes in his own second chapter that a teaching about the absence of means is a strange thing to teach. Every seam was marked by the people who made it, and it was the retelling that sanded them down.

That this article has tried to find the seams does not mean the tradition needs them found. It does not. The Tantrasara closes its chapter on the means-less with the figure the whole scheme is measured against.

उपायजालं न शिवं प्रकाशयेद् घटेन किं भाति सहस्रदीधितिः । विवेचयन्नित्थमुदारदर्शनः स्वयंप्रकाशं शिवमाविशेत्क्षणात् ॥ ६ ॥

upaya-jalam na shivam prakashayed ghatena kim bhati sahasra-didhitih vivechayann ittham udara-darshanah svayam-prakasham shivam avishet kshanat

“The net of means cannot illumine Shiva. Does the thousand-rayed sun shine by means of a pot? Discerning thus, one of generous vision enters, in an instant, the self-luminous Shiva.”

Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra 2.6, KSTS 17, p. 9 #

Someone still had to build the net.

The people who built it left the seams showing.