SUHRAWARDĪ, ABHINAVAGUTPA, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT

by

Kirk Templeton

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty

of the California Institute of Integral Studies

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in

Asian and Comparative Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies

San Francisco, CA

2013

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CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read SUHRAWARDĪ, ABHINAVAGUTPA, AND THE

METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT by Kirk Templeton and that in my opinion this work

meets the criteria for approving a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion with a

concentration in Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of

Integral Studies.

Jim Ryan, Ph.D., Chair, Professor, Asian and Comparative Studies

Bahman Shirazi, Ph.D. Faculty, Integral Counseling Psychology

Mohammad Azadpur, Ph.D. San Francisco State University

© 2013 Kirk Templeton

iv

Kirk Templeton California Institute of Integral Studies, 2013 Jim Ryan, Ph.D., Committee Chair

SUHRAWARDĪ, ABHINAVAGUTPA, AND THE METAPHYSICS OF LIGHT

ABSTRACT

The doctrine of the metaphysics of Light was a powerful current of

thought that flowed through Western philosophy from ancient times down

through the Renaissance. It taught that reality was essentially and

fundamentally Light, not in a metaphorical but in a proper sense. Moreover, this

Light was understood to both emanate being and illuminate cognition.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the possibility that the

doctrine of the metaphysics of Light also appeared in the systems of two other

philosophers: Shihāb al-Din Suhrawardī, a Persian philosopher of the 12th

century, and Abhinavagupta, a great Kashmir Śaivite philosopher of the 10th

century. Suhrawardī worked within the Islamic philosophical tradition and so

had direct historical connections with the Neoplatonic sources of the

metaphysics of Light in the West. He also claimed Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian,

and Indian sources for his Light doctrine. Abhinavagupta had no attested

historical connections with either Suhrawardī or Neoplatonism. Yet there are

remarkable and striking similarities in the systems of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta in both ontology and epistemology that identify them with the

v

doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. The situation with regard to cosmology is

more complex. Suhrawardī enunciates a system of emanation similar to that of

his Neoplatonic forbearers. Abhinavagupta enunciates a system of emanation,

but its categories are radically different from Neoplatonism. Combined with

Suhrawardī’s invocation of ancient sources, this suggests that both Suhrawardī

and Abhinavagupta taught a true metaphysics of Light, but that the context of

the doctrine itself should be extended beyond Neoplatonism to include

traditions from Iran and India.

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, my deepest thanks go to my guru and fellow śakta

Jim Ryan, who first introduced me to the wonders of Indian thought, and whose

patience and wisdom have guided me throughout this project. He embodies in

fullest measure the ideal of the integral scholar. I owe a similar profound debt to

Mohammad Azadpur, who opened the treasure house of Islamic philosophy to

me. Bahman Shirazi has been a constant source of deep insight and knowledge

expressed with a constant and gentle grace and good humor. I must also

acknowledge Mark Dyczkowski, who has honored me with both his teaching and

friendship, and John Glanville, my magister in the magnificent edifice of

Thomism. Both my Sanskrit and spirit have benefitted immeasurably from the

teaching and friendship of Shanta and Indira Bulkin. No scholar’s work is his

alone and to the extent that there is any virtue and value in these pages, it

derives in great measure from what I have gleaned from the scholarship and

support of my collegues at CIIS, especially Stephan Julich, Aaron Weiss, Sean

MacCracken, and Kundan Singh. Finally I must thank my daughter Sara, whose

love and laughter have lighted my way on our travels together along the Golden

Road to Samarkand.

vii

ॐ ऐ ँश्री सरस्वत्यै नमः

स्तौमम त्ववां त्ववां च वन्द े

मम खल ुरसन ां नो कद चित ्

त्यजेथ ाः

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ................................................................................................................... iv

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. vi

Chapter 1: Introduction .......................................................................................... 1

Purpose and Contribution of the Study ........................................................ 9

Review of Scholarship ................................................................................. 12

Methodological Considerations .................................................................. 22

Limitations of the Study .............................................................................. 31

Structure of the Study ................................................................................. 35

Chapter 2: The Historical Context ......................................................................... 38

Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy: The Question of Influence ............. 41

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta in Historical Context ................................ 55

Suhrawardī: Life and Works ........................................................................ 76

The Historical Context of the Metaphysics of Light in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq .......................................................................................... 81

Abhinavagupta: Life and Works ................................................................ 114

The Historical Context of Light in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula ............................................................................................................ 119

Conclusions Concerning the Question of Context .................................... 130

Chapter 3: Light and Being .................................................................................. 136

Light and Being in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq .................................... 140

Light and Being in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula .......................... 160

Comparing Being and Light in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and Abhinavagupa’s Anuttara Trika Kula ......................................................... 178

Chapter 4: Light and Cognition ........................................................................... 186

Light and Cognition in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq .............................. 192

ix

Light and Cognition in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula ................... 206

Comparing Light and Cognition in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and Abhinavaguta’s Anuttara Trika Kula ......................................................... 223

Chapter 5: Light and Emanation ......................................................................... 227

Light and Emanation in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq ............................ 232

Light and Emanation in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula ................. 240

Comparing Light and Emanation in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula ................................................ 251

Chapter 6: Conclusion ......................................................................................... 261

References .......................................................................................................... 278

Appendix A: Abbreviation Key ............................................................................ 292

1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

The term “metaphysics of light” was first coined by Clemens Baeumker in

1916 (McVoy, Grossteste 87). It has been employed ever since in studies of the

Western history of philosophy to designate a powerful and pervasive current of

philosophical, mystical, and theological thought that runs right through

European culture from ancient times down to the Renaissance. In terms of

scholarly practice, it has been used most often, perhaps, within the study of

medieval philosophy, but even there it has been admitted of having a wider

application.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the possibility that the doctrine

of the metaphysics of Light also appeared in the systems of two other

philosophers: Shihāb al-Din Suhrawardī, a Persian philosopher of the 12th

century CE, and Abhinavagupta, the great Kashmir Śaivite philosopher of the

10th century CE. The possibility of extending the doctrine to non-Western

philosophers in this way may also have implications for how the doctrine is

understood within the Western academy and this issue is also examined.

In Western scholarship, the doctrine is typically traced to Greek

philosophy, for as a major scholar of the tradition, James McVoy, has written:

“As a symbol for human knowledge, the interplay of light and sight is

omnipresent in Greek intellectual culture and its heirs” (“Light” 126). Arguably,

elements of the doctrine could be found in Parmenides (fl. 5th century BCE) with

his use of light and darkness as cosmological principles (Notopoulos 169). While

2

Plato (429–327 BCE) was not himself an explicit exponent of the doctrine, his

treatment of light and the sun were so seminal that the metaphysics of Light1

has been associated with Platonism ever since (McVoy “Light” 126–27). As

Goodenough demonstrates throughout his classic study By Light, Light, Philo of

Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) taught the doctrine, along with other Middle

Platonists such as Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 CE) and Origen (184–234

CE) (Berchman 194). With Plotinus (204–270 CE) the doctrine reaches perhaps

its most paradigmatic expression (Yhap 78), becoming almost a defining feature

of Neoplatonism, especially in the works of Iamblichus (242–327 CE) and Proclus

(412–485 CE) (Johnston 8–13).

The Metaphysics of Light was a basic tenet of the Islamic Peripatetic

tradition, which also had its roots in Neoplatonism, being fundamental to the

systems of both Al-Farabī (870–c. 950) and Ibn Sinā (c. 980–1037) (Nasr Islamic

160). As with much else in the Greek tradition, Islamic philosophy not only

became the predominant repository of the doctrine and the vehicle of its

development, but also was the major source of its transmission to the Latin West

in the 12th and 13th centuries (Druart “Philosophy” 97–120; Knowles 193–205).

1 As will become apparent, the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light distinguishes the

metaphysical Principle of Light from the physical light that affects our sense of vision. In this study I follow the practice of certain other scholars in capitalizing the former usage and leaving the latter in lower case. Examples of this practice would include Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, Dyczkowski’s Doctrine of Vibration, Nasr’s Islamic Cosmological Doctrines and Three Muslim Sages and Yazdi’s Principles of Islamic Epistmology. The vocabulary of Latin enabled Grosseteste to distinguish the two as lumen and lux.

3

The other profound influence on the development of the medieval metaphysics

of Light was another one of its paramount exponents, St. Augustine (354–430

CE) (Knowles 49). In medieval scholasticism, the metaphysics of Light flourished

most significantly between c. 1220 and 1270 CE. As Pasnau records while

discussing thirteenth century Franciscans in his article on “Divine Illumination,”

the name of St. Bonaventure (1221–1274 CE) is especially associated with it but

Robert Grossteste (1175–1253 CE) also enunciated it in a particularly

thoroughgoing yet innovative form. His De Luce has been considered to be the

only significant work of scientific cosmogony between Plato’s Timaeus and the

18th century and is thought to have laid the foundation for modern

mathematical physics (Zajonc 53). In Scholasticism after the 13th century the

doctrine was found only among the German mystics and Nicolas of Cusa (1401–

1464 CE) (J. Hopkins 28). It was revived in Renaissance by Marsilio Ficino (1433–

1499), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and Franceso Patrizzi (1529–1597). It also

appeared among the Cambridge Platonists (mid-17th century). Yet by the time

of the rise of rationalism the doctrine was, with a few very marginalized

exceptions, extinct in Western intellectual culture.2

The claim that Suhrawardī also embraced the metaphysics of Light is not

at all a difficult to sustain because he was member of the Islamic philosophical

tradition and so a Neoplatonist. Thus he was part of the lineage that articulated

2 I discuss some of the reasons for this change in Chapter 4 of this study.

4

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light within Islamic intellectual culture, even

though his self-defined role within that lineage was that of critic and reformer.

Much of what makes Suhrawardī interesting and important in terms of the

metaphysics of Light is that he expresses it in an extremely pure, even radical

form, adopting in his major work an entirely Light-based philosophical

vocabulary to replace the standard terminology of the Islamic tradition—a

terminology that even he himself had used in earlier works. He is also

interesting because in articulating his version of the metaphysics of Light in his

masterwork The Philosophy of Illumination (ḤI)3, he asserts that the doctrine is

primordial, an ancient wisdom known to the sages of Egypt, Greece, Persia, and

India (165).

