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| Lotus flowers prepared for pūjā— image of ritual not as something opposed to realization, but as one of the forms through which it may be embodied. |
The Beautiful Half of the Argument
A few days ago I came across a thoughtful post on the Kashmir Śaivism subreddit entitled “You Never Outgrow Rituals: A Gem from Abhinavagupta’s Tantrasāra.” It is worth reading in full before continuing here. Read the original Reddit post
The author begins from an observation that I think is genuinely important. When people first encounter Kashmir Śaivism—especially through texts such as the Vijñānabhairava—it is very easy to bring with us a rather generic picture of what “nonduality” is supposed to look like.
Silent contemplation seems higher than ritual. The internal seems higher than the external. Formlessness seems higher than form. Meditation seems spiritual, while flowers, incense, mantra, nyāsa, mudrā, bodily gestures, visualization and the careful construction of a ritual space begin to look like preliminary devices which a mature practitioner ought eventually to leave behind.
And thus, rather ironically, nonduality itself becomes organized around another duality.
The author of the post puts the problem beautifully:
“The point is not primarily whether you perform rituals or not, but for you to eradicate the false distinction in your mind between the higher and lower, external and internal, transcendent and immanent practices.”
I think there is something very valuable here.
It is certainly difficult to understand Abhinavagupta if we imagine liberation simply as an ascent away from manifestation. Bhairava is not a transcendent reality standing opposite the world. The innumerable forms appearing within experience are not something that has somehow fallen outside him. The movement from unity into multiplicity is itself the freedom of consciousness.
And precisely this objection arises in the thirteenth chapter of Abhinavagupta's Tantrasāra.
Having described the internal worship in which the practitioner enters the supreme, “waveless” condition, Abhinavagupta anticipates a natural question:
tenaitad anavakāśaṃ yad āhuḥ: ataraṅgarūḍhau labdhāyāṃ punaḥ kiṃ tattvasṛṣṭinyāsādineti
“Thus there is no room for the objection: ‘Once establishment in the waveless state has been attained, what further purpose is served by the nyāsa of the tattvas according to the sequence of emanation, and so forth?’”
The objection is easy to understand.
If the practitioner has already entered the non-conceptual recognition of Bhairava, why return to multiplicity? Why construct tattvas again? Why perform nyāsa upon the body? Why offer flowers, incense and libations? If one has reached the ocean, why concern oneself again with its waves?
Abhinavagupta's answer is remarkable:
tāvad dhi tad ataraṅgaṃ bhairavavapur yat svātmany avabhāsitasṛṣṭisaṃhāravaicitryakoṭi
“That waveless state is indeed the very body of Bhairava, who manifests within himself countless varieties of emanation and reabsorption.”
The point is subtle.
The “waveless” is not opposed to the waves.
Bhairava does not become more himself when manifestation disappears. His transcendence is not purchased by excluding his own manifestation. The very consciousness resting without differentiation is also the consciousness which freely unfolds itself as body, breath, intellect, senses, worlds, deities, mantras and the innumerable movements of experience.
The many never really departed from the One.
And so Abhinavagupta continues:
evam anyonyamelakayogena parameśvarībhūtaṃ prāṇadehabuddhyādi bhāvayitvā bahir antaḥ puṣpadhūpatarpaṇādyair yathāsambhavaṃ pūjayet
“Thus, through the yoga of mutually uniting the two, having contemplated the breath, body, intellect and so forth as having become the Supreme Goddess, one should worship, externally and internally, with flowers, incense, libations and so forth, according to one's capacity.”
This is a beautiful passage.
The movement is not from ritual to something that renders ritual contemptible. Nor is it from the embodied world toward some purified consciousness from which body and world have finally been removed.
Rather, the practitioner first recognizes the “waveless” nature of Bhairava and then learns to recognize the waves themselves as nothing other than that same Bhairava.
The breath is Parameśvarī.
The body is Parameśvarī.
The intellect is Parameśvarī.
