THE TANTRIC PHILOSOPHY OF ABHINAVA GUPTA
Tantra: The word
can be used
for any systematic instruction; it is not used as the name of a single
school
of philosophy or of yoga. However,
views and texts concerned with yoga and mystic philosophy outside the
orthodox
Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga and their classifications of revelation
which
distinguish sruti the Veda and
the
Upanishads from smrti
the Gita and other
texts were, and
are, commonly
called Tantric. Tantric texts
usually recognize the authority of the Upanishads, etc., but see a
greater
authority in later revelations and personal yogic experience. Among the clusters of features
belonging to most if not all Tantric views are an emphasis on a
feminine divine
being or principle, called the Goddess and Shakti, who secures a
yogin's
enlightenment and transformation. Bhoga,
"enjoyment," is
usually said to be as important a part of the goal of yogic practice as
"liberation" (mukti) from
spiritual ignorance (brahmasaksatkara, according
to
Hindus). Tantric psychology came
to be centered on a yogic or "subtle" or occult body comprised of
canals, nadi-s for prana and sakti, and centers
or wheels,
cakra-s,
of occult consciousness and energy.
There are Buddhist and Jaina Tantric texts and views as well as
Hindu. Hindu Tantrism divides into
the Saivite and the Vaisnavite as well as into numerous subcategories
of
guru-student-guru lineage as well as of philosophy and mystic practice.
Mudra: See
xpacket, Paul
Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heaert of Siva. "Seal," "gesture."
According to Abhinava, the Absolute, Shiva, expresses, or
impresses like
a signet ring a seal in wax, the enlightenment of the individual on the
individual (in gesture or speech, mantra), in what he calls Sambhavi-mudra, the "seal
of the
Absolute."
Sakti (pronounced
shuk-tee): "Energy," "power."
According to Abhinava, the Divine Mother, the active and
creative side
of Shiva.
***
The
great Tantric master, Abhinava Gupta, reformulated the Saiva Siddhanta
of the Kirana
Tantra and
other early Tantric texts (which import the dualism of Samkhya) into a
monistic
spiritual philosophy of a Divine Creatrix or Shakti, creating a divine
individual (cf., Aurobindo's notion of a `"psychic being").