Abhinavagupta is a different story. For, unlike Suhrawardī, he has no

attested historical connection whatsoever with the main current of the tradition

of the metaphysics of Light, rooted as it is Neoplatonism in the West.4 Therefore

any justification to include him as an exponent of the doctrine must rest on the

analysis of philosophical doctrine alone.

The purpose of this study is to do just that: investigate the possibility of

extending the term “metaphysics of Light” to include Abhinavagupta’s system by

means of a comparative study between it and Suhrawardī’s. This investigation

3 For a key to all abbreviations used in citing texts and documents, see Appendix A. 4 This is one of the things that makes Suhrawardī’s assertion of a primordial tradition

which includes India intriguing.

5

will also have larger philosophical implications. As Frits Staal justly observes,

“whereas the comparative study of religions has no pretention of being itself a

religion, comparative philosophy is, according to the term, philosophy” (2). In

undertaking this project I am also implicitly taking a philosophical position.

When discussing the metaphysics of Light McVoy remarked that there are “great

metaphysical systems which repose on a single concept possessed of a richness

or magnetic force sufficient to ground a whole system of ideas” (“Light” 126). By

investigating the possibility of extending the scope of the doctrine to include

Abhinavagupta, I am implicitly asserting that such concepts can transcend

cultural boundaries and the metaphysics of Light is one that does so, that it

might have a place on what Scharfstein calls “a kind of periodic table of the

elements of philosophy” (7). This assertion in turn implies that the way the

doctrine of the metaphysics of Light itself is understood may change in order to

accommodate a broader, non-Western context.

In performing this investigation I am assisted by the fact that the

metaphysics of Light is not a myth or metaphor or poetry, but a philosophical

doctrine. It asserts some very particular things about reality and it does so in a

very particular way. Essentially, as the name of the doctrine indicates, it holds

that reality is ultimately Light. Moreover, the doctrine asserts that Light both

emanates being and illuminates cognition. Turning once more to McVoy:

To come now to the central issue of the metaphysics of light, the identification of the divine nature, and consequently of created reality olformulated as follows: God is light in a proper and not merely a

6

metaphorical sense; the essence of light lies in spiritual being rather than corporeal; in the visible world, light is the first, subtlest and most active of material elements, and hence closest to immaterial nature.…Light, then, is not a mere metaphor for the unsayable, but a concept which names intelligible reality properly and fittingly. (“Light” 139)

Light is not exclusively or even primarily the physical light which is the object of

the studies of optics and electromagnetism. That physical light is only one of its

manifestations, albeit a particularly important one. The true and actual Light is

the underlying Principle of Reality which both gives things their being and makes

them knowable, in the same way that the light of the sun both nourishes life and

enables us to see.

The metaphysics of Light thus combines epistemology with its ontology.

The Light reveals both Itself and Its object. Thus, a characteristic and defining

element of the doctrine is a cognitio infusa, the direct illumination of the human

intellect by this all-pervading and encompassing Light. This aspect of the

doctrine was so prevalent that it also has its own designation in Western studies

of the history of philosophy: the doctrine of divine illumination. As I discuss in

Chapter 2 of this study, in its characteristic formulation as the theory of the

active intellect, the doctrine of divine illumination held sway over philosophy in

Europe and West and Central Asia for over a millennium. It is a characteristic

and integral element of the larger doctrine. What McVoy says in reference to

the medieval period applies generally: “The illumination-theory of the 13th

century cannot be understood as a mere theory of knowledge, but only as the

7

epistemological expression of a metaphysical view of being and activity,

participation and order—in short of the metaphysics of light” (“Light” 139).

In addition to ontology and epistemology, there was a third component

of the metaphysics of Light, at least as was understood and taught by Neo-

platonic traditions. The qualification is necessary because this is not true of

medieval scholasticism. The third component is the doctrine of emanation, and

this was in fact specifically condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

The reason for this will soon become evident.

The doctrine of emanation is essentially a way to unite transcendence

and immanence. In the physical world the light from a single source—the sun—

illuminates a multitude of objects for the eye in all their diversity of form and

color, yet in illuminating them, it remains itself unchanged. In emanationism this

image is taken to represent the relationship of the single, absolute and

transcendent ground of being to the phenomenal world of being and becoming

and human experience.

This is not a temporal process but a formal one. It is considered to be

outside space and time as well as being beyond Being itself. The cosmological

structure whereby the First Principle of Reality emanates all things is a

continuum expressed as gradations of degrees of actuality. It is often

understood as a hierarchy whereby all things are ranked according to their

degree of proximity to the fundamental Principle. Since the emanation is a

continuum, the Principle is manifesting out of Itself and so what it manifests

8

must also remain in some sense finally Itself. Just as the rays of the sun are not

the sun but they are also nothing but the sun, so in the doctrine of emanation all

manifestation has an essential, if qualified, existential identity with its Principle.

This understanding of cosmogony was of course the reason for the

condemnations by the medieval Church, for such a doctrine flatly contradicted

the dogma of a separate creation by God ex nihilo. Islam and Judaism also

taught a separate creation, but elements within the intellectual traditions of

these faiths were able to accommodate the doctrine of emanation in their

versions of the metaphysics of Light. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains:

[The doctrine of Emanation] is alien to the exoteric element of monotheistic traditions in which the absolute distinction between the Creator and the creature is preserved. In Islam the doctrine of emanation, or effusion, therefore, can be understood and integrated only in the esoteric aspect of the Tradition. (Cosmological 202)

The same is true of the Jewish tradition: emanation appears there, but only in

Kabbalah. However, the philosophical and theological elements of Christianity

had no legitimately recognized, or even quasi-legitimately recognized, esoteric

component. Therefore emanation could only appear in mysticism such as

Eckhart’s, and even there not without considerable controversy (he was

condemned in 1329).5

5 McVoy’s hero Grossteste is an interesting case. In Grossteste’s version of the doctrine

the Light which constitutes all of reality is described as being “self-defusing”—which is simply emanation by another name. As far as creation is concerned: “We can study the light that God’s word made, but may not forget that God makes light, because he is light in his own nature” (“Light” 134—italics in original).

9

For purposes of this study, however, the doctrine of Emanation will be

taken as an element of the metaphysics of Light. This procedure is adopted

because it was an essential feature of the doctrine in its Neoplatonic version,

which is generally taken to be paradigmatic. However, it will turn out that the

Christian version of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light, with no emanation,

will be of some importance in my final discussion. This then, is the framework

within which this study’s investigation occurs: a philosophical doctrine

containing the three interrelated elements of Light and being, Light and

congnition, and Light and emanation.

Purpose and Contribution of the Study

The purpose of this study is to compare the philosophical systems of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta with a focus on their treatment of the

metaphysics of Light. The research question investigated is to what extent is it

legitimate to include their systems within the extension of “the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light,” a category that has been principally applied to a current of

philosophical thought in European intellectual history. This investigation

includes consideration of the extent to which so including them may change the

defining characteristics or intension of the doctrine itself.

Both of these philosophers are still relatively unknown, and a

comparative study between them and their traditions has never yet been

undertaken. Besides its intrinsic interest for scholars of Suhrawardī and

10

Abhinavagupta, this study breaks new ground and offers the prospect of

broadening and enriching the scholarly discourse in a number of areas.

First there is the field of the history of ideas, especially in Western

civilization and culture. The metaphysics of Light is one of the most neglected

areas in the Western philosophical canon, yet one of the more important. The

decisive rejection of the doctrines of the metaphysics of Light and divine

illumination after their predominance for over a millennia is one of the most

significant turning points in the history of Western intellectual culture, yet both

the doctrines and their historical importance are relatively unknown. If this

study does no more than increase acquaintance and possible interest in these

areas, to that extent alone its effect will be salutary.

The study is also of benefit to scholars of the doctrine of metaphysics of

Light. The works of these scholars mostly focus on medieval and to some extent

Islamic philosophers, mostly Avicenna. By extending the realm of discourse to

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta and engaging in a comparative analysis of the

doctrine in their systems, this study may serve to enrich the discourse with

additional insights into the structure and meaning of the doctrine itself.

In the area of Suhrawardī studies, comparison with Abhinavagupta’s

thoughts may similarly yield fresh perspectives. Suhrawardī scholarship is

enlivened—if that is the correct word—by controversy having to do with the role

of Persian thought and symbol in Suhrawardī’s thought, especially in relationship

11

to Greek influence. By shifting the focus eastward, as it were, this study will

contribute to that discussion, even if it is only by adding fuel to the fires.

Another contribution lies in the fact that this is a comparative study of an

Islamic and an Indian philosopher. As Sayyed Hossein Nasr points out: “Rarely

does one find serious comparative studies made of Islamic philosophy with those

of India and the Far East” (“Significance” 3). This lack is especially to be

regretted since Islamic culture can be credited with producing the first works of

comparative philosophy with Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973–1048) and his most

famous works of this kind concerned India.

As a comparative study between a Persian and an Indian philosopher

who lived during the 10th-11th centuries CE, this study will also have relevance

to the re-evaluation of Persia’s role in the cultural history of Eurasia which is

beginning to emerge within the Western academy. This view increasingly

recognizes what has been called a “Persian Cosmopolis” in which a full range of

cultural influences were diffused throughout Africa, Central Eurasia and East Asia

as a coherent whole from the 9th through 19th centuries CE.6 Of particular

importance in this regard is the fact that (as I discuss in Chapter 2) although

there is no attested relationship between the systems of these two philosophers

during the period when they were produced, Suhrawardī’s illuminationist

doctrine was a central pillar of the Delhi Sultanate under Akbar some centuries

6 For a recent discussion see Eaton (“Revisiting”).

12

later. A comparative study of Light in the systems of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta can contribute to the growing understanding of the complex flow

of ideas and influence that characterized the central Eurasian cultural complex

during this entire period.

Although there have been comparative studies of Platonism and Indian

philosophy since the beginning of the last century, to date there has been much

less work that focuses on either Islamic Neoplatonism or Kashmir Śaivism than

there has been in areas such as Plotinus and Advaita Vedānta. Here again this

study will widen and, hopefully, enrich the discourse. Simply by broadening the

extension of the term “metaphysics of Light” to include an Indian philosopher,

this study contributes to the scholarly conversation concerning both the

universality of philosophy as such and, given that there is something called

“world philosophy,” the possibility of universal ideas within it.

