The three malas: what impurity is made of

In the Kashmir Valley, around the year 1000, two men who disagreed about almost everything reached for the same picture.

The first was Bhatta Ramakantha, writing a commentary on a dualist scripture called the Kiranatantra. His school is the Shaiva Siddhanta, the dualist Shaiva school, and this article’s “dualists” are his party. Liberation comes by initiation alone, he says, commenting on Kiranatantra 1.22ab: knowledge, yoga and renunciation do not reach it, because bondage is a substance, like a film on the eye. And then the surgical image: as a film is removed from the eye by the operation of an eye-doctor, so it is removed by the Lord’s operation, with mantra as the instrument, the operation called initiation.

The second was Abhinavagupta, the systematiser of Kashmir Shaivism, writing the Tantraloka. His own school within it is the Trika, the triad, and this article’s “non-dualists” are his party. Impurity, forsooth, is a substance, like a film seated on the eye; and the rite that destroys it, initiation, is like applying collyrium. That is Tantraloka 1.239. The Sanskrit word carrying “forsooth” is kila, and it is doing the work of a raised eyebrow. Two lines later he announces that he will refute the view as censured by both reason and scripture.

Same word for substance. Same word for the film. Two different cures, both out of the eye-doctor’s trade. One man asserting it, one man setting it out in order to destroy it.

What they are arguing about is mala, impurity, and whether it is a thing.

A note on spelling and script

Before anything else, a warning about spelling, because this site writes Sanskrit without diacritical marks and here that costs something.

Mala, impurity, has a short first vowel. Mala, the rosary of beads used for counting recitations, has two long ones. They are different words: different gender, different declension, different root, no relation whatever. Stripped of diacritics they become the same string, and the confusion is not hypothetical. The general reference page that ranked highest for this doctrine in October 2026, when the search was run for this article, spells the impurity with the rosary’s long first vowel throughout.

This article therefore says which word it means. The impurity appears as anava mala, mayiya mala, karma mala, or as “the three impurities”, and where the bare word stands alone, in a title, a heading or the summary above, it is the impurity.

A second word carries two loads. In Abhinavagupta’s usage anava mostly means anavopaya, the lowest of the four means, and only seldom the impurity. The two senses sit two verses apart in the Tantraloka’s first chapter: Jayaratha glosses anava in the means-sense at 1.241, immediately after the substance verses at 1.239 and 1.240. Where this article writes anava on its own it means the impurity.

And the texts also use mala for plain dirt. The Svacchandatantra has a bath for dirt as against a ritual bath, and lists ear-discharge among ritual substances. None of that is the doctrine.

Two further words collapse the same way, and both appear below. Kala with a long first vowel is time. Kala with a long second vowel is a different word, one of the thirty-six principles, a portion or slice of manifestation. Where either is needed here it is named.

The verses below are given in transliteration. This site prints Devanagari only where three witnesses of independent provenance agree, and almost nothing here clears that bar: Ramakantha, the Mrgendra and Varadaraja survive in the sources used here only in roman script, and so does the Tantraloka’s sixteenth chapter; the Tantrasara and the Tantraloka’s first fourteen chapters rest on a single Devanagari witness each. One verse does clear it. The verse of the Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika in which Utpaladeva fixes the first of the three names is quoted by four later authors. Three of them print it in Devanagari and agree; the fourth, Varadaraja, has it in roman and reads one word of it differently. A divergence of that kind is what independence looks like. It is still printed here in neither script, because no copy of Utpaladeva’s own work was held for this article: a verse reaching it only through other men’s quotations is reported here rather than quoted. Converting a transliteration back into Devanagari is how invented characters get into print, so that is not done here either.

What the three are

The names are anava, mayiya and karma, and they were fixed as a set by Utpaladeva, writing around 925, in verses that reach this article only through four later authors who quote them, in whole or in part: Kshemaraja, Jayaratha, Varadaraja and Mahesvarananda. Two of the three definitions usually given in his name are not his own wording.

Anava mala, in Utpaladeva’s own verse, is a loss that runs both ways: autonomy gone out of awareness, and awareness gone out of autonomy, each by the loss of the soul’s own nature. The name is formed from anu, an atom or speck. The phrase that the tradition settled on for it, and that the modern accounts print, belongs to Abhinavagupta and to Kshemaraja: apurnammanyata, considering-oneself-incomplete.

