Utpaladeva

Utpaladeva (c. 900–950 CE) was an Indian philosopher and theologian from Kashmir. He belonged to the Trika Shaiva tradition and is the most important thinker of the Pratyabhijñā school of monistic idealism. His Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā (IPK, Verses on the Recognition of the Lord) were the most important and central work of the Pratyabhijñā school. Utpaladeva was a major influence on the great exegete Abhinavagupta, whose works later overshadowed those of Utpaladeva. However, according to the Indologist Raffaele Torella "most of Abhinavagupta’s ideas are just the development of what Utpaladeva had already expounded." Torella characterizes Utpaladeva's philosophy as a "unique blend of epistemology, metaphysics, religious experience, linguistic philosophy and aesthetic speculation." For Utpaladeva, the supreme reality, Shiva, is "an absolute I", the atman, a singular subject or consciousness. As Torella notes, Utpaladeva constantly works to prove, contra the Buddhists, that there is "a single, dynamic subject that unifies and animates the discontinuity of reality and constitutes the substratum of every limited subject, as well as of every form and activity of everyday life." Utpaladeva's view of God is stated in the Īśvarapratyabhijñā-Kārikā:There is only one Great Divinity, and it is the very inner Self of all creatures. It embodies itself as all things, full of unbroken awareness of three kinds: “I”, “this”, and “I am this.”According to Torella, another important and original contribution of Utpaladeva is his doctrine of "abhasas" (light, radiance, manifestations), which sees everything as radiant manifestations of the ultimate consciousness of Shiva which is their necessary foundation. Each "manifestation" is a kind of universal and is connected with a specific Sanskrit word. Torella also notes however that the term abhasa was not a new term "but was commonly used in the Vedantic and Buddhist schools." Torella explains Utpaladeva's view of God as follows:This I or Consciousness is, on the religious plane, Siva.