The flower placed before the deity does not stand outside consciousness. Neither does the hand offering it, the fragrance of the incense, the mantra being pronounced, nor the awareness within which the entire ritual appears.
Seen in this way, ritual can cease to be merely an action performed in order to reach the sacred. It can become one of the ways in which the sacred recognizes its own manifestation.
This is, I think, the strongest insight of the Reddit post.
And it is an important corrective to a tendency that sometimes appears in modern presentations of Kashmir Śaivism: taking the most radical statements of the Vijñānabhairava, the Pratyabhijñā, or the higher upāyas and quietly constructing from them a new hierarchy in which formless awareness is spiritually respectable while embodied practice is tolerated only as a concession to those who have not yet understood.
Abhinavagupta's vision is much too expansive for that.
But there is another danger here, almost the mirror image of the first.
Having correctly understood that ritual need not be discarded when recognition dawns, we might conclude that Abhinavagupta is telling us something stronger: that external ritual therefore remains universally necessary; that one never truly passes beyond it; or that the realized practitioner must continue performing it precisely because manifestation is also Bhairava.
And this is where the matter becomes more interesting.
Because if we simply continue reading the very same chapter of the Tantrasāra, Abhinavagupta begins to qualify the picture.
When What Had to Be Done Has Been Done
The qualification comes only a few verses later, and it is worth allowing Abhinavagupta to speak for himself.
After describing increasingly internalized forms of worship, he writes:
evam antaryāgamātrād eva vastutaḥ kṛtakṛtyatā
“Thus, in reality, through internal worship alone, what had to be accomplished has been accomplished.” (Tantrasāra 13.39)
The expression kṛtakṛtyatā is particularly strong. Literally, it is the condition of one for whom “what had to be done has been done.” Nothing essential remains to be produced by another act. Abhinavagupta does not say merely that internal worship is especially profound, or that it is preferable to external worship. He says that, in the deepest sense, the work is complete.
And yet he immediately continues:
satyataḥ tadāviṣṭasya tathāpi bahir api kāryo yāgo 'vacchedahānaya eva
“Nevertheless, for one who is truly absorbed in that state, external worship too should be performed, precisely for the removal of limitation.” (Tantrasāra 13.40)
This is perhaps the sentence that allows us to understand the earlier passage more precisely.
External worship has not suddenly become unnecessary in the sense of being worthless. Nor has Abhinavagupta changed his mind about the union of the waveless Bhairava with the multiplicity of manifestation.
But its function has changed.
For one who is genuinely absorbed in the inner reality, external pūjā is no longer what produces the essential attainment. Kṛtakṛtyatā has already been reached. Rather, worship moves outward so that this recognition is not confined within another boundary: “Bhairava is present here, in inward absorption, but not equally here—in the body, the gesture, the flower, the image, the act.”
This is why Abhinavagupta gives the reason as avacchedahānaya—“for the removal of limitation.”
The practitioner does not return to manifestation because transcendence was incomplete. The return prevents transcendence itself from becoming another enclosure.
But Abhinavagupta then turns immediately to a different practitioner:
yo 'pi tathā samāveśabhāk na bhavati tasya mukhyo bahiryāgaḥ tadabhyāsāt samāveśalābho yataḥ
“But for one who does not yet possess such immersion (samāveśa), external worship is primary, because through its repeated practice that immersion is attained.” (Tantrasāra 13.40)
The same ritual now occupies an entirely different place.
For the first practitioner, samāveśa is already present and ritual carries that recognition into the apparent multiplicity of life.
For the second, samāveśa has not yet become established. Here Abhinavagupta says without hesitation that bahiryāga, external worship, is mukhya—primary. Its repeated practice becomes a means by which samāveśa itself can arise.