Review of Scholarship

There have been no previous comparative studies of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta; mine is the first. The same is true for cross-cultural studies of

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. So in these areas no prior scholarship

exists to review.

In a somewhat broader context, there has been a history of comparative

studies between Platonism and Indian philosophy going back over the last

century, and very recently these have included a study directly comparing

Neoplatonism with Kashmir Śaivism (Just), but these are so deeply involved with

13

the question of historical context and cross-cultural influence that I have

deemed it more appropriate to deal with them in Chapter 2 of this study. In

terms of a review of existing scholarship, this leaves work that has separately

addressed Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta.

The pre-eminent figure in the study of Suhrawardī in modern Western

scholarship is Henry Corbin (1903–1978) who essentially introduced it there. His

work still casts its influence over the entire field. In the mid-20th century, Corbin

worked relentlessly to translate, edit and study Suhrawardī’s works and thought,

producing the three volume translation Opera Metaphysica et Mystica in the

1940s and 1950s. His work has also engendered controversy within the very

field that he himself founded, with scholars dividing themselves into two schools

of thought, one of which he led and another that took a profoundly critical view

of his teachings.

This controversy is often framed as being over the question of whether

Suhrawardī was a philosopher or a mystic. This is a gross oversimplification.

Corbin himself and his school, represented by scholars such as Seyyed Hossein

Nasr, Mehdi Aminrazavi, and Tom Cheetham, do indeed emphasize the mystical,

esoteric and, as they like to describe it, “theosophical” elements of his thought.

Corbin also argued for a continuity between Suhrawardī and Avicenna in terms

of an illuminative or oriental (“eastern”) philosophy based on elements found in

their allegorical writings or, as he called them, “visionary recitals.” In works such

as Avicenna and the Visionary Recital and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, he

14

investigated these ideas further in ways similar to those of Suhrawardī himself,

seeking to understand illuminationist philosophy in terms of an esoteric tradition

with roots in Zoroastrian and Hermetic thought. Corbin’s scholarship was also

deeply informed by his involvement with contemporary Western studies of the

problems of hermeneutics, especially the work of Martin Heidegger. He found

and developed deep resonances between this contemporary movement and the

Islamic tradition of hermeneutics (ta’wil).7

The pre-eminent representatives of the other and contending school of

Suhrawardī scholarship are John Walbridge and Hossain Ziai. Their great

contribution to Suhrawardī scholarship is their joint translation of Suhrawardī’s

masterpiece The Philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq). Walbridge has

also written a trilogy of books on Suhrawardī (The Leaven of the Ancients, The

Science of Mystic Lights, The Wisdom of the Mystic East) and Ziai has produced

his own study of illuminationist philosophy, Knowledge and Illumination. The

best way to present their differences with Corbin is to let them speak for

themselves, from the Introduction to their translation:

The great French orientalist Henry Corbin saw Suhrawardī’s project as an “Oriental theosophy.” The “Peripatetic” works were thus either purely propaedeutic or a middle phase of his thought. The Philosophy of Illumination stands alone as representative of Suhrawardī’s mature thought. What is important in that work is the metaphysics of light and darkness and, in general, the mythological elements of Suhrawardī’s thought. The allegories and the mystical works are likewise seen as representative of the final and highest stage of his thought. Suhrawardī’s

7 For a discussion of this resonance and its importance for contemporary philosophy see

Chapter 2 of Azadpur’s Reason Unbound.

15

primary cultural identification is with ancient Iran. Insofar as Corbin’s interpretation has premodern roots, they are in the Zoroastrian-oriented philosophy of the Illuminationists of Mughal India. Corbin’s interpretation is expressed not just in his studies of Suhrawardī but also in his translations and even his critical editions of Suhrawardī’s works. The use of renderings like “theosophy” and “oriental” indicate the fundamentally mythological focus of Corbin’s interests and interpretations. His translation of The Philosophy of Illumination omits the logic, and his editions of the three “Peripatetic”…works omit the logic and physics of each work and contain only the sections on metaphysics. Such methods inevitably downplay the strictly philosophical aspects of Suhrawardī’s thought. Others—and we are among them—see Suhrawardī’s program as fundamentally philosophical and consider the “mature Peripatetic” works to be part of the same philosophical program as The Philosophy of Illumination. In such an interpretation, Suhrawardī’s logical and metaphysical critique of the Peripatetics is central to his philosophical enterprise. Suhrawardī is presenting what is fundamentally a philosophy—albeit one with a place provided for the use of allegory and mystical experience—and is thus to be interpreted and judged in philosophical terms.…The allegorical works, though of literary interest, are seen as primarily elementary and semipopular works and not central to the Illuminationist philosophy. (xix)

There is another scholar whose name deserves mention in this survey and who

stands quite apart from this debate. This is Mehdi Hai’iri Yazdi. His Principles of

Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence is valuable because it

is one of the first philosophical studies in English written by a scholar who was

trained in the traditional method of philosophical study in Iran but who is also

well versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Like Suhrawardī himself, he

emphasizes both mystical and philosophical aspects. In the introduction to the

Principles of Epistemology he writes:

The primary aim of this study is to introduce the notion of knowledge by presence, as nonphenomenal human consciousness that is identical with the very being of human nature, to the epistemological study of philosophy. Having touched on this aim, we are legitimately prepared to

16

utilize philosophical analysis in formulating the mystical theory of the unicity of the whole world of Being as the prime proposition of mystical theory. Most important of all, through this analysis the paradoxical problems inherent in the theory of mysticism can be examined through the logic of philosophical thinking. (2)

Walbridge and Ziai are quite correct in noting that Corbin tends to

neglect the philosophical aspects of Suhrawardī’s work and that this is

problematic. In this study I argue that Suhrawardī’s philosophical arguments and

critique of the Peripatetic system are motivated by his view that the Peripatetic

system is an incorrect and inadequate theoretical guide to the intuitive

philosopher in her path to mystical fulfillment. So I hold that the mystical and

philosophical aspects of Suhrawardī’s system are mutually supporting and

equally necessary to an accurate understanding of his thought. In this I agree

with Walbridge and Ziai. It is only fair to note, however, that this criticism does

not hold for others who have been considered (and who have considered

themselves) to be members of Corbin’s school. Both Nasr and Aminrazavi give

full value and attention to the philosophical aspect of Suhrawardī’s work and

both have produced valuable and important studies in this regard. Aminrazavi’s

School of Illumination, for example, shows a fine balance in considering all of the

elements of Suhrawardī’s thought.

It is also unjust, however, to represent Walbridge and Ziai as failing, in

Aminrazavi’s words, to give “appropriate credit to the mystical dimension as

well” (School xix). Both Walbridge and Ziai are in fact insistent that mystical

17

experience is fundamental to Suhrawardī’s philosophy. Thus, Ziai writes that

Suhrawardī’s work

marks the beginning of a well-formulated religious and mystical philosophy in Islam. It transcends Peripatetic philosophy by according a fundamental epistemological position to revelation, personal inspiration and mystical vision. Suhrawardī’s thought constitutes neither a theology, nor a theosophy, nor sagesse orientale, as the volume of scholarship to date may suggest. Instead it represents a systematic mystical philosophy. (Knowledge 2)

Walbridge takes a view that is in some ways very similar to my own:

Suhrawardī states that the truths of the Science of Lights are derived in the first instance from mystical intuition. Plato, for example, knew that the basis of all reality was light because he saw that this was so….The Philosophy of Illumination is philosophy, not mysticism; Suhrawardī constructs rational proofs of his intuitions both for the sake of his own continued certainty and correct interpretation of those intuitions and for the guidance of those without the experience. (Science 42)

Where Walbridge and Ziai deserve to be faulted, however, is in their

handling of the visionary recitals. These they treat with a not-so-benign neglect.

Walbridge, for example, writes as follows:

[Suhrawardī’s] allegories were widely read and in the eyes of many Persian scholars and philosophers came to be considered the centerpiece of his philosophy. This seems wrong on the face of it, since the content of his allegories is quite elementary and they do not contain his more advanced doctrines. I am convinced they were intended for popular readers and for students. (“Suhrawardī” 219)

It seems much more likely, rather, that “on the face of it” works that are

universally regarded as gems of Persian literature and which Walbridge himself

describes as “exquisite” (“Suhrawardī” 219) were intended to be more than

primers or popularizations. Aminrazavi makes the point:

18

To ignore the vast body of Suhrawardī’s mystical narratives also ignores the reason he wrote these mystical treatises. If Suhrawardī did not consider them to be necessary, he would not have composed them with such care or given repeated instructions to his companions to safeguard them. The mystical narratives of Suhrawardī should be regarded as part and parcel of the doctrine of illumination and it is in such treatises that he offers the second component of the ishrāqi school of thought, namely practical wisdom. (School xvii)

He goes on to say:

It is obvious that Suhrawardī has written a variety of mystical narratives deliberately using the traditional Sufi symbolism and metaphors. Furthermore, the number of these treatises, the use of Sufi language and expressions, as well as explicit emphasis on such notions as the spiritual path, the need for a master and ascetic practices, all indicate one thing, namely Suhrawradī’s desire to disclose the place and significance of the Sufi component of the school of ishrāq. It is therefore our view that disregarding the Sufi elements of the Suhrawardian thoughts leads to a misinterpretation of the school of Ishraq which is often followed by an attempt to place Suhrawardī in one of the traditional schools of Islamic philosophy, i.e. peripatetics. It is the opinion of this author that Suhrawardī did not rely on one methodology for the understanding of truth but that he made full use of the possibilities that exist in the philosophical as well as the practical aspects of wisdom. (School xix)

A. S. Coomaraswamy put into clear perspective what I believe is the

underlying problem in all this when he wrote that it was a peculiarity of the West

“that whereas all other peoples…have thought of art as a kind of knowledge, we

have invented an ‘aesthetic’ and think of art as a kind of feeling” (113). This

seems to be precisely the issue upon which this controversy rests. Corbin, along

with Nasr and Aminrazavi, believe that the visionary recitals convey knowledge.