The texts are emphatic that it is objectless. Abhinavagupta calls it a craving free of any specific object in the Tantraloka, and objectless again in his own Tantrasara. Kshemaraja, glossing the Svacchandatantra, rules out the sort of craving that says may I get something. That, he says, is precisely the nature of the raga principle, attachment, which is one of the thirty-six principles that the six courses map, and a different thing altogether. Abhinavagupta makes the same cut: when the same craving is delimited even minimally by a portion of karma, it becomes raga, a property of the intellect.

So anava mala is not desire. It is contentless lack.

Mayiya mala is the display of a world as something separate from the knower, and of the three that one is Utpaladeva’s own phrase: bhinnavedyapratha. The Svacchandatantra names the three in the middle of its account of the great initiation, where the officiant is purifying the disciple, and describes the mayiya as having the form of body and worlds. Ramakantha, on the dualist side, tallies it precisely: thirty principles and three hundred and ninety worlds.

Karma mala, in Utpaladeva’s own half-verse, is non-awareness in the agent. The later authors who quote him gloss it as the deposit of traces left by acts, good and bad, and that gloss is what the careful modern accounts print.

Kshemaraja supplies the image that holds the three together. Commenting on the Svacchandatantra, he writes that when anava is present as the wall, the other two arise. The first is the surface the other two are painted on.

He argues for that priority elsewhere in the same commentary, on a verse of the third chapter, and the argument runs from what is observed of liberated knowers. The root verse there sets an order: impurity and karma are the cause, and what comes after them, body and worlds, is the effect. It is Kshemaraja who identifies that effect as the mayiya, and having done so he has to settle which way the dependence runs between the mayiya and karma. He observes that although karma arises when the mayiya is present, it is not caused by it, because in knowers whose awareness has fully expanded the mayiya is still there and no karma is observed to accrue. Karma is therefore accumulated only by those who consider themselves incomplete, which is anava. The order the root verse gives, he concludes, is better than the reverse.

That is a commentator’s argument built on a verse that merely asserts the sequence.

Which soul carries which

The three are not carried by every soul at once, and on the first two rungs of the ladder that results the two hostile schools say the same thing.

A soul joined with the first impurity alone is a vijnanakevalin, and the name says alone-with-knowing. Joined with that and with karma, it is a pralayakevalin, alone-at-the-dissolution. Carrying all three, it is a sakala, the embodied soul in the world. The Malinivijayottara gives the first two rungs in its opening chapter; Ramakantha gives the whole ladder in his commentary on the Kiranatantra.

And Ramakantha adds a fourth case: a soul holding anava and the mayiya with karma gone, which keeps its body, he says, by the force of residual impressions, as a wheel keeps spinning.

The gradations run finer still at the top. The Mrgendra says a portion of impurity remains in the Vidyeshvaras, the lords of knowledge who stand below Shiva and above the bound soul, and Kshemaraja, commenting on the Svacchandatantra, holds that a trace survives as far up as Shantyatita, the topmost of the five levels into which these texts divide the whole of manifestation.

The question the dualists asked themselves

The framing question of the whole dispute is a verse in a dualist scripture, put in the mouth of a questioner. Maya in it is the dualists’ material cause of the world, a real stuff that Shiva works upon, where a Vedantin would mean an illusion:

tvayanadir malah prokto mayeyo ‘syatmano ‘pi va | gunas tadvyatirikto va malo bruhi kim atmakah

“You have declared impurity to be beginningless. Is it a quality of maya, or of this soul itself, or something distinct from those? Tell me what impurity consists of.”

— Kiranatantra 2.11

That is the question. The two sections that follow are the two schools answering it.

The case that impurity is real

The dualist position argues four claims.

Impurity is one. The Mrgendra says it is one for all beings, beginningless, dense and great, possessed of a collection of powers which reside in each individual self and expire at the end of their own allotted time. Ramakantha says the same in technical prose: impurity is one alone, with many powers, the coverer of many souls.

The Mrgendra’s verse has already conceded something and already answered something. Impurity is one, but its powers are per-soul and expire per-soul. The objection that the destruction of one impurity would liberate everybody at once is the one Abhinavagupta presses hardest, and the dualist reply is in his own pages. At Tantraloka 9.68 he states it in the Mrgendra’s own terms, that impurity carries a per-soul obstructing power, and then refutes it. He states it and refutes it again in his thirteenth chapter. He does not name the Mrgendra.

