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Mālinīvijayottara

The root scripture of the Trika — the three goddesses, the garland of letters in broken order, the three immersions, and the one text on which Abhinavagupta founded everything he wrote.

Abhinavagupta opens the Tantrāloka by declaring that everything in it is drawn from the Mālinīvijayottara. He says it more than once, and he means it as a principle rather than a courtesy. On his account this is the highest authority of the Trika and the text against which the whole of the rest of the tradition — including his own thirty-seven chapters — is to be measured.

The nameमालिनीविजयोत्तर

Mālinī is a garland, and specifically the garland of letters: an arrangement of the fifty phonemes of Sanskrit in which vowels and consonants are interwoven instead of being kept in their natural order. Vijaya is her victory; uttara marks this as the latter or higher portion of a longer revelation. The goddess Mālinī is that arrangement personified — she wears the letters, and the letters are what she is.

Mātṛkā and mālinī

Against the mālinī stands the mātṛkā, the alphabet in sequence: the sixteen vowels, then the consonants from ka to kṣa. The distinction between the two orders is not clerical, and everything in the Trika's practice depends on it.

In the mātṛkā the vowels stand apart from the consonants. The vowels are the Śiva-letters, called bīja, seed; the consonants are the Śakti-letters, called yoni, womb; and the sequence runs from the first to the last as the tattvas run from Śiva down to earth. Mātṛkā is the alphabet as ordered emanation. It is also, in the Śaiva analysis, the alphabet as the machinery of bondage — for it is the letters that fabricate the distinctions of the world, and the same letters that fabricate the vikalpas by which a subject binds itself without noticing.

In the mālinī the same fifty phonemes appear in a wholly different order, running from na to pha — hence her epithet nādiphāntā, she who begins with na and ends with pha. Vowels and consonants are saṃkīrṇa, commingled, scattered through one another with no derivable rule. The order cannot be worked out. It has to be received from a teacher, which is itself part of the point.

The three goddessesपरा · परापरा · अपरा

Parāपरा · supreme

Undivided consciousness; pure light with nothing set over against it. She is visualised white. Her mantra is the single syllable SAUḤ, which Abhinavagupta analyses as containing the whole of reality in three moments — s the entire field of existent things, au the triad of will, knowledge and action, and the final ḥ the emission by which consciousness pours itself out as a world without ceasing to be itself.

Parāparāपरापरा · supreme-and-not

The middle: unity holding difference within itself without being broken by it. Visualised red. Her vidyā addresses her as at once mild and terrible, and the pairing is the doctrine — she is the point at which the same reality is simultaneously the one and the many. The most characteristic of the three, and by common consent the hardest.

Aparāअपरा · not-supreme

The world of distinct objects and separate subjects, visualised dark and fierce. Not a fall and not an error: the same reality in its outward-facing aspect, which is why the Trika can treat ordinary experience as material for practice rather than as an obstacle to be removed.

The trika, the triad, is these three, and the school takes its name from them. They are not three deities arranged in a hierarchy so much as three depths at which one reality can be met — and in the characteristic Trika visualisation they are seated on the three prongs of a trident that rises through the practitioner's own body, which makes the relation between them spatial and immediate rather than theoretical.

The three immersionsसमावेश

The framework the whole later tradition works within comes from the second chapter of this text, where the scripture distinguishes three kinds of samāveśa — immersion, absorption, being entered by and entering into the divine. Its definition of the highest is quoted by Abhinavagupta again and again:

The other two are defined in the same place and with the same economy. The śākta immersion is reached by contemplating with the mind alone a reality that has no utterance in it — thought working on thought until construction exhausts itself. The āṇava proceeds by five named supports: uccāra, the upward movement of breath and sounded mantra; karaṇa, the disposition of the body; dhyāna, visualisation; varṇa, the phonemes; and sthāna-prakalpanā, the construction of place. Abhinavagupta devotes an entire chapter of the Tantrāloka to each of the five in turn.

And the fourth

The familiar scheme of four means is Abhinavagupta's, not the scripture's. The Mālinīvijayottara teaches three immersions. To them he prefixes anupāya, the non-means — the case of one for whom no method is required at all, in whom recognition occurs on hearing a single sentence — and argues that it is implicit in what the scripture says rather than added to it. Whether that is exegesis or extension is a fair question, and it is the kind of question his whole method invites.