And he does not abandon internal worship for this second practitioner either:
tasyāpi tu paśutātirodhānāyāntaryāgaḥ tadarūḍhāv api tatsaṃkalpabalasya śuddhipradatvāt
“For that person too, however, there is internal worship for the removal of the condition of limited individuality (paśutā), since even when one has not yet become established in it, the power of the resolve toward it bestows purification.” (Tantrasāra 13.40)
There is something characteristic of Abhinavagupta in the generosity of this formulation.
He does not require the practitioner to pretend to possess a realization that has not yet occurred. Even before one has truly ascended into that inner worship, the orientation toward it already has value. The intention itself begins to loosen the contracted condition of the paśu.
So within a handful of sentences we already find several different relationships to ritual.
External worship can lead toward samāveśa.
Internal worship can purify even before full establishment in it has occurred.
For one truly immersed in the inner reality, what needed to be accomplished has already been accomplished.
And yet that same person may continue external worship—not to obtain liberation from something outside themselves, but so that realization itself does not become restricted to an inward, “spiritual” domain.
This makes the position considerably subtler than either of the simple alternatives.
Abhinavagupta is not saying: ritual is merely preliminary; once realization comes, discard it.
But neither is he saying: because ritual is an expression of Bhairava, everyone must continue performing it indefinitely.
The meaning of the practice depends upon the condition of the practitioner.
And perhaps most importantly, the hierarchy here is not simply between “external” and “internal.” The real question is what is happening in consciousness through them.
A flower offered without samāveśa may participate in the movement toward samāveśa.
The same flower offered from samāveśa may express the absence of any boundary between Bhairava and his manifestation.
And when Abhinavagupta says that through internal worship alone kṛtakṛtyatā has been attained, he also leaves open a possibility that we have not yet examined:
What happens when recognition becomes so complete that even the distinction between a practice that must be performed and one that may be left undone has lost its binding force?
Elsewhere, Abhinavagupta answers that question quite explicitly.
When There Is No Constraint
The thirteenth chapter showed us something already quite subtle. External ritual may be primary for one practitioner because it leads toward samāveśa. For another, already immersed in recognition, the essential work has been accomplished, while ritual may continue as a way of allowing that recognition to permeate manifestation without restriction.
But Abhinavagupta goes further than this.
If we turn back to the second chapter of the Tantrasāra, devoted to anupāya—the “non-means”—we meet the practitioner in whom śaktipāta has descended with such intensity that the usual progressive structure of practice no longer applies.
Abhinavagupta describes someone who, struck by powerful śaktipāta, hears the instruction of the guru and recognizes directly what is being indicated. For such a person, samāveśa is nirupāyaka: it does not depend upon a method or means.
Abhinavagupta then asks a very simple question.
What exactly could a spiritual means accomplish here?
The Self cannot be newly acquired, because it is eternally present. It cannot be made known in the ordinary sense, because consciousness is self-luminous. One cannot remove some actual covering from it, because no second reality truly exists that could conceal consciousness from itself. Nor can one “enter” it, because there is no separate person standing outside it who could perform such an entrance.
And so he reduces the matter to its most uncompromising form:
samastam idam ekaṃ cinmātratattvam
“All this is the one reality consisting of consciousness alone.”
And then:
tad eva cāham
“And that indeed am I.”
The world does not stand outside that consciousness. It appears within it, as its own manifestation. For one in whom this recognition has become firm, Abhinavagupta says that the divine samāveśa is continually present without dependence upon any means.
And then comes the sentence especially relevant to our question:
tasya ca na mantrapūjādhyānacaryādiniyantraṇā kācit
“For such a person there is no constraint whatsoever concerning mantra, pūjā, meditation, observance, and so forth.” (Tantrasāra 2.4)
This is a remarkably clear statement.
And it is important to notice exactly what Abhinavagupta says—and what he does not say.
He does not say that such a person must abandon mantra.
He does not say that pūjā is now beneath them.
He does not say that meditation or ritual observance belong to an inferior religion from which the enlightened practitioner has finally escaped.
He says something much freer:
there is no niyantraṇā—no constraint.
The distinction matters.
To be beyond the necessity of ritual is not the same thing as being opposed to ritual.
