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| Arunachala. It embodies stillness, purity beyond purity, and the dissolution of all dualities. |
Vira Chandra: There are passages in the Tantrāloka where Abhinavagupta speaks like a thunderbolt and a mother in the same breath. The cluster of verses 4.215–224 is one of those rare places. At first they seem to strip away every standard of purity and religious duty: “Whether you wear matted locks or not, it is not the vow… Nothing here is commanded or forbidden… The yogin remains untouched, like water on a lotus leaf.” If read too quickly, one might take them as a license for carelessness or even pride. But that is not their heart.
These verses are not against ordinary cleanliness or discipline. The play of the guṇas is still real. A mind overwhelmed by tamas — heaviness, dullness, disorder — cannot easily open to the inner flame. For one who is not yet free, basic harmony in body and mind is helpful, even essential. The texts do not dismiss that.
What Abhinava is shaking here is something subtler: the hidden pride that clings to sattva, the belief that meticulous purity alone makes one closer to God. Sri Ramakrishna once told the parable of the three robbers — tamas, rajas, and sattva. Tamas seeks to destroy, rajas binds, and sattva rescues and shows the way home. But even sattva, he said, is still a robber. It cannot enter the house of Brahman; it can only point from afar. To mistake sattva for the goal is to stop on the road before reaching home.
Bhagavan Ramana saw this too. When his mother Azhagammal clung to her orthodox purity rules, he teased her gently: “Be careful — perhaps an onion will block your way to heaven!” His playful compassion was to show her that holiness does not live or die with onions, clan rules, or ritual boundaries. These may support, but they cannot deliver realization.
So many of us, out of sincerity, become anxious about such things. We want to be pure, to be worthy, to do everything right. But anxiety is not freedom. Abhinava’s verses come as a kind of balm. They whisper: Do not worry so much about what is pure or impure. Beyond all of that, there is only the shining play of Consciousness itself.
And with that assurance, we can turn now to the verses themselves, listening as if the Goddess were speaking directly — sometimes laughing, sometimes cutting, always freeing.
Verses 4.215 – 4.220
saparigrahatā vā api jaṭā-bhasmādi-saṃgrahaḥ /
tat-tyāgo na vratādīnāṃ caraṇa-ācaraṇaṃ ca yat ॥ [4.215]
“Whether one takes on outer tokens—matted locks, sacred ash—and the like,
or casts them off, such adopting and discarding is not what constitutes vows and observances.”
kṣetrādi-saṃpraveśaś ca samayādi-prapālanam /
para-svarūpa-liṅgādi nāma-gotrādikaṃ ca yat ॥ [4.216]
“Entering sacred precincts, guarding initiatory rules, attending to marks of another’s essential nature, names, family lineage—”
nāsmin vidhīyate kiñcin na cāpi pratiṣidhyate /
vihitaṃ sarvam evātra pratiṣiddham athāpi ca ॥ [4.217]
“—nothing here is positively enjoined, nor is anything forbidden;
everything is at once prescribed and proscribed.”
kiṃ tv etad atra deveśi niyamena vidhīyate /
tattve cetaḥ sthirīkāryaṃ suprasannena yoginā ॥ [4.218]
“Only this, O Goddess-of-the-gods, is laid down with strict insistence:
the yogin, mind made crystal-clear, must steady his awareness in Reality.”
tac ca yasya yathaiva syāt sa tathaiva samācaret /
tattve niścalacittas tu bhuñjāno viṣayān api ॥ [4.219]
“And whatever suits each person, let him act precisely so;
but one whose thought rests unshaken in the Real—though he enjoy the sense-fields—”
na saṃspṛśyeta doṣaiḥ sa padma-patram ivāmbhasā /
viṣāpahāri-mantrādisamnaddho bhakṣayan api ॥ [4.220]
“—is not touched by fault, like water on a lotus leaf;
just as a man fortified by antidote-mantras can swallow poison unharmed.”
Jayaratha, our ever-diligent commentator, suddenly goes quiet here. On 4.215–220, he leaves no words. His notes resume only with the purity–impurity debate at 4.221. That silence is not an accident. When Abhinavagupta pulls the floor out from under all vows and ritual props, Jayaratha simply lets it stand, unpadded. Perhaps he thought: ‘Best not to scribble on the Goddess’s punchline.’
But since I’m less disciplined than Jayaratha—and maybe a bit more talkative—I’ll risk saying something anyway…
In these verses Abhinavagupta takes us gently but decisively into the heart of Kaula freedom. The sequence begins by dismissing the importance of outward symbols: matted locks, ashes, clan marks, vows performed or vows abandoned. He says, almost with a smile: this is not the essence of a vow. The path does not lie in hair or in ash, in keeping or in dropping customs.