Walbridge and Ziai believe that they do not: they are “only” of “literary interest”

(ix). But what did Suhrawardī believe? What did he intend?

19

I think it is fairly evident that Walbridge, at least, believes that

Suhrawardī intended to be a Greek. I say this because of the fact that of

Walbridge’s three books on Suhrawardī, one, The Leaven of the Ancients, is

devoted entirely to attempting to prove that Suhrawardī was a traditional Greek

philosopher, and another, The Wisdom of the Mystic East, is devoted entirely to

attempting to prove that Suhrawardī could not possibly have been influenced by

anything Persian:

There is certainly no warrant whatever for considering Suhrawardī as an exponent of any sort of genuine pre-Islamic Iranian wisdom. He shows no evidence of knowledge of ancient Iran beyond what might be expected of an educated Muslim of his time and place. I will argue that his invocation of the ancient Persians is incidental even in terms of his philosophical mythology, and that is Plato, Hermes and the Greeks who are central.…It is the Greek philosophers who are his sages par excellence. (Wisdom 13)

I tend to think that Walbrigde’s views reflect a tendency that still exists in

Western academic circles to identify philosophy with the Greeks, rationalism

with philosophy, and Western civilization with both, and that this has had its

effect on the study of Suhrawardī. This settled opinion results in a tendency

among scholars such as Walbridge to unduly emphasize what they think to be

the Greek and rational elements of his thought and to try to disregard or

disparage the Persian and poetic, whether pre-or post-Islamic. This does not do

justice to the full range of Suhrawardī’s legacy. There is still a pervasive

tendency among scholars to believe, as Oswald Spengler wrote, that our

Western culture has a deep inward relationship to Greek culture that makes us

20

its successors and inheritors rather than being merely its worshippers. For my

part, I agree with Spengler in believing that this is, as he says, a venerable

prejudice that should at long last be put aside.8

After all of that, it is a pleasure to record that contemporary scholarship

on Abhinavagupta is much less fraught, no doubt because the subject matter is

more remote, with no direct connection with the Western tradition such as

Suhrawardī has with Platonism. As it is the case with Suhrawardī, the study of

Abhinavagupta is a recent phenomenon, primarily because his work has lain in

obscurity for many centuries. What enabled scholarship to begin was the

publication in the early part of the 20th century of the Kashmir Series of Texts

and Studies by the Research Department of the Government of Kashmir. The

publication of this series enabled scholars to find reprinted all of the important

texts of the early Kashmir Śaivite tradition. This publication event has allowed

research to flourish both in India and the West. In India, it is worthwhile to note

the work of the most authentic modern representative of the tradition,

Brahmacari Lakṣman Joo, who has had a number of the more prominent

Western scholars among his students. In addition, there is Pandey’s

monumental and indispensable study, Abhinavagupta. Pandey has also

produced a text of the Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī, including an English

8 “Es ist ein ehrwürdiges Vorurteil, das wir endlich überwinden sollten, daß die Antike

uns innerlich nahesteht, weil wir vermeintlich ihre Schüler und Nachkommen, weil wir tatsächlich ihre Anbeter gewesen sind” (37).

21

translation. Jaideva Singh has brought out a series of translations, complete with

his own extremely valuable commentary, including the Śivasūtras, the

Spandakārikās, the Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, the Parātrīśikāvivaraṇa, and the

Vijṇānabhairava. The Muktabodha Indological Research Institute has produced

quality translations of the Paramārthasāra, Tantrasāra, and Utpaladeva’s

Īsvarapratybhijñākārikā.

In the West, Alexis Sanderson has written copiously on the Śaiva

traditions in Kashmir, producing a series of articles covering a wide variety of

topics including both historical and interpretive issues. A number of scholars

have produced studies treating particular facets of Abhinavagupta’s work within

the Kashmir Śaivite tradition as a whole. Lilian Silburn, in addition to translating

a number of works into French including the Paramārthasāra, wrote a study

whose particular focus was kuṇḍalinī and its place within the tantric tradition.

André Padoux has produced a systematic and in-depth treatment of divine

speech and phonematic emanation. Mark Dyczkowski has written a trilogy

whose particular focus is the doctrine of spanda or vibration. Paul Muller-Ortega

wrote a book whose particular focus was the symbol of the heart with the works

of Abhinavagupta. John Dupuche has written on the Kula Ritual as described in

the Tantrāloka (TĀ). All of these scholars have also published significant essays

which advance the study of Abhinavagupta’s work. Also of note is Dyczkowski’s

forthcoming translation of the complete Tantrāloka with commentary, which will

certainly make Abhinavagupta’s magnus opus much more generally accessible.

22

In addition to these philosophical studies, there has been a similar flowering of

both Indian and Western scholarship treating of Abhinavagupta’s theories of

aesthetics. The pioneering work was Indian Aesthetics by Pandey, framed in

terms of Abhinavagupa’s theories and devoted to bringing them into line with

the philosophical aspects of Abhinavagupta’s works in which Pandey was also a

pre-eminent scholar. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan have produced a

translation of the Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavrhana along with Abhinavagupta’s

Locana, supplemented by analytical studies such as Masson and Patwardhan’s

Śāntarasa and Abhinvagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. There have also been

works by K. P. Mishra, Y. S. Walimbe, and R. Gnoli.

Methodological Considerations

There is an obvious fact with which any scholar who seeks to approach

thinkers such as Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta must come to terms. Speaking

of Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, Walbridge puts it in the following way:

He indicates that it is an esoteric book, written for his disciples and not really intended for others. It was based in part on intuition or mystical insight; its full comprehension was reserved for those who have achieved a certain level of spiritual comprehension. (Science 28)

The obvious fact poses an obvious methodological problem. Again speaking with

reference to Suhrawardī, Aminrazavi states it comprehensively:

The foremost difficulty in writing on Suhrawardī’s school of illumination, as with any visionary mystic/philosopher, is to find the qualified person who can comment from an insider’s point of view. The heart of the visionary’s brand of mysticism, is to have an intuitive knowledge of or an inner experience of, truth. By definition, then, commentators and authors of such a work would be qualified to explain this inner

23

experience if they can relate to this message on an experiential basis and therefore can speak as an insider. The above poses a problem for this author since on the one hand I am to comment on a philosopher/mystic whose thoughts have drawn and engaged more for a number of years, while on the other hand I do not stand within the illuminationist tradition of the luminous world of lights, angels, archetypes and the interconnected web of ideas that Suhrawardī puts forward.…An insight of the luminous world of Suhrawardī therefore, is not a “live option” for me, to use William James’ term. (School xvi)

Muller-Ortega raises the same issue with regard to Abhinavagupta:

Can we hope completely to understand Abhinavagupta? We must be fully aware that for every element of his thought we study, many more remain to be discussed before we can claim a true understanding of this great teacher and the tradition from which he stems. We immediately encounter an important and central cross-cultural perplexity. We have been using the term understand in its commonly accepted denotation: to have a thorough technical acquaintance with something. The term may be used in a stronger sense: Abhinavagupta distinguishes between an understanding that is purely intellectual, and one gained from experiential knowledge. There is an important sense in which to understand the Heart actually requires replicating the journey of return that is the tantric sādhanā: we must play Śiva’s game to its most serious and hilarious conclusion, which is the unmasking of Śiva within ourselves. A scholarly study, however, cannot insist on such a radical form of understanding. (Triadic 2–3)

Since both of these distinguished scholars have in fact produced scholarly

works that deal with Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, the reader will not be

remiss in presuming that they have both offered solutions to the conundrum

that they have posed. And so it is. Aminrazavi writes as follows:

This volume presents not so much a discussion concerning the validity or soundness of Suhrawardī’s specific ideas but an exposition of the mystical dimension of his rather broad and varied school of thought. As an outsider to a school of thought whose thrust remains the attainment of truth through a special mode of cognition, all an author can do is to engage himself in a close textual analysis and attempt to put them in coherent and well defined concepts.…The present work, therefore, undertakes a study of the mystical dimension of Suhrawardī’s thought. It

24

is imperative to note that while mysticism remains one of the salient features of Suhrawardī’s philosophical school, he was not only a Sufi nor was his school of thought only mystical. (School xvi)

And here is Muller-Ortega:

A scholarly study, however, cannot insist on such a radical form of understanding. As a consequence we must here limit the notion of understanding to a form of sympathetic perception through which we attempt to see and feel our way into the still alien universe of tantric sādhanā. However, this limitation of understanding necessarily obscures the most important meaning of the Heart of Abhinavagupta: that a religious vision is not something simply intellectual, emotional, or imagined, but rather it is a pulsating, powerful experience that completely transforms our ordinary and routinized perceptions of reality. Nevertheless, a scholarly study can contribute something to the collective task of interpreting and understanding the work of Abhinavagupta. In addition, it may embolden a few readers to the existential task of experiential replication. (Triadic 3)

In facing myself this methodological dilemma, I can first simply appeal to

the precedent of these ansehene Vorgängers. My task of justification is actually

easier than theirs because mine is a philosophical study with a strictly

philosophical research agenda, even though it must to some extent deal with the

mystical aspect of their work. I can once again appeal to Staal’s dictum that

while comparative religious studies are not religion (which in essence is the

problem that Aminrazavi and Muller-Ortega have posed), comparative

philosophy remains philosophy. In this I am aided by both of the subjects of the

study themselves. Both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta can be described, in

Ziai’s happy phrase, as systematic mystical philosophers (Knowledge 1). Muller-

Ortega himself refers to Abhinavagupta’s “highly intellectualized mysticism”

(“Luminous” 51). Even though these are both mystical systems, one finds very

25

little that is apophatic in either thinker’s writings—no appeals to ineffability such

as occur in Cusa, for example. On the contrary, both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta are insistent upon the place, even the necessity, of reasoning in

the mystical quest.

In the introduction to his masterwork, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, Suhrawardī

distinguishes two types of wisdom (ḥikma) in philosophy: intuitive (ta’alluh) and

discursive (baḥth). Intuitive philosophy is the more mystical side of things. It

means, literally, becoming God-like, from takhalluq bi akhlāq Allāh, becoming

characterized by the traits of God. Discursive philosophy, however, involves the

mastery of logic and reason and of the sciences. Suhrawardī says that

philosophers may have varying combinations and degrees of either of these two,

but that the ideal philosopher is the master of both (ḤI 5).