A practitioner established in recognition might perform pūjā. They might not. They might recite a mantra, worship a deity, undertake a ritual observance, sit silently, or simply move through ordinary life. None of these acts can either create or destroy the consciousness that has already recognized itself.
The freedom is deeper than the choice between ritual and non-ritual.
Indeed, were the practitioner to become attached to not performing ritual because ritual now appeared “lower,” another subtle limitation would already have appeared. One would still be arranging experience into the pure and the impure, the spiritually advanced and the spiritually primitive, the transcendent and the embodied.
But the reverse attachment would be equally strange.
If Bhairava is genuinely recognized as the entirety of experience, it would be difficult to argue that liberation somehow depends upon continuing to place flowers upon an altar. The flower is Bhairava—but so is its absence. The mantra is consciousness—but so is silence.
This is why niyantraṇā is such an illuminating word here.
Abhinavagupta does not resolve the tension by giving us a new universal prescription. He removes the prescription.
At this level, the practitioner does not need ritual in order to become Bhairava, because there was never anyone other than Bhairava who could become him.
Nor does the practitioner need to reject ritual in order to prove this freedom.
This also helps us see why the teaching of anupāya cannot simply be turned into a general recommendation that everybody abandon practice. Abhinavagupta introduces it specifically in connection with an extraordinarily intense descent of grace. The absence of means belongs to a condition in which recognition has actually occurred; it is not a conceptual permission for someone who merely likes the idea that no practice is necessary.
That difference is easy to lose in modern discussions of nonduality.
There is a considerable distance between saying, “Ultimately there is nothing to attain,” and actually standing in the recognition from which this statement is true.
Abhinavagupta never seems particularly interested in protecting us from that distinction.
He can therefore say, without contradiction, that external worship is primary for the practitioner who has not attained samāveśa, and elsewhere say that for another practitioner there is no constraint whatsoever concerning pūjā, mantra, meditation or observance.
The metaphysics has not changed.
The practitioner has.
And this begins to reveal something important about Abhinavagupta's way of thinking. His nonduality does not flatten the path into a single prescription applicable to everyone. On the contrary, precisely because consciousness is free, its recognition can unfold through radically different configurations of practice, initiation, knowledge and grace.
The question therefore cannot simply be:
“Does Kashmir Śaivism teach that ritual should be continued after realization?”
Abhinavagupta's answer is already becoming something closer to:
For whom? Under what initiation? At what degree of recognition? For what purpose?
And when we turn to the fifteenth āhnika of the Tantrāloka, these distinctions become much more explicit.
Not Everyone Has the Same Path
The fifteenth āhnika of the Tantrāloka is largely concerned with initiation. At first sight, this might seem to take us some distance away from our question. In fact, it brings us directly to its heart.
For here Abhinavagupta has to deal not with an abstract “practitioner,” but with actual differences between people: differences of capacity, aspiration, initiation, knowledge, and obligation. And once these differences enter the picture, it becomes very difficult to formulate a single rule about what everyone must practice.
He begins with a striking statement about knowledge.
Quoting the Mataṅgatantra, Abhinavagupta first says that ritual procedure provides an easier means for those who lack the capacity or determination for knowledge. He then gives the principle behind this:
samyagjñānasvabhāvā hi vidyā sākṣād vimocikā
“Knowledge (vidyā), whose nature is right understanding, liberates directly.” (Tantrāloka 15.9)
The following verse makes the hierarchy even clearer:
tatrāśaktās tu ye teṣāṃ dīkṣācaryāsamādhayaḥ |
te vidyāpūrvakā yasmāt tasmāj jñāny uttamottamaḥ ||
“For those who are incapable of that, there are initiation, ritual observance, and samādhi. Since these are preceded by knowledge, the knower is therefore the highest of the high.” (Tantrāloka 15.11)
This is worth lingering over.