Impurity is not a principle. The thirty-six tattvas are the closed list of principles this cosmology recognises, and Ramakantha is explicit that impurity is not a tattva separate from the soul-principle, because without impurity there is no bound soul to speak of. But, he says, it most certainly is another thing, a vastvantara: real without being a separate item on the list. Abhinavagupta, in his own text and for his own reasons, also refuses impurity the status of a separate principle. Setting those two statements side by side is this article’s doing, and neither author does it: on the reading offered here the division is over the thing.

Impurity is not a property of the soul, except by figure of speech. The root text asks why impurity should not simply be postulated as a property of the self, and then answers itself in the half-verse that Ramakantha introduces with the words here is the settled doctrine: because of a beginningless connection with the self, it is figuratively called a property. Two half-verses later, with a further objection in between, the root says why it cannot really be one. Were it a property, an evident transformation of the eternal self would follow. The illustration is Ramakantha’s own: a myrobalan turning yellow.

And impurity is real, because otherwise the rite is idle. Impurity is of the nature of a real thing, like a film on the eye; for if it were unreal, then, being eternally absent like a hare’s horn, all of initiation and knowledge and the rest, which are the causes of its removal, would be pointless.

The argument is from ritual efficacy. A rite that removes nothing is not a rite.

From that follows the dualist answer to why the soul is embodied at all. A cloth, the Kiranatantra says, because it has a fault, is purified standing within dirt: malantahstha. Ramakantha rereads that as malantarastha, standing within other dirt, says in so many words that he is rereading it, and names the other dirt: ash and cow-dung. In no way, he adds, is the prior impurity removed without the help of a further impurity. And since a solitary impurity does not ripen, liberation would be impossible; so the bound soul is yoked to bondage in the form of experience precisely in order that the impurity should ripen.

Embodiment exists because impurity will not ripen in the abstract. On this account the world is there in order that it should.

Ramakantha is equally precise about what liberation is. The formula is the manifestation of Shiva-ness, and he specifies what it is not: no transfer into the accomplished, no entry, no arising. An account that has the soul simply becoming Shiva does not report him.

The case that impurity is Shiva’s own concealment

At Tantraloka 9.66 Abhinavagupta writes that impurity, as a real thing, is nothing but the will to conceal one’s own self. He writes it again in the Tantrasara.

He does not say impurity is unreal or an illusion. He calls it real at 9.66, and real again in the Tantrasara, and in that same Tantrasara he calls it insentient, which sits oddly against calling it an act of Shiva’s own will. Whether that is a concession made while he is describing rather than arguing, or an inconsistency, the texts read here do not settle, and both statements stand. His claim against the dualists is narrower and harder than unreality: that impurity is not a separate substance.

Against the substance view he brings a long sequence of arguments. The doctrine, he says at 9.69, is bereft of reason, fabricated by nothing but faith. The verses after it press the case.

A covering does not qualify the thing it covers. It obstructs apprehension, as a cloth covering a pot: he grants the covering image, in its cloth form. Then the dilemma. Consciousness can be covered neither by something formless nor by something with form; and if impurity has form, why is it not perceived? Impurity, being non-autonomous, cannot cover a sentient self, and here he turns the opponent’s own axiom on him: it has been said by you yourselves that an insentient thing is not itself an agent.

Four chapters later he takes the same ground again and goes further. If the knowledge that is to be covered does not know the covering, then the covering is a name and nothing more. If all souls are equally covered by a beginningless impurity, whence the variety of their careers? And if the whole arrangement is established by beginninglessness alone, without reason, then, he says, enough; let this useless impurity go. The quotations in this paragraph come from the thirteenth chapter; the two refutations are separate pieces of work, four chapters apart.

In that thirteenth chapter he also turns on the ripening itself. What would this ripening of impurity be? If it is destruction, then, since it is said that impurity is one, purity would follow for all the other souls as well.

Impurity is one is what Ramakantha and the Mrgendra both say, so the opponent is being quoted on his own words. The dualist reply to that objection has already been set out above.

For the positive picture Abhinavagupta quotes a scripture called the Nishakula:

vyomniva nilam hi malam malashamkam tatas tyajet

“For impurity is like the blue in the sky; therefore abandon the suspicion of impurity.”

— quoted at Tantraloka 13.127

What can a speck of dust lying on a crystal do to the crystal, the same passage asks.