It is a disarming reminder: so much of our spiritual anxiety comes from dressing ourselves up in symbols, from struggling to decide whether we must hold on to them or renounce them. Abhinavagupta cuts through both, declaring them equally irrelevant. The Goddess does not live in your ash or in your lineage; She lives in your own awareness.
Then comes the thunderbolt: “Nothing is enjoined. Nothing is forbidden. All is at once prescribed and proscribed.” Here the structure of religion itself is dissolved. Commandments and prohibitions belong to a world where the Self is seen as a doer who must be restrained, guided, punished, rewarded. But when the Self is seen as Bhairava—unbounded, luminous, spontaneous—those categories collapse. This is not chaos, but a deeper order. It is the Mother removing the fence from around the child’s playfield, not because She no longer cares, but because She trusts the ripeness of the child’s heart.
Yet, Abhinavagupta does not leave us in a void. After tearing down all commands and prohibitions, he gives one true injunction: “The yogin must steady his mind in the Reality, with a heart made clear.” This is the only vow. Not a vow to ash, or to a sect, or to the anxieties of ritual purity—but to Truth itself. And once the heart rests there, everything else becomes natural.
From here, the verses turn to the life of such a yogin. He does whatever suits his nature. He can eat, laugh, love, work, quarrel, sing. Nothing in his life is outside the scope of practice, for he abides unmoved in Reality. The metaphors are tender and exact: just as a lotus leaf stays untouched by the water around it, just as a man fortified by a protective mantra swallows poison unharmed—so the realized yogin lives amidst the world, enjoying its flavors without being stained.
This is the Kaula secret. Integration, not suppression. Not fleeing from poison, not blindly guzzling it either—but standing so firm in the Heart that even poison becomes nectar. Heaven and hell, purity and impurity, vow and non-vow, all are swallowed, digested, and returned as radiance.
These verses are not a rejection of practice; they are the maturity of practice. They sing of a state where the only discipline left is remembrance, the only purity is awareness, the only vow is love of the Real.
Verse 4.221
aśuddhaṃ hi kathaṃ nāma dehādyaṃ pāñcabhautikam ॥
prakāśatātirikte kiṃ śuddhy-aśuddhī hi vastunaḥ ॥ [4.221]
“How could the body and the rest—made of the five elements—be intrinsically impure?
Apart from sheer Manifestation, what ‘purity’ or ‘impurity’ could a thing possess?”
Jayaratha in the commentary is basically saying:
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The body and everything material is made from the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space).
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These five are just expressions of pure awareness (prakāśa).
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From the standpoint of awareness, “pure” and “impure” aren’t real qualities of things. They are mental labels, not built into the fabric of reality.
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Everyday people still talk about “this is pure, that is impure,” but that’s only social convention, not ultimate truth.
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If purity or impurity were truly real properties, they could never change—an impure thing could never become pure, just as blue can never become “non-blue.”
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The scriptures that speak of cleansing gems with fire or water, or cleansing objects with clay or ash, are valid only in that conventional, social sense.
So in short: purity and impurity belong to our human perspective, not to reality itself. From the standpoint of the Absolute, the body and the world are neither pure nor impure—they are simply shining expressions of Consciousness.
Vira Chandra: When the Devi whispers through these verses, She is not scolding us for using words like “pure” or “impure.” She knows that in daily life we wash our hands, we clean the house, we call one food clean and another unclean. She doesn’t deny any of that. She only leans closer and says: “But child, don’t mistake these habits for truth itself.”
Your body is not impure. Your body is not pure. It is made of the same five elements as mountains and rivers and stars. And all of these are just the dance of Her light. To call them pure or impure is like calling sunlight “clean” or “dirty.”
We can still speak the language of the world, because the world is full of rules and customs. But deep inside, the yogin smiles. He knows that the one who calls something impure and the thing that is called impure are both made of the same radiance.
This is freedom—not the freedom of carelessness, but the freedom of seeing the Goddess in everything. Then nothing can really stain you, nothing can really defile you. You wash because you care for your body, not because your body is bad. You clean the temple floor, not because dust is sinful, but because the act itself is worship.
The Kaula secret is not that impurity disappears—it is that impurity never really existed. There was only ever the shimmering play of Śakti.
Verse 4.222
aśuddhasya ca bhāvasya śuddhiḥ syāt tādṛśaiva kim ॥
anyonyāśraya-vaiyarthya-anavasthā ittham atra hi ॥ [4.222]
“If an impure entity must be purified by something of its own kind that is likewise impure, what then? Here we meet mutual dependence, futility, and endless regress.”
Simple exposition of Jayaratha's commentary: Here Abhinavagupta pushes the logic further. If you say, “This impure thing must be purified by something else,” but that other thing is also impure—then you are stuck.