Abhinavagupta goes even further. He writes that, according to Kashmir

Śaiva doctrine, knowledge and ignorance may be divided into two types each,

namely spiritual (pauruṣa) and intellectual (bauddha) (TĀ 1.36).9 He argues that

both spiritual and intellectual ignorance and spiritual and intellectual knowledge

feed on each other (posṭṛ). He then goes on to say that, while initiation and

ritual and the like may eradicate spiritual ignorance, this only occurs after the

body dies. However, he continues, if intellectual ignorance is brought to an end

through intellectual knowledge, then liberation while still alive is as if in the palm

9 ज्ञ न ज्ञ नस्वरूपां यदकु्तां प्रत्येकमप्यदाः।

चिध पौरूषबौद्धत्वचिदोक्तां चिवि सने ॥

26

of one’s hand (jīvanmuktiḥ karatale sthitā) (TĀ 1.44).10 Moreover, even in the

case of initiation and ritual and the like, liberation only occurs when it is

preceded or accompanied by clear intellectual insight (bauddhavijñāna). Thus, in

that case also, intellectual knowledge is the dominant factor (TĀ 1.45). This

emphasis on the intellectual in both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta encourages

me to suppose that a study such as this one, which is focused on philosophical

doctrine, can nonetheless be adequate to truly capture at least some of the

essence of what each of them understands and intends with regard to Light.

A philosophical approach, however, has its own methodological problems

to be considered. This fact is particularly true of a comparative study. The first

question to be addressed is whether or not it is legitimate to refer to systems of

thought that are not derived from the Greek intellectual culture of antiquity as

“philosophy.” It goes without saying that I think that it is legitimate to do so, in

particular for a couple of systems of thought from Persia and India. Happily, I am

not alone in holding this view in the philosophical community. Scharfstein

advocates it as follows:

As the interrelationship between human beings everywhere grows stronger and more visible, it grows more obvious that a point of view that takes account of no more than a single culture is to that extent provincial. This provincialism has been shared by persons of otherwise great intellectual distinction, too proud, I suppose, to realize how narrow-minded they were, or still are. I do not hesitate to say that anyone who believes that philosophy…has been confined to Europe is demonstrating

10

बौद्धज्ञ नेन त ुयद बौद्धमज्ञ नजचृभितम ्।

चवलीयते तद जीवन्मचुक्ताः करतले चस्थत ॥

27

either ignorance or prejudice. So far as I know, this belief is never held by those have studied Indian or Chinese thought with care. (7)

It helps, however, to have some justification for this view, and for the purposes

of providing it for this study I will avail myself of the one Scharfstein himself

supplies:

I define [a] tradition as philosophical to the extent that its members articulate it in the form of principles—if only principles of interpretation—and of conclusions reasonably drawn from them; and I define it as philosophical to the extent that its adherents defend and attack by means of reasonable arguments—even those that deny reason—and understand and explain how they try to be reasonable. (1)

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta do not merely state and claim things about Light,

they present reasoned arguments in support of what they state and claim. Some

of these arguments are considerably intricate and subtle. I have included a

number of them in this study and one of the reasons that I did so was to make

exactly Scharfstein’s point, that Suhrawardī and especially Abhinavagupta should

be considered philosophers because they reason and argue in what is a

quintessentially philosophical manner.

It must, however, be noted that the scope of what is called

“philosophical,” even within Scharfstein’s definition, is somewhat broader for

“systematic mystical” philosophers such as Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta then

what is often meant by “philosophy” in, say, many modern American

universities. In this context Jonathan Edelmann, for example, argues that for

Hindu thinkers such as Abhinavagupta, while it would certainly be false to say

that his system is not philosophical or has no philosophical interest at all, it is

28

misleading to call them philosophers, in particular since the scope of their

intellectual practice includes the spiritual exegesis of sacred texts in a way that

modern Western philosophical practice does not. Their practice should more

properly be called theology (430–31). Of course, neither Suhrawardī nor

Abhinavagupta are modern Western philosophers, and Edelmann himself

recognizes that “the words philosophy and theology have changed in meaning

over the course of Western history, and therefore Hindu exegetes share

sensibilities of what was called philosophy in medieval Europe” (431). However,

he then goes on to say that “we need to use the words are used today, even if

one may wish to note alternative meanings from different historical contexts”

(431). The difficulty with this analysis is that it privileges mainstream Western

practice in a way that is not entirely justified—consider, for example,

contemporary Thomism, which continues to share the medieval outlook—and it

also smacks of Eurocentrism. For example, the accuracy of his claim is arguable

in the case of contemporary Islamic philosophers such as Mehdi Yazdi

Mohammed Azadpur, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

The other issue is that of contextualism. In his collection of essays

dealing with Light in various traditions, which includes articles on both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, Matthew Kapstein summed up the issue:

The comparative study of mysticism and religious experience has been enriched during recent decades by a lively debate aroused by scholars who have argued, against the perennialism that had characterized much of early-twentieth-century writing on mysticism, that religious experience is largely a matter of cultural and linguistic construction, and not of

29

context-neutral, universal phenomena. In rebuttal, some have recently sought to challenge constructivism, grounding religious epistemology in experiences that are not contingently constructed, but instead reflect innate capacities of human consciousness and perception. (ix)

Although Kapstein was writing about religion and mysticism, similar things have

been said in philosophy, although with perhaps a little less force because

reasoning is less private than mystical experience. Nevertheless, as I have noted

earlier, in making this study I am clearly committed to the possibility and

legitimacy of cross-cultural comparison between intellectual cultures in general

and philosophical traditions in particular.

As far as the extreme contextualist position is concerned, that is, that

philosophical traditions from different cultures are absolutely incommensurable,

I will note along with others that it entails its own denial. The claim that

different philosophical traditions are incommensurable depends in itself upon

them being at least commensurable enough so that one can judge them to be in

fact incommensurable. As Scharfstein puts it:

Whoever goes beyond the mere assertion and undertakes to explain how and why traditional Indians, Chinese, and Europeans were—and, to later interpreters, remain—impenetrable worlds apart, is most probably assuming the ability to enter into each of the worlds far enough to show that they are closed to one another. The explanation explains what, it is claimed, is impossible to explain. (34)

My other justification for a methodology employing cross-cultural philosophical

comparisons is that the denial that philosophers from differing cultures can

interact with each other in meaningful ways is empirically false. We have had

examples of just such interaction throughout recorded history. The most

30

relevant example to this study, perhaps, is that, when Greek philosophers

travelling with Alexander the Great encountered yogis in India, they were able to

recognize what they were to the extent of calling them gymnosophists.11

The present study itself brings up this question in another interesting

way. Consider the following remark of Frits Staal, delivered in a somewhat

contextualist vein: “Oriental philosophies can be studied in Western philosophy

only as possibilities of Western philosophy” (13). Now, that is prettily said, but

where does it leave Suhrawardī, a Persian Platonist? For as a Persian, he is

presumably an Oriental philosopher, and as a Platonist, presumably a Western

one.12 But how can he be? By its mere existence, the Islamic philosophical

tradition broaches the question of whether or not the Greek philosophical

tradition is inherently “Western” at all. As the boundaries between different

contexts start to become permeable or even fade, contextualism becomes a

harder position to sustain.

11 A (somewhat) more recent example comes from the chair of my dissertation

committee, who for quite a number of years has been attending a series of conferences held between Hopi Medicine Elders and Quantum Physicists in the American Southwest. By his account, the two groups seem to understand one another remarkably well. 12 This is Scharfstein’s solution. In his Comparative History of World Philosophy he

writes “Jewish and Muslim thought, though each has its own history and dogmas, draw their philosophy proper from the same Greek and Roman sources and, in this limited but real sense, are part of the European tradition” (6). For anyone with a knowledge of the Islamic tradition and its historical relationship with the West, this step is misconceived almost to the point of absurdity.

31

Limitations of the Study

Both Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq and Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika

kula are rich and profound systems, integrating philosophy and mysticism. A

comparative study such as this one, focused as it is on the purely philosophical

aspects of their works, can barely touch upon the surface of either. Its

justification lies, I believe, in the centrality of Light to both of their systems of

thought and practice.

Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge some of the limitations that

are necessarily imposed on the study by its scope and focus. The first limitation I

wish to mention is textual. In focusing upon the question of the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light as it appears in their systems, in the case of Suhrawardī I

have used almost exclusively his masterwork, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (ḤI). Not only

does this book express his philosophical treatment of Light in a complete and

comprehensive way, including all of his arguments for illuminationist principles

and against the Peripatetics, but alone among all his works it is written in the

Light terminology which is perhaps the most striking feature of his philosophy.

In the case of Abhinavagupta I have used primarily his masterwork the

Tantralokā, supplemented by a few other works, in particular the

Īsvarapratyabhijñāvimarśini because it is there that he presents his detailed

philosophical argumentation.

Since this study is a philosophical one, and both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta are systematic mystical philosophers, I am necessarily telling only

32

half the story. But as Aminrazavi and Muller-Ortega have said, and I quite agree,

the core experiential elements of the mystical aspects of their systems are quite

beyond the reach of a scholarly study. However, neither Suhrawardī nor

Abhinavagupta compartmentalized their knowledge in this way. So there are

elements in their mystical and aesthetic thought that doubtless have significant

bearing even on the more purely philosophical aspects of their work that I

consider and these things appear in their texts. Because of my focus on the

doctrinal elements of the metaphysics of Light in relation to these works, I have

not been able, for reasons of space, to include all of these in my study, although I

do discuss mysticism to a certain extent. Yet they are of such importance that

they at least bear mentioning.

A very complex and important part of Abhinavagupta’s texts, especially

the Tantrāloka, is his explication of the four methods or means (upāya-s) where

one actually attains enlightened freedom. Often in his works discussion of these

means are deeply intertwined with the more philosophical elements of his

discussion. This interleaving can occur at a very fine level of detail, even within

an individual pada. In lifting out the purely philosophical elements for a doctrinal

comparison with Suhrawardī, I have inevitably done a certain injustice not only

to the actual flow of Abhinavagupta’s thought but to it sense as well. I am aware

of this fact, but I also think that the philosophical elements can be treated in

isolation for the purposes of this study, which is a doctrinal investigation

concerning specific questions of ontology, epistemology, and cosmogony.