The word that is not in the verse

Every English account of the descent of grace found for this article repeats one formula: grace descends when impurity ripens. The Sanskrit is malaparipaka, and it is treated as scripture. The descent itself is shaktipata, literally the descent of power. Descent of power and descent of grace name the same event here, and both renderings appear below.

The root verse of the Kiranatantra says something else.

same karmani sanjate kalantaravashat tatah | tivrashaktinipatena guruna dikshito yada

“When karma has become equal, then by force of the interval of time, when he is initiated by a teacher with an intense descent of power…”

— Kiranatantra 1.20cd to 1.21ab

Kalantara is an interval of time. The verse says that the descent comes after a lapse of time.

Ramakantha, commenting on exactly that verse, does three things in a row. He etymologises kala, the verse’s word for time, as impurity, on the ground that it blackens, makes dark, makes dirty. He then re-reads kalantara as the transformation of impurity. And he explicitly rules out the temporal reading: the intense descent of power comes from the force of the transformation of impurity, he writes, and not from the force of an interval of time, past or future. Then the conclusion: because it is the ripening of impurity alone that is the cause of the descent of power.

The doctrine the English accounts repeat as scriptural is a commentator’s construal of a word that means something else in the verse he is commenting on. The theory itself is older than Ramakantha and is credited to Sadyojyotih, who was not read for this article at all. What the Kiranatantra commentary shows is how it was fastened to a scripture.

Ramakantha does the same to the other term in the sequence. Karmasamya, the equality of karmas, is usually explained as two contrary karmas of equal strength deadlocking each other. Ramakantha rejects that construal in terms, because a descent of power so caused would not be a cause of liberation, and substitutes moral equanimity, quoting a verse about the man who is neither elated by benefit nor angered by harm. And he gives the term a job: without such equality of karma the teacher cannot ascertain that the descent of power has occurred. Karmasamya becomes the teacher’s diagnostic criterion.

Two further absences belong beside this, and a counted absence is weaker evidence than an argument. The Mrgendra states the doctrine of ripening without using the word paripaka at all, preferring transformation and an idiom of office held and vacated. In the romanised Malinivijayottara the word does not occur either, that text saying instead that the Shaiva power becomes connected with the self by force of fitness.

A third count runs the other way. In the romanised root text of the Svacchandatantra used here paripaka occurs once, of karma, and it occurs twenty-five further times in the Devanagari text of Kshemaraja’s commentary on that scripture, twenty of them in the closing pages of its fifth chapter, which is where Kshemaraja says he treated the question at length. Those pages were not read for this article.

Ripening is not an automatic mechanical process on the dualist account either. The Mrgendra says that no one is liberated while impurity, which it calls the darkness, still holds office, that the office ceases through the transformation of its power, and that this transformation does not occur of itself even in a thing that is capable, because in every way and always the insentient must be employed by consciousness. Shiva superintends the ripening.

Where the Siddhanta has a process, then, the Malinivijayottara has a capacity. The word it uses for that capacity is yogyata, fitness, and it is the word Abhinavagupta turns on impurity at Tantraloka 9.63, where impurity is said to be mere fitness and nothing more. The same word carries the Trika’s own precondition for grace and its refusal to make impurity a thing apart.

Two shapes of an answer

Set the two accounts of the descent of grace side by side and the disagreement takes a shape.

Ramakantha gives a sequence, and he gives it as a single compound: ripening of impurity, descent of power, equality of karma, the inference of that, initiation. Five steps. For a soul bound without a body, he adds, the sequence short-circuits: liberation follows immediately after the ripening, by the descent of power alone. Two steps.

Abhinavagupta gives one arrow. The pure, self-luminous Shiva alone is the cause, and he, by mere autonomy, manifests the gradations. The Tantrasara puts the refusal as a question: suppose the descent occurs upon the ripening of impurity, then what is the nature of that, and what is its cause? By the same argument, he says, the other proposed causes fall too, and he lists them: detachment, a particular merit, discrimination, service of the good, attainment of the good, worship of god. So, he concludes, for the dualists everything is incoherent.

He also leaves a list, at Tantraloka 13.261, of what he takes himself to have refuted: karma, its equality, detachment, the ripening of impurity and the rest.

Kshemaraja presses the same point in his Stavacintamanivivrti, through a series of moves, of which three run as follows. If the Lord’s power causes the ripening, then dispense with the intermediary; the Lord’s power alone will be the autonomous bestower. If the ripening is causeless, why does it not happen to everyone at once? If at some particular time, then since everyone’s bondage is beginningless, why is there no uniform time? These passages were read here only as a modern scholar quotes them.