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Example: Earth is purified by water.
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But if water itself is impure, then it must be purified by something else—maybe fire, or another substance.
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But those too might be impure. So the chain goes on forever, each thing depending on another.
Jayaratha calls this a trap of mutual dependence, futility, and infinite regress.
So: If impurity were a real property, you could never actually fix it—because everything made of elements shares the same “flaw.”
Vira Chandra: Here the Goddess is chuckling softly. She is showing us the absurdity of our own fears. We try so hard to keep ourselves “clean”—washing, purifying, avoiding “bad” things. But if impurity were truly built into matter, no amount of washing would ever suffice. One impurity would always call another to clean it, which in turn would need cleaning itself. A hopeless circle.
Abhinavagupta is holding up a mirror to our rituals of endless cleansing and saying: “Child, don’t you see? If impurity were real, you could never wash it away. But look closer—what you call impurity is just a habit of mind, not a truth of Being.”
This is not to ridicule human customs. We still wash our hands, we still clean our houses, we still perform purifications in ritual life. But Kaula whispers: these acts are play, not necessity. They are gestures of reverence, not repairs of a broken universe.
The yogin who rests in Reality knows this. He can perform a ritual bath with sincerity, or he can walk into the cremation ground with the same ease. Both are clean in the Mother’s eyes, because both are Her.
The deeper tenderness of this verse is that it lifts a burden from our shoulders. We don’t have to endlessly prove ourselves pure. We don’t have to scrub and scrub the soul. For how can you wash light? The body, the elements, the world—they were never defiled. They are already the play of Śakti, sparkling, whole.
Verses 4.223 & 4.224
pṛthivī jalataḥ śuddhyed jalaṃ dharaṇitas tathā ॥ [4.223]
anyonyāśrayatā seyam aśuddhatve’ py ayaṃ kramaḥ ॥
aśuddhāj jalataḥ śuddhyed dhareti vyarthatā bhavet ॥ [4.224]
“Earth would then be purified by water, and water in turn by earth—
this is sheer mutual dependence.
If impure water must purify impure earth, the exercise is futile.”
Jayaratha explains: this chain doesn’t stop with earth and water. You could say air purifies water, fire purifies air, space purifies fire, and so on without end. If every purifier is itself impure, then purification never succeeds. What you get is:
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Anyonyāśraya – mutual dependence (A depends on B, B on A).
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Vaiyarthya – futility (no real change is happening).
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Anavasthā – infinite regress (the chain goes on forever).
This shows impurity cannot be a real, inherent property—otherwise no thing could ever be “purified.”
Vira Chanrda: Here the Goddess turns logic into a playful riddle. “If the impure must be cleansed by something else impure, how will you ever be finished?” she teases. It is like trying to wash a black cloth with ink. Or trying to clean smoke with more smoke.
Abhinavagupta lets reason itself carry you to exhaustion: if earth is cleansed by water, and water by earth, and both are impure—then nothing has been solved. If you keep going—air by fire, fire by space—you are left with an endless ladder climbing into nowhere.
This is more than philosophy. It is compassion. For how many of us live trapped in this very cycle—always scrubbing, always afraid of stain, always seeking another ritual to make us worthy? The Kaula path reveals the futility of this chase. If impurity were real, no act could remove it. But since it is not, all your washing was play all along.
And so the Goddess invites you to relax. Bathe if you wish, smear ash if you wish, but do it as līlā, as delight—not as a desperate attempt to repair a broken soul. You were never broken. You are already as luminous as the sky.
In these verses Devi laughs at our seriousness. “Child, you cannot launder infinity. You cannot bleach the elements. You cannot purify what is already Me.”
Conclusion
Abhinavagupta’s words are not a call to neglect or to scorn ordinary purity. They are a reminder that no matter how carefully we guard our boundaries, wash our bodies, or polish our symbols, none of that is the essence. Purity is useful, even beautiful, but it is not the Truth.
The real vow is not written in ash or inscribed in lineage. It is written in the steadiness of the heart resting in Reality. Once that steadiness is there, the yogin may eat, bathe, laugh, work, love — all becomes clean in the light of Consciousness. Like water sliding off a lotus, nothing truly clings.
To read these verses with tenderness is to feel a great burden slip away. We need not prove ourselves to God with spotless rituals. We need only remember — again and again — that all things are already Her play. Even our mistakes, even our fumbling attempts to be holy.
And so the text concludes not with rejection, but with freedom. A freedom gentle as water, strong as mantra, playful as the Goddess Herself. A freedom that allows us to live simply, to breathe easily, to know: There was never impurity in the first place. There was only Her light, shining in every form.
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