33

Attempting to include these elements would also inevitably trespass on those

elements of Abhinavagupta’s system that can be accessed only through direct

experience and which are beyond the reach of a scholarly study anyway.

In their writings, both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta also move beyond

the strictly philosophical into the areas of the poetic, aesthetic, and imaginal. I

have already had occasion to discuss these facts with regard to Suhrawardī in my

review of scholarship earlier in this chapter. The same is true for

Abhinavagupta’s extensive and important works on aesthetics. I agree with

scholars such as Pandey, Barlingay, and Mishra that Abhinavagupta’s aesthetic is

seamlessly integrated with his philosophy and so its relevance is undoubted.

Abhinavagupta’s Dhvanyāloka (“Light on [the Doctrine of] Suggestion”)

has proven over the centuries to be one of the most influential works of India on

the theory and practice of poetics and literary criticism. As its name indicates, in

large part it is a defense and advocacy of suggestion (dhvani) as an independent

semantic mode that has greater evocative power in speech than direct

denotation (abhidhā).

Indirect reference implies the need for interpretation of meaning, and

thus of some level of hermeneutics. As I discuss earlier in this chapter in the

review of scholarship, hermeneutics (ta’wil) is one of the fundamental features

of Corbin’s approach to the works of Suhrawardī, especially in the visionary

recitals, for the idea of ta’wil, etymologically and functionally, is to “cause to

return, to lead back, to restore to one’s origin and to the place where one comes

34

home, consequently to return to the true and original meaning of a text”

(Avicenna 29). When one considers that one of the fundamental concepts of

Kashmir Śaivism is pratyabhijñā or recognition, it seems evident that there is

material here for a comparative investigation between Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta that could go beyond the limits of investigating their systems in

terms of the metaphysics of Light. Such a study might even involve correlating

similarities in their Light philosophies with possible similarities arising from their

common involvement with poetics, suggestive reference, and hermeneutics. I

readily acknowledge the appeal of such a study and its possible importance to a

number of areas of scholarship, but also must submit that it is quite beyond the

scope of the present study.

The same is true of another important aspect of Suhrawardī’s work that

also engaged Corbin in a fundamental and compelling way. Suhrawardī taught

that in addition to the intelligible, spiritual, and material worlds, there is another

level of reality, the ‘alam al-mithāl, or what Corbin named the mundus

imaginalis or imaginal world. The imaginal level of reality operates like an

intermediary bridge between the physical world and the intelligible level of

world of forms. More than the concept of hermeneutics or ta’wil, the imaginal

world has direct philosophical implications, dealing as it does with issues of

ontology. It is also important in terms of Suhrawardī’s relation to the Islamic

tradition because it is anticipated in Al-Farabi and Avicenna and also appears in

Ibn ‘Arabi who is his near contemporary (d. 1240). Nonetheless I have regretfully

35

concluded that consideration of this important aspect of Suhrawardī’s system is

beyond the scope of the present study. I am sustained in this decision by the

fact that the ‘alam al-mithāl and its theory is barely mentioned, if it is mentioned

at all, in the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, which is Suhrawardī’s major philosophical work

concerning the metaphysics of Light and the fundamental research text for this

study.

Structure of the Study

As philosophy, the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light has three

elements: ontology, epistemology, and emanation. Although the three interact

together to form a composite and complex whole, it is useful to separate them

for analysis. The core of this study is its three central chapters, one chapter

dealing with each of these doctrinal elements.

Persia has always served as a bridge between the East and the West, and

in a way Suhrawardī serves that function in this study as well. Its central

question is to ask to what extent it is legitimate to include Suhrawardī’s al-

ḥikmat al-ishrāq and Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula within the extension of

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. For Suhrawardī there is no difficulty in

this whatsoever: the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light in its accepted

extension is Platonist, and so is Suhrawardī. The only reason he has not been

regularly included in the lists of philosophers who are identified with the

doctrine is that he has been (and to a certain extent remains) relatively unknown

in Western academia. So in a comparative study with Abhinavagupta he can

36

serve as a litmus test, as it were, because it is of Abhinavagupta, who is not a

Platonist and is an Indian philosopher, that the central question to be

investigated really needs to be asked. So in each of the central chapters, after

some introductory discussion, I proceed to a descriptive analysis of Suhrawardī’s

system in terms of the specific element of the doctrine to be investigated in that

chapter. I then go on to do the same for Abhinavagupta and then finally I do a

comparative analysis. I have also included in each chapter direct quotations

from the works of Plato or Plotinus or both as prime exemplars of the doctrine in

its “original” Platonic setting to serve as an additional touchstone for

comparison.

Before beginning this comparative analysis, however, I devote Chapter 2

of this study to the historical context. The question of context assumes

importance in any cross-cultural comparative study and especially so in this one,

because it is important in terms of the research question to determine to what

extent, if any, there has been direct or indirect influence between Suhrawardī’s

and Abhinavagupta’s thought or even between their parent traditions. In

addition to investigating this question, in this chapter I give a brief overview of

the life and works of the two philosophers. I also examine the historical context

of both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta within each of their own traditions.

In Chapter 3 I investigate and compare how Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta each understand Light within the ontologies of their respective

systems. I inquire into what they mean by “Light” and how they both define it

37

and understand it in relation to Being and manifestation, as well as the general

features of their cosmologies. I also look at the arguments they bring to bear

against other schools within their respective traditions with a view to determine

how they illuminate each philosopher’s particular treatment of the question of

Light and Being.

In Chapter 4 I bring the same comparative procedure to Light and

cognition, examining Suhrawardī’s and Abhinavagupta’s systems in relation to

the idea of divine illumination. I investigate their own particular doctrines,

knowledge by presence and the illuminative relation for Suhrawardī, and the

doctrine of appearance and the doctrine of vibration in Abhinavagupta. I again

examine the particular lines of argument each philosopher takes against other

schools to establish his version of the doctrine.

Chapter 5 deals with the doctrine of emanation. Here I will consider how

each philosopher understands the continuum of Light which constitutes reality

and manifestation, of what it consists, and the manner in which it functions.

In Chapter 6, the conclusion, I seek to collate and evaluate the material of

the other chapters with a view toward answering the research question by

evaluating the extent to which Suhrawardī—and in particular Abhinavagupta—

may be thought to be exponents of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light as

well as to what extent doing so may possibly change the defining characteristics

of the doctrine itself.

38

CHAPTER 2: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

In his Introduction to The Presence of Light, Matthew Kapstein writes as

follows:

Among the themes sometimes taken to suggest that there is a universal basis for religious intuition and experience, images of light must hold pride of place….In mystical traditions, East and West, not only is light ubiquitous, but strikingly precise similarities may be found in altogether different historical and cultural settings. The traditions themselves, in their interplay of convergence and divergence, seem to confirm the vision of the whole and its many modes. (viii)

The works of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta show exactly this striking

similarity within differing historical and cultural settings. There is no attested

historical or textual connection between them yet, as this study shows, their

philosophical doctrines concerning Light are remarkably similar. In his recent

comparative study of Neoplatonism with Kashmir Śaivism, Michal Just

summarizes the situation accurately and well:

How is it possible that this philosophical doctrine seems to have travelled across geographical and cultural boundaries with such unbelievable ease? This might be explained either by the nature of the subject itself…or by a cross-cultural exchange of ideas based on real contact on oral or textual level…since direct textual parallels, e.g. translations, seem difficult to be found, the question of real contact may remain forever open as its answer more or less depends on the personal preferences of each interpreter. We could take the first path and presume that doctrinal parallels are derived from the nature of the mind itself; we are thus led to the old doctrine of eternal philosophy (philosophy perennis or theologia prisca).…Taking the path of “influence” would on the other hand lead to an increasingly detailed study of the history with a proportionally increasing degree of speculative theorizing based on the growing amount of material of such study. (23)

In his essay, Just considers only Hellenistic Neoplatonism in relation to

Kashmir Śaivism. There is no mention of the Islamic development of Neoplatonic

39

thought in general nor of Suhrawardī’s illuminationist philosophy in particular.

Just is by no means unique in this regard. Comparative studies of Neoplatonism

and Indian philosophy have gone on in the Western Academy for over a century

with little or no mention of Islamic philosophy. Yet in considering possible

influences between Neoplatonism and Indian systems of philosophy, the

importance of Islamic Neoplatonism is obvious since this tradition flourished in

Persia, which lies geographically between West Asia and the Mediterranean on

the one hand and South Asia on the other. Moreover, Light imagery has been

pervasive throughout central Eurasia, being found not only in Greek, Persian,

and Hindu thought but in Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Manichean as well.

This suggests the possibility of a transfer of Light imagery and associated

doctrines along the trade routes that have woven the cultures of this region

together over the last three millennia. Suhrawardī himself understood his

tradition to be rooted in an ancient wisdom tradition that was common to Egypt,

Greece, Persia, Babylon, and India. His identification of the Zoroastrian Amesha

Spenta, or bounteous immortals, with the Platonic forms suggests that Iran may

have been not only a bridge between Eastern and Western currents of thought

that contributed to the metaphysics of Light but an important source of them as

well. The existence of an Indo-Iranian linguistic, mythological, and spiritual

substratum existing prior to the earliest Vedic and Zoroastrian scriptures and

contributory to both is almost universally recognized, and this could also be a

potential source of a common heritage that eventually flowered into various

40

forms of Light-based spiritual practice and intellectual speculation. This

interaction between the two branches of the Indo-Iranian linguistic and spiritual

substratum thus dates to the close of the second millennium BCE and has been

continuous ever since. As G. Gnoli writes in the introductory section of his article

on these relations:

Existing cultural, as well as linguistic, differences between the two larger groups would only be heightened by geographic dispersal and, consequently, different experiences of adaptation and interaction with the indigenous populations and different contacts with neighboring societies. However, through political expansion, commercial relations, religious and other cultural exchange, Iranians and Indians were destined to experience repeated, if not continuous, rediscoveries of each other, both in ancient times and, with increasing intensity, after the extension eastward of Islam and the Persian language. (“India”)

Political control of these regions might change frequently, yet despite the

rise and ebb of empires, the history of India and Iran has been one of continuous

cultural interpenetration:

India’s wealth and cultural vigor, finding outlets to the west and expedited by Iranian entrepreneurship, would give it an influence on the art, thought, and religion of Iran and of Central Asia. In turn, the eastward political and cultural expansion of Islam would create a vast new field of interaction between Iranians and Indians across the subcontinent. (G. Gnoli “India”)

All of this is clearly relevant to the research question of this study

because if there are indications of possible influence between or a common

heritage for Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, then that might be the source of

similarities in their doctrines. There is a clear sense in which bringing a Persian

and an Indian philosopher within the ambit of the discussion of the metaphysics

of Light shifts the focus of discourse eastward, as it were, in the direction of

41

Persia and India. In particular, it opens up new avenues of inquiry concerning

the question of Persian influence on Suhrawardī’s illuminationist philosophy that

is of such importance (and controversy) in the study of his legacy.