There is a social corollary on the non-dualist side, and it is in Abhinavagupta’s own verses at Tantraloka 13.116 to 13.118. Without regard to family, caste, body, action, age, observance or wealth, he writes, devotion to Shiva is the descent of power for those who seek no worldly fruit.

Neither side is left without an answer.

Impurity is missing from a number of the oldest Siddhanta scriptures

The English accounts surveyed below do not carry what follows.

Impurity is noticeable by its absence, Dominic Goodall writes, in a number of the earliest surviving Siddhanta scriptures. His entry in the Tantrikabhidhanakosa finds no mention of it in the Nishvasa, in the non-eclectic recensions of the Kalottara, or in what survives of the Rauravasutrasamgraha, and in the Sarvajnanottara he reads the word as meaning karma, against the commentator Aghorashiva. The first surviving Siddhanta in which impurity figures may be the Svayambhuvasutrasamgraha. The claim is about the Siddhanta scriptures: the Malinivijayottara, the Trika’s own root scripture, does name impurity in its first chapter.

That entry was not read here directly; it is quoted from Somadeva Vasudeva, who quotes it in full.

A corroboration comes from inside the primary chain. When Ramakantha needs scriptural authority for the ripening of impurity, he adduces three texts, and one of them is the Svayambhuvasutrasamgraha: precisely the text Goodall names as the first in which impurity figures. It is also the only one of the three whose verse uses the word impurity.

Why the doctrine appeared is a separate question, and the answer currently on offer is one scholar’s. Diwakar Acharya argues that the Shaivas first understood sin as innate impurity, and that under pressure from critics they later treated innate impurity as a separate abstract substance affecting all souls and possessing multiple powers. The critic in question is the Buddhist logician Dharmakirti, who attacked the Shaiva claim that initiation removes sin.

That article is paywalled and was not read here. What is known of it is its abstract and the report of it by Vasudeva, who summarises the development as four stages: innate sin in the early Siddhanta, Dharmakirti’s critique, the three substantial impurities in the later dualist Siddhanta, and the three forms of ignorance among the non-dualists. His own summary sentence: the non-dualists inherited the theory and, on the authority of the Malinivijayottara, re-interpreted the defilements as three forms of ignorance.

No scholar reachable for this article contends that the three-impurity doctrine is early, original or scripturally foundational. It is simply assumed to be, by every devotional and instructional source found here.

Who fixed the triad

Four different hands are visible in the phrase the three malas, and only one of them is a root scripture’s.

The Svacchandatantra says pashatraya, the triad of bonds. Its fourth chapter uses the word impurity of one of the three, and it is Kshemaraja, glossing it, who extends the word to all of them. Its chapter three says the bonds are threefold, born of maya, of the atom and of karma, the three technical words standing inside a single compound that qualifies bonds; Kshemaraja, glossing that chapter, takes the atom there to be the soul that considers itself incomplete. The Malinivijayottara lists four things and calls only the first of them an impurity. And the dualists’ own count of the bonds is not three: Ramakantha, on the first chapter of the Kiranatantra, lists five, adding maya and the power of concealment to the three.

The triad is in root scripture all the same, and in one text it is there in full. The Netratantra says at 19.145, in so many words, that impurity is threefold: anava, karma and mayiya. Verses later in that chapter carry the word malatraya, the triad of impurities, and so do verses in the chapter after it. One of those, at 20.18, Abhinavagupta quotes as scripture at Tantraloka 16.60, attributing it to the Mrtyunjaya, which is this same scripture’s other name and stands on the title page of the edition used here. His wording of the line differs slightly from the Netratantra’s. So the word is not a commentator’s coinage.

Two cautions belong with that. The Netratantra is held here in a single scanned text and in no second witness, and while the chapter numbers above are fixed by colophons, the verse numbers are read off an optical scan and should be treated as provisional. And the formula is absent from the two other root texts searched for it here, the Svacchandatantra and the Malinivijayottara.

A different formula recurs in the Svacchandatantra itself: impurity, karma and kala, the limiting principle of portions, standing as a compound through the tenth and eleventh chapters. That compound is what the text habitually says, where the summaries give the standard triad. The loci are the text’s; calling the compound its habitual formula is this article’s characterisation. It is Kshemaraja who maps that kala onto the mayiya, and he does it twice, independently, within the same commentary.