Abhinavagupta's declaration

The ten are the Śiva-bheda Āgamas, the eighteen the Rudra-bheda, the sixty-four the Bhairava tantras: the whole Śaiva revelation, funnelled in one verse to a single point. Elsewhere in the same opening chapter he states flatly that there is nothing in the Tantrāloka which is not already in the Mālinīvijayottara. Taken as a bibliographical claim this is plainly false, and he cannot have thought otherwise — the Krama material, the Kaula chapters, the metaphysics of recognition and the theory of aesthetic experience are not in this scripture in any ordinary sense. Taken as a hermeneutical principle it is exactly what he intends: this text is the criterion, and anything that cannot be shown to follow from it has no standing.

Why this text, and not another

The Mālinīvijayottara is at once a revealed Āgama and a Trika scripture, and that double status is precisely what let Abhinavagupta build on it. Against the Siddhānta he could claim revelation of the highest kind — this is not a treatise, not a human composition, not an inference, but Śiva speaking — while expounding a non-dual doctrine the Saiddhāntikas would never have granted him. Against rival non-dualists he could claim a scripture rather than a lineage-secret.

But the text is not explicitly non-dual on every page, and this is where the interest lies. Much of it is ritual prescription that a dualist could read without discomfort. The work of showing that it nonetheless implies the whole non-dual system is Abhinavagupta's own, and he knew it was work. That is what the Mālinīślokavārttika is for.

The Mālinīślokavārttika

The Mālinīślokavārttika is Abhinavagupta's commentary in verse on the Mālinīvijayottara, and it never gets past the opening of the first chapter. It expands the scripture's first words at very great length into a full theory of revelation: what it is for a text to be revealed, how a single Śiva can be the speaker of scriptures that contradict one another, how the descent of grace works, and why the Trika stands at the head of the whole hierarchy. It survives incomplete, and it is unclear whether more was ever written.

It is tempting to read the fragment less as an abandoned project than as a demonstration of its own thesis: if the first verse really does contain the system, then a commentary that establishes as much has, in a sense, finished. Jürgen Hanneder's edition and translation of the first portion (Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Revelation, 1998) is the way into it for a reader who wants to see the argument at first hand.

The Siddhayogeśvarīmata behind it

The surviving text presents itself as the uttara, the latter portion, of a longer Mālinīvijaya which does not survive; whether a pūrva ever circulated as a separate book is not settled, and the tradition's own statements on the point are not consistent. Behind both stands the Siddhayogeśvarīmata, the older Trika scripture of the siddhayogeśvarīs, the perfected yoginīs — a text Abhinavagupta also cites as authoritative and which survives only in part. Judit Törzsök's critical edition and translation of selected chapters made its contents accessible for the first time.

The relation between the two is instructive. The Siddhayogeśvarīmata belongs recognisably to the yoginī cult of the Vidyāpīṭha, with its possession, its impure substances and its cremation-ground setting. The Mālinīvijayottara covers much of the same ground with that material markedly reduced: the yoginīs are present, the transgressive rite is not what the book is about. Alexis Sanderson has argued that this is deliberate — a redaction that makes the Trika presentable, closer in tone to the Siddhānta whose ritual respectability it wanted.

The scripture on which Abhinavagupta founded his entire system was therefore, by the standards of its own class, the moderate one. That is not incidental to the choice. A man arguing for the highest doctrine in front of a learned and largely conservative audience chose the least embarrassing available authority, and then extracted the highest doctrine from it.

The text and its edition

The Mālinīvijayottara runs to twenty-three chapters. Beyond the celebrated second, they range over the extraction of mantras from the mālinī and the mātṛkā, initiation, the ordering of the tattvas and the levels of the cosmos, the six-limbed yoga, the siddhis and the signs by which possession by the deity is recognised, the yoginīs, and a large body of ritual detail.

It was printed in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies as volume XXXVII in 1922, edited by Madhusūdan Kaul Śāstrī. It appears there without a commentary, because none survives: the Mālinīślokavārttika covers only the opening, and Jayaratha's Viveka on the Tantrāloka — which quotes the scripture constantly — is the nearest thing to a running exegesis that exists. The edition rests on a small number of Kashmirian manuscripts and its text is corrupt in places.