In this chapter I address these issues of historical context. To undertake a

detailed study of the complete millennial sweep of Indo-Iranian cultural

interactions is beyond the scope of this study, so I concentrate on a few selected

elements within this history of continual interaction that bear directly or

significantly on the possibility of influence between Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta. I begin by considering the way in which prior scholarship has

addressed the questions of possible influence and doctrinal similarity between

Neoplatonism and Indian philosophy and examine it with reference to

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. I next consider the historical context of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta specifically, concentrating on the two epochs

that are especially suggestive of a possible shared context: the Indo-Iranian

substratum and the Delhi Sultanate under Akbar. I then consider both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta within the context of their respective traditions.

Finally I discuss what possible conclusions may be drawn from a consideration of

context in terms of the research project of this study.

Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy: The Question of Influence

The question of possible influence between Greece and India in classical

antiquity has been debated by scholars over the past century. A great deal of

this discussion has been focused on possible relationships between the

42

Neoplatonists—in particular Plotinus—and Indian philosophy—in particular

Vedanta—wherein many doctrinal similarities have been seen to occur. Now,

Suhrawardī was a Neoplatonist. Similarly, Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula

has historical and doctrinal relationships with Vedantā. So if there were strong

evidence for historical interaction and influence between Neoplatonism and

Vedanta and those interactions included elements of the metaphysics of Light,

then doctrinal similarities between Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta concerning

Light might be explained as the result of them both inheriting those doctrines

from such an earlier interaction of Greek and Indian traditions.

However, in modern Western scholarship at least, the question of

possible direct doctrinal influence between Indian and Greek philosophers

remains moot. Scholars have advanced arguments for the complete range of

possible positions, from historical influence being virtually impossible to its being

virtually certain. There have also been arguments for a perrenialist view,

although this can be taken to be not mutually exclusive with the possibility of

influence. These discussions have by and large treated India and Greece as

standing in isolation, as it were, without taking into consideration the possibility

of influence mediated by the network of trade routes (the Silk Road) that have

woven Eurasia together throughout antiquity.

Without doubt, the most ambitious attempt to argue for a definite

mutual influence between India and Greece in general has been Thomas

McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought. McEvilley argues for “two massive

43

transfers of ideas or methods of thinking, first from India into Greece in the pre-

Socratic period and again from Greece back into India in the Hellenistic” (642).

Essentially he claims that Indians taught the early Greeks monism and Greeks

later reciprocated by teaching Indians logic. Commentators have faulted him for

his neglect of Persia, as well as the possibility of emergence of similar doctrines

from a common Indo-European “proto-philosophy” (Allen 60–62; Thompson 48–

49). Bussanich brings up the alternative perrenialist explanation for similarity of

doctrine (5–6). Nowhere does McEvilley deal with the doctrine of Light and its

place in either tradition.

Concerning the more specific question of possible influence between

Neoplatonism and India, the starting point for discussion is often a reference

that Porphyry makes to Plotinus’s ardent interest in the philosophies of Persia

and India. After describing how after a long search Plotinus settled on

Ammonius as the teacher he had been looking for, in his the Porphyry writes:

From that day he followed Ammonius continuously, and under his guidance made such progress in philosophy that he became eager to investigate the Persian methods and the system adopted among the Indians. It happened that the Emperor Gordian was at that time preparing his campaign against Persia; Plotinus joined the army and went on the expedition. He was then thirty-eight, for he had passed eleven entire years under Ammonius. When Gordian was killed in Mesopotamia, it was only with great difficulty that Plotinus came off safe to Antioch. (3)

It is both remarkable and significant that in reading this passage, contemporary

scholars tend to focus entirely on the reference to India while passing over the

reference to Persia in silence. Yet this is only one of many references to the

44

influence of Persian knowledge that are made in Greek texts throughout

antiquity.

It is important to recognize that it is not the ancient Greeks themselves

who ignore or deny Persian influence on Greek thought—rather they

consistently affirm it.13 It is contemporary Western scholarship that discounts

the possibility of Persian influence. The difficulty for contemporary scholarship is

that there is nothing in the extant works of Plotinus that refers to Indian or

Persian philosophers in the direct way that he refers, for example, to

Parmenides. Thus scholars are left with inferring possible influence solely from

similarities in doctrine. In mainstream Neoplatonic scholarship this question has

been framed as whether or not there are aspects of Neoplatonism which cannot

be understood solely against the background of Greek tradition and would

therefore require some outside influence—presumably Indian—to explain (Staal

249). The majority of the leading scholars of Plotinus of the 20th century have

maintained that no such Indian influence is indicated (Sumi 45).14 Even granting

that it is historically possible that Plotinus was in contact with and influenced by

Indian thought, “possible contact and doctrinal similarity do not add up to

influence” (Wolters 302–03). On the other hand, scholars such as Tripathi argue

13 Even Walbridge writes that “References to things Persian appear frequently in Greek

literature of all periods” and that very often these references include statements that Greek philosophy was influenced by or even developed from Persian wisdom (Wisdom 5). 14 A survey of the relevant scholars and their works can be found in Staal 235–50.

45

that “we may conclude that Indian thought might have played a great part in the

development of Neoplatonism, and that Neoplatonism might be the result of the

religious syncretism which arose from the conquests of Alexander the Great and

the undertakings of the Roman Empire” (287).

There are others who adopt a more perennialist view. Chattopadhy, for

example, writes:

Fashions and faith change. Languages and ways of doing philosophy are not constant either. But certain fundamental questions of life appear, disappear and reappear in different forms….It is interesting to recall that none of these questions is peculiar to one particular culture, form of life or system of philosophy. Their trans-cultural or pervasive influence is itself an intriguing philosophical question. How do you account for the fact that in India, Europe and elsewhere, old, new and renewable answers have been and still are being raised in the course of tackling these questions? (31)

I. C. Sharma writes:

Let us accept that Plotinus was absolutely ignorant of Indian thought. The question arises, what could be the cause of the parallelism between the meditative methods of Plotinus and those of the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavadgīta? How is it that similar methods have led to the same conceptual formulation in Plotinus of the theory of the One, the Nous, the Psyche and the World, as that of Indian thought? The most modest answer would be that, just as the scientists’ experiments on the nature of the atom performed in different laboratories have led to the same conclusions the Greek and Indian thinkers might have reached identical conclusions to the domain of religion independently of each other. (334)

Others argue that the cultural interchange facilitated by extensive trade

networks would foster a tendency toward a blending of doctrines:

Plotinus never belonged to the isolated Occident which in fact never existed. European culture developed historically by heavy borrowing from Babylon, India, Syria and Egypt, perhaps also from Iran and Palestine, and Plotinus drank deeply from that composite, creative,

46

cosmopolitan culture of the Mediterranean, which today belongs to the world’s common heritage. (Gregorios, “Geography” 21)

In any case, the question of influence between Neoplatonism and Indian

philosophy remains undecided and is likely never to have a clear resolution “at

least in the absence of some dramatically new body of evidence—namely, the

discovery of the Neoplatonic equivalent of the Dead Sea scrolls” (Ciapalo 72).

In all of this discussion, there is very little that is focused directly on the

doctrine of Light. There is one exception to this, however, in a paper entitled

“Cit and Nous” which was prepared and presented by Paul Hacker for an

international conference on “Neoplatonism and Indian Thought” held at Brock

University in Ontario in October 1967.

As its title indicates, Hacker’s essay is a comparative study of the concept

of Nous in Neoplatonism and Cit in Vedānta and Advaita Vedāntism.15 Fairly

early on, however, he finds what seems to be a glaring inconsistency. In

Neoplatonism, Hacker notes, the intellect or soul is described as being inherently

capable of turning back upon itself.16 This means that the cognitive theory of

Neoplatonism involves reflexive awareness—in Hacker’s words, “epistemological

reflexivity.” Yet “the Advaitic Vedantist explicitly dismisses the notion of

15 There are a variety of philosophical systems may be called “Vedanta.” What Hacker

means by his use of the term is primarily the system of Śaṁkara, as well as “later interpretations of the Upaniṣads” (161). In the course of his essay, he makes specific reference to Śaṁkara’s Upadeśasāhasrī (171–77) his Brahmasūtrabhāṣya (178–80) and his commentary on the Bṛahdāraṇyakopaniṣad (179). Among the Upaniṣads, he also refers to Katha, Śvetāśvatara, Muṇḍaka and Maitrī (162) and he also mentions Paul Deussen’s The System of the Vedānta (162). 16 Έπιστροφέ προς έατου

47

epistemological reflexivity as illogical” (165). There is good reason for this, he

writes, for “one of those thinkers whose speculations were handed down in the

Upaniṣads conceived a thought that, in my opinion, belongs to the greatest

achievement of philosophy, both Eastern and Western” (165). This thought, as it

is expressed in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad is that “You cannot see the seer of

seeing, you cannot hear the hearer of hearing, you cannot think the thinker of

thinking, you cannot cognize the cognizer of cognition” (3.4.2).17 As Hacker

expands the problem:

That which makes knowledge possible—knowledge of all kinds, sensorial perception as well as mental insight and discursive thinking—the principle which makes this possible cannot naturally be grasped or comprehended by that of which it is the very basis of existence. Whatever names we may give to the principle which makes both mental and sensuous acts or events possible, whether we call it consciousness or spirit or thought or knowledge, it is absurd to assume that this principle should need an act of knowledge in order to attain that state which we call “to be known” or “to be manifest.” It is absurd because that which makes a thing possible, or is the basis of it, cannot possibly itself be made possible by the thing which it makes possible. Such an absurdity, however, would happen in epistemological reflexivity. (165)

Yet it is “inconceivable,” writes Hacker, that “the greatest thinkers of the

West should have acquiesced in a blatant absurdity” (165). The solution to this

problem, he finds, is to suppose that by “reflection upon oneself, “ the

Neoplatonists did not mean the usual type of cognition which an object

17

न दृष्टरे द्रष्टवरां पशयेः

न श्रतेुर श्रोतवरां शणृयुवः

न मतेर मनतवरां मन्वीथवः

न मवज्ञवतवरां मवजवनीथवः

48

represents itself to a knowing subject, but rather self knowledge in the sense of

the knowing subject being immediately revealed to itself:

For the negative proposition, “Spirit can never become an object,” provides a vigorous support to the positive statement, “Spirit is self-revealing.” The denial of objectivity on the part of spirit naturally involves its proximity to the subject of knowledge. (166)

But how can we be sure that the Neoplatonists in fact intended this conception

of self-reflection as self-revealing rather than a subject-object relationship? The

answer, Hacker claims, lies in the fact that both Neoplatonists and Vedāntists

expressed this self-revealing in the same terminology—the terminology of Light:

The self-manifestation of the spirit is expressed by an old term, stemming from mythic thinking and, through a long history, eventually developing into one of the finest intellectual achievements of India. Like “reflection upon oneself” its expression is a metaphor, but, I think, a much more apposite one, namely “self-luminous” in Sanskrit svayaṃ-jyotis or svayam-prakāśa. “Light, “ “shining” is a self-explanatory and widely used metaphor to denote all acts and states of consciousness and cognition and perception. “Self-luminosity” implies both the spirit’s awareness of its self and its capability of making objects, both mental and material, appear in the range of consciousness. (167)

I have more to say concerning the status of Light as “metaphor” in

Chapter 3. But, to continue following Hacker’s account, he then goes on to make

the point that in Neoplatonism, the understanding of Light moves beyond

cognition into a full-blooded metaphysics of Light, a “philosophical aspect that

may be called an epistemological ontology” (167). Recalling McVoy’s doctrinal

exposition of the metaphysics of Light from Chapter 1 of this study, the

illuminative theory of knowledge can only be understood as “an expression of

being and activity, participation and order—in short of the metaphysics of light”

49

(“Light” 139). Moreover, as is shown in Chapters 3 and 4 of this study, the

inherent nature of Light as such is self-awareness.

I have quoted at length from this essay of Hacker’s because in his

comparative study between Neoplatonism and Vedānta/Advaita Vedāntism he

has anticipated with remarkable precision some of the major themes of the

present study, which compares Suhrawardī, a medieval Islamic Neoplatonist,

with Abhinavagupta, a Kashmiri Śaivite whose thought emerged within the

current of Indian thought that in many respects continued to look to Vedānta as

foundational, even while critiquing it.

Hacker began by recognizing a problem in the Neoplatonic account of

cognition as involving έπιστροφέ προς έατου, or epistemic reflexivity, because,

as Vedānta had discovered, the notion of the knower taking itself as an object is

inherently self-contradictory. He solved this problem by arguing that the

Neoplatonic account understands reflexive awareness as self-manifestation or

self-luminosity—which is not self-contradictory—rather than as the self

representing itself to itself as an object—which is. He supported this by noting

the similar use of Light terminology in both Neoplatonism and Vedānta to

describe self-awareness, which would indicate that sense in which self-

awareness was understood was the same in both.

Now, it is precisely this distinction between two ways of understanding

self-knowledge and the identification of self-luminosity as the correct one that

stands at the core of Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist philosophy. In describing

50

luminous self-awareness Hacker wrote that “the denial of objectivity on the part

of spirit naturally involves its proximity to the subject of knowledge” (166).

Suhrawardī is more precise. It is not proximity that is involved, but rather

presence. Suhrawardī’s term for this luminous self-awareness is “knowledge by

presence” (al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī) which he contrasts with “knowledge by

representation” (al-‘ilm al-rasmī) which refers to the subject-object knowledge

which Hacker, following the Vedānta, finds to be self-contradictory. Later, in

Chapter 4, I examine how Suhrawardī employs what is essentially the same line

of argumentation to show the identical result—that the self’s knowledge of itself

must be in the form of knowledge by presence rather than knowledge by

representation.

In taking up the question of “why the idea of epistemological reflexivity is

alien to Vedantic thought,” Hacker prudently qualifies this by remarking, “I am

not speaking of Indian thought in general.” Indeed, for “epistemological

reflexivity” can serve as a reasonably adequate translation of vimarśa, which

along with prakāśa, lies at the heart of Abhinavagupta’s annutara trika kula in

much the same way that al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī and nur al-anwār, the Light of Lights,

lies at the heart of Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq. Moreover, these terms

together essentially constitute Hacker’s “philosophical aspect that may be called

an epistemological ontology” (167). To see this one need only consult

Dyczkowski’s definition of these terms:

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Absolute consciousness understood as unchanging ontological ground of all appearing is termed “Prakāśa”. As the creative awareness of its own Being, the absolute is called “Vimarśa”. “Prakāśa” and “Vimarśa”—the Divine Light of consciousness and the reflective awareness this Light has of its own nature—together constitute the all-embracing fullness (pūrnatā) of consciousness. (Doctrine 59)

Yet note that these philosophical concepts which support Abhinavagupta’s

system and Kashmiri Śaivism in general—what Hacker calls “epistemological

reflexivity” and “epistemological ontology”—are by his account both

characteristics of Neoplatonism that are fundamentally “alien to Vedāntic

thought” (167). But then this would imply that Kashmir Śaivism, at least in these

respects, is doctrinally closer to Neoplatonism than it is to Vedānta. Perhaps this

is why, in his magisterial study of Abhinavagupta’s life and works, Pandey felt

compelled to write that in approaching aspects of Abhinavagupta’s thought we

would inevitably be “reminded of the Philosophy of Plotinus” (631). Both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta explicitly define the Light of self-awareness

precisely as Hacker suggests it was understood by Neoplatonism and Vedānta: it

is “both the spirit’s awareness of its self and its capability of making objects, both

mental and material, appear in the range of consciousness” (167).

There is another issue touched upon by Hacker which prefigures

elements to be touched upon in this study. In this case it is an area of

fundamental difference that he finds to exist between Neoplatonism and

Vedānta that is also carried through into the work of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta. This concerns the Neoplatonic world of Intelligible Forms, a

52

concept, as Hacker rightly says, is “entirely foreign to Vedāntic thought” (167).

Hacker writes: “The light with which Spirit irradiates Soul has a content, which is

the ‘light of the true things’…the ideal forms of the Intelligible Word” (168). This,

according to Hacker “makes us understand why in [the Neoplatonist’s] mind

Spirit’s reflection upon itself is not an absurdity, for Spirit carries, so to speak, its

object of knowledge within itself” (168). This is not quite right, for in

Neoplatonism the forms are not so much carried within Spirit as emanated from

it, which is not the same thing. Nonetheless, Hacker is essentially correct when

he writes that “there is no trace of a borderline, like the one which

Neoplatonism draws, between the sensible and intelligible world” (174). In all

the various systems of Indian philosophy, there is no trace of the separate and

immaterial world of the intelligible Forms such as we find in Neoplatonism.

There is a fundamental difference between what are regarded as the categories

of reality: in Neoplatonism (and its descendants) these categories are always

perceived in terms of mahiyah or quidditas—“whatness”; in India they are

understood as tattva—“thatness.” In Chapter 5 I examine this issue in detail as it

relates to the systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta.

In summary, then, Hacker found fundamental similarities in the doctrine

of self-awareness expressed as Light in Neoplatonism and Vedānta as well as

important divergences. As this study will show, the same similarities and

divergences continue to inform the philosophical systems of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta centuries later. Given this, it would be useful to know what

53

Hacker himself has to say about the possibility of historical influence between

Neoplatonism and Vedānta. Here it is:

In spite of the enormous disparity of the two cultures we found in the two systems an impressive number of terms that are partly almost literally translatable, partly interpretable as different ways of pointing to the same intended reality. Historical influences from either side are quite improbable. (178)

As I note at the beginning of this chapter, recently this field of scholarship

has been extended to include Abhinavagupta with the work of Michal Just. As he

himself notes:

As far as I know, however, there has been no focused attempt to compare Neoplatonism with Paramādvaita (supreme Advaita), a branch of Indian non-dualism (Advaita) that originated in Kashmir, in the very north west corner of India. (2)

Just’s study is of obvious relevance to this study’s research question, since he

finds that Abhinavagupta’s system has remarkable similarities to Neoplatonism.

He in fact proposes that Kashmir Śaivism “is a more suitable comparandum for

Neoplatonism than any other form of Advaita” (2). Although Just does not treat

of Light to any great extent, nonetheless, his identification of Kashmir Śaivism as

the best analog of Neoplatonism supports an affirmative answer to the research

question because Neoplatonism is the paradigm of the metaphysics of Light in

Western history of philosophy.

In his analysis, Just emphasizes the same aspect of self-awareness or

subjectivity which played such an important role in Hacker’s study and which will

figure prominently in this study: “[Plotinus’s] is subjective in its essence. Not

only did he base all his philosophical conclusions on his own living experience,

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including his personal ‘merging in the One’, but in a way he was also the founder

of the very notion of subjectivity in the western world” (3). In considering the

impact of including Kashmir Śaivism in these considerations of context, Just

writes: “Although this article does not aim to resurrect the old discussion of the

possible oriental influence on Plotinus and his philosophy, its conclusions might

nevertheless provoke a deep reconsideration of it” (2). This is all the more true

when Suhrawardī is factored into the equation as well. If, as Just claims, Kashmir

Śaivism “is a more suitable comparandum for Neoplatonism than any other form

of Advaita” (2), then this study will show that it also true that Suhrawardī’s

ḥikmat al