The definitions are a separate matter, and the attribution to Utpaladeva is premodern and explicit: Varadaraja writes, in so many words, that this triad of impurity is stated in the Ishvarapratyabhijna. Two of the three definitions given in Utpaladeva’s name are not his own wording. His anava is autonomy gone out of awareness and awareness gone out of autonomy, where the modern accounts have the sense of being incomplete; his karma impurity is non-awareness in the agent, where they have a deposit of traces. The mayiya is the one definition they do inherit from him in his own phrase, bhinnavedyapratha, the display of what is known as separate. The traces of good and bad acts are supplied over him, by Kshemaraja, by Jayaratha and by Varadaraja, each in his own words.

The verse numbers do not belong to anybody premodern. Kshemaraja quotes the verses and says only “in the Pratyabhijna”. Mahesvarananda, in the prose commentary on his own Maharthamanjari, quotes one of them and says the same. Jayaratha says only “it has been said”, naming no work at all. The numbers that appear beside these quotations in modern editions, 3.2.4 and 3.2.5 in the copies used here, are the modern editors’ brackets, and a sentence of the form “Kshemaraja cites Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika 3.2.4” quietly credits a tenth-century commentator with a twentieth-century apparatus.

One loose thread here could not be tied. Jayaratha quotes Malinivijayottara 1.16 in a form that contains the word anavam, where the text as transmitted in both witnesses consulted reads otherwise. If Jayaratha’s copy really read that way, the Trika’s root scripture named an impurity by one of the three technical words as well, which would make the Netratantra less of an exception than it looks. The divergence could not be resolved here, and it stays open.

What the English accounts say

English Wikipedia has no article on this doctrine under any plausible title. Searches of English Wikipedia on 28 October 2026 for malatraya and malaparipaka returned no hits. A plain web search for the doctrine on the same day returned, on its first page, four yoga sites, a page on Jain philosophy and an unrelated journal article. None of them works from a primary text.

The general page that does rank is English Wikipedia’s article on the Trika. It carries about twenty-seven sentences on the three, cites no primary text and no verse for any of them, and spells the impurity with the rosary’s long first vowel. Set its three definitions beside the texts:

It says the karma impurity manifests the physical body. The Svacchandatantra makes body and world the mayiya.

It says the mayiya impurity manifests as the mind. The Svacchandatantra describes the mayiya as having the form of body and worlds; Ramakantha counts it as thirty principles and three hundred and ninety worlds.

It says the anava impurity is manifested as residual impressions. Residual impressions are the standard definition of the karma impurity, and anava is objectless in both of Abhinavagupta’s own statements of it, the Tantraloka’s and the Tantrasara’s.

No scholar was found who has written about that page, and the comparison above is this article’s own. It is offered as a set of loci a reader can check.

The one modern English account found to be substantially careful is Jaideva Singh’s, in the apparatus to his translation of the Shiva Sutras, where anava is the primal limiting condition, mayiya gives the soul its gross and subtle body, and karma is the impressions of actions. He also marks the limit: the ignorance in question is a limited and vitiated knowledge, and not the total absence of knowledge.

What could not be read

Some things bearing directly on this were out of reach.

No edition of the Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika was held here, and no verse of it is quoted anywhere above; of the four later authors who quote it, three name the work and one does not. Diwakar Acharya’s article, the one piece of scholarship devoted to this question, is paywalled, and what is reported of its argument comes from its abstract and from another scholar’s summary. Kshemaraja’s longest treatment of grace, the tract at the end of the fifth chapter of his Svacchanda commentary, was not read.

And the Parakhyatantra, another dualist scripture bearing directly on the question, was not reached at all.

What the dispute was for

A quarrel over whether impurity is a substance can look like metaphysics for its own sake. Both schools are arguing about what a rite does. Ramakantha’s initiation alone and his eye-doctor are the point of his argument here: if impurity is not a real thing, then knowledge and yoga and renunciation cannot be ruled out as means, and the rite is not necessary. Abhinavagupta’s refusal of the intermediate terms is the point of his: if Shiva’s autonomy is the only cause, then no ripening and no equality of karma and no accumulated merit can be made a precondition of grace, and the rite does not purchase anything.

One system needs impurity to be real so that the surgery is real. The other needs it not to be a separate thing so that grace stays free.

They never settled it. The two men were in the same city in the same generation, using the same image, and no text has been found in which either names the other on this question.

The film on the eye is still there.