Abhinavagupta does not flatten every form of practice into complete equivalence merely because all reality is Śiva. He is perfectly willing to speak of gradation. Initiation, caryā, ritual action, yoga and knowledge do not necessarily occupy the same place in the process of liberation.
This does not make ritual impure or somehow “un-Śaiva.” It means simply that ontological nonduality does not abolish soteriological distinctions.
Everything may be Bhairava, while different means still perform different functions.
A few verses later, Abhinavagupta describes an even more unusual case:
yasya tv īśaprasādena divyā kācana yogyatā |
guroḥ śiśoś ca tau naiva prati dīkṣopayogitā ||
“But where, through the grace of the Lord, there is a certain divine fitness in guru and disciple, initiation has no utility for those two.” (Tantrāloka 15.14)
And then:
jñānam eva tadā dīkṣā śrītraiśikanirūpaṇāt |
sarvaśāstrārthavettṛtvam akasmāc cāsya jāyate ||
“Then knowledge itself is initiation, according to the teaching of the venerable Traiśika; and knowledge of the meaning of all the scriptures arises in such a person spontaneously.” (Tantrāloka 15.15)
The phrase is difficult to make more direct:
jñānam eva tadā dīkṣā — “Knowledge itself is then initiation.”
There is no disdain for initiation here. Abhinavagupta will spend much of the remainder of this enormous āhnika describing initiation with extraordinary care.
But he will not make the ritual universally necessary merely because it belongs to the tradition.
Where the appropriate capacity is present, the thing toward which initiation points can occur directly.
And immediately afterward he quotes the Kiraṇatantra:
jñānayogyās tathā kecic caryāyogyās tathāpare |
dīkṣāyogyā yogayogyā iti śrīkairaṇe vidhau ||
“Some are fit for knowledge; others are fit for caryā; others are fit for initiation, and others for yoga—so it is taught in the venerable Kiraṇatantra.” (Tantrāloka 15.18)
This may be one of the simplest keys to the whole problem.
Not everyone has the same path.
And Abhinavagupta does not seem troubled by that fact.
The differences are not merely concessions reluctantly tolerated until everybody finally practices in the same way. They belong to the very structure of the tradition. Different people possess different forms of yogyatā—fitness or qualification—and the appropriate means follows from that difference.
This principle becomes still more concrete when Abhinavagupta turns to initiation itself.
Citing the Svacchandatantra, he has the guru ask the disciple:
phalaṃ prārthayase yādṛk tādṛk sādhanam ārabhe
“Whatever kind of fruit you seek, I shall undertake the corresponding means.” (Tantrāloka 15.21)
Then comes an especially revealing observation:
vāsanābhedataḥ sādhyaprāptir mantrapracoditā |
mantramudrādhvadravyāṇāṃ home sādhāraṇā sthitiḥ ||
vāsanābhedataḥ bhinnaṃ śiṣyāṇāṃ ca guroḥ phalam ||
“The attainment of the goal, impelled by mantra, differs according to differences in intention or disposition. The mantras, mudrās, paths and substances employed in the offering may be the same; the fruit differs according to the differing dispositions of disciple and guru.” (Tantrāloka 15.22–23)
The external structure can therefore be similar while its meaning and result differ.
Once again, Abhinavagupta directs our attention away from the mere presence or absence of ritual and toward the deeper configuration in which the ritual takes place.
He then divides the liberation-seeking initiate into two kinds:
dvidhā mumukṣur nirbījaḥ samayādivivarjitaḥ
“The seeker of liberation is of two kinds. The nirbīja is free from the samayas and related observances.” (Tantrāloka 15.24)
The other is the sabīja initiate:
anyaḥ sabījo yasyetthaṃ dīkṣoktā śivaśāsane |
vidvaddvandvasahānāṃ tu sabījā samayātmikā |
dīkṣānugrāhikā pālyā viśeṣasamayās tu taiḥ ||
“The other is sabīja. In the teaching of Śiva this initiation is described as ‘with seed,’ constituted by the samayas ... The particular samayas are to be observed by them.” (Tantrāloka 15.25–26)
We should be careful here not to turn this distinction into a simple hierarchy of “advanced” and “less advanced.” That is not what these verses say. Abhinavagupta is describing different forms of initiation appropriate to different kinds of disciples. The point relevant to us is narrower, but important:
ritual obligation itself is not uniform.
Some initiates undertake binding samayas. Others do not.
And Abhinavagupta soon makes this completely explicit:
samayācārapāśaṃ tu nirbījāyāṃ viśodhayet |
dīkṣāmātreṇa muktiḥ syād bhaktyā deve gurau sadā ||
“In the nirbīja initiation, the bond consisting of the ritual observances and samayas is to be purified away. Liberation then occurs through initiation itself, together with constant devotion to the Lord and guru.” (Tantrāloka 15.31)
But regarding the sabīja initiate:
samayācārapāśaṃ tu dīkṣitaḥ pālayet sadā
“The initiated practitioner must always observe the bond of the samayas and ritual conduct.” (Tantrāloka 15.34)
Here the picture becomes almost impossible to reduce to a slogan.
We cannot say simply that external observance is irrelevant, because Abhinavagupta explicitly says that for some initiates the samayas are to be maintained.
But neither can we say that ritual observance remains universally binding, because in another initiation the very bond of those observances is deliberately removed.
Nor can we conclude that initiation itself is universally necessary, because only a few verses earlier Abhinavagupta told us: jñānam eva tadā dīkṣā — “Knowledge itself is then initiation.”
The pattern should by now be familiar.
Again and again, when we try to turn Abhinavagupta into a simple rule, he introduces another distinction.
This is not indecision. It seems rather to follow from the enormous range of human possibilities that his system is trying to accommodate.
One person approaches liberation through knowledge.
Another through initiation.
Another through yoga.
Another through caryā.
One initiate bears particular ritual obligations.
Another is released from them.
For one practitioner external worship is the primary means through which samāveśa develops.
For another, established in that samāveśa, external worship continues as the removal of limitation.
And for the extraordinarily qualified practitioner encountered earlier, there is no niyantraṇā—no constraint—with regard to mantra, pūjā, meditation or observance at all.
What remains constant through these differences is therefore not one particular form of practice.
It is the movement toward—and eventually the recognition of—Śivahood itself.
And this is perhaps why the verses that follow in the fifteenth āhnika are so beautiful. Having just distinguished different initiations and different obligations, Abhinavagupta turns back toward ritual and asks what actually makes those external actions liberating.
Neither Attachment to Ritual nor Attachment to Transcendence
Near the beginning of this essay we encountered Abhinavagupta's insistence that the “waveless” state of Bhairava should not be separated from the immense variety of manifestation.
The practitioner should unite the two.
The breath, body and intellect are to be contemplated as the Supreme Goddess. External and internal worship are brought together. Flowers, incense and libations are not rejected merely because one has discovered a reality deeper than them.
But after following Abhinavagupta through the distinctions of samāveśa, anupāya, initiation, adhikāra and samaya, we can now return to this teaching with a little more precision.
Toward the beginning of the fifteenth āhnika, while discussing initiation, Abhinavagupta describes how repeated ritual action can stabilize the recognition of Śivahood in consciousness. But then he tells us exactly where the liberating power lies:
śivābhimānitopāyo bāhyo hetur na mokṣadaḥ |
śivo 'yaṃ śiva evāsmīty evam ācāryaśiṣyayoḥ ||
hetutadvattayā dārḍhyābhimāno mocako hy aṇoḥ
“Conviction of one's identity with Śiva is the means; an external cause does not bestow liberation. ‘He is Śiva, and I am nothing but Śiva’: this firm conviction in guru and disciple is what liberates the limited being.” (Tantrāloka 15.42–43)
There is perhaps no better place to bring the threads together.
Abhinavagupta is standing in the middle of an enormous discussion of ritual initiation. He does not dismiss the ritual. He has just spent pages explaining it.
And yet he says quite plainly:
bāhyo hetur na mokṣadaḥ
“The external cause does not bestow liberation.”
The external act is not magical in isolation.
What liberates is śivābhimānitā: the deeply established recognition of Śivahood.
śivo 'yam
“He is Śiva.”
śiva evāsmi
“I am nothing but Śiva.”
In the initiation being discussed, these two recognitions meet: the guru recognizes the disciple as Śiva, and the disciple recognizes Śiva as their own nature.
The rite gives this recognition form.
But the form is not the ultimate source of liberation.
This qualification is especially important because Abhinavagupta immediately invokes the Brahmayāmala in support of the conjunction of inner and outer practice. The passage, as he understands it, says that the external does not succeed without the internal, nor the internal entirely separated from the external; the two appear through ritual action and knowledge respectively. Modern scholarship has noted that Abhinavagupta is reading this older tantric material specifically through the relationship between kriyā, ritual action, and jñāna, liberating knowledge.
Again the balance is delicate.
The outer need not be despised.
The inner should not become an excuse for rejecting embodiment.
But neither should the external form be mistaken for the thing that liberates.
This is why I think the original Reddit post captures something genuinely valuable, even if its title—“You Never Outgrow Rituals”—is stronger than Abhinavagupta's own position would allow.
The problem is not that ritual must always be retained.
Nor is the problem that ritual must eventually be abandoned.
Both statements are too simple.
Abhinavagupta has shown us something much more fluid.
For one practitioner, external worship is mukhya—primary—because through its repetition samāveśa is attained.
For another, already immersed in that recognition, kṛtakṛtyatā has arisen: what needed to be accomplished has been accomplished. External ritual may nevertheless continue avacchedahānaya—so that realization does not remain confined within another boundary.
For another, the samayas undertaken in initiation remain binding and are to be carefully observed.
For another, those very ritual bonds are removed through nirbīja initiation.
For another, extraordinary divine fitness makes ordinary initiation unnecessary:
jñānam eva tadā dīkṣā
“Knowledge itself is then initiation.”
And in the extreme intensity of recognition described in the Tantrasāra, there is: na mantrapūjādhyānacaryādiniyantraṇā kācit — “no constraint whatsoever concerning mantra, pūjā, meditation, observance and so forth.”
None of these statements needs to cancel the others.
They concern different conditions of consciousness, different forms of initiation, different degrees of qualification and different functions of practice.
Perhaps this is precisely where Abhinavagupta's nonduality becomes more demanding than the simple language of “everything is one.”
Nonduality does not mean that every practice is identical.
It does not mean that every practitioner requires the same thing.
And it certainly does not mean that all distinctions must be flattened before they can be embraced.
The diversity itself belongs to Śiva.
There can be ritual without bondage to ritual.
There can be transcendence without contempt for manifestation.
There can be complete inward absorption followed by the placing of a flower before a deity.
And there can also be a condition in which no flower needs to be placed at all.
The freedom of Bhairava must be wide enough to contain both.
This, in the end, is why I would hesitate to say simply that we “never outgrow ritual.”
There is something true in the intuition behind the phrase. What should be outgrown is certainly not the world, not the body, not form, not beauty, and not ritual merely because they appear external. A nonduality that remains fascinated only with transcendence can quietly preserve exactly the opposition it claims to have overcome.
But Abhinavagupta seems equally unwilling to replace that attachment with another one.
Ritual too can become something we cling to.
So can practice.
So can the identity of being a practitioner.
So can the conviction that liberation must look a particular way.
And at some point his language becomes very simple.
The flower is Śiva.
The hand placing the flower is Śiva.
The mantra is Śiva.
The silence after the mantra is Śiva.
The inner worship is Śiva.
The external worship is Śiva.
And when worship falls away, nothing has fallen outside Śiva.
Perhaps that is the freedom toward which all of these distinctions were pointing from the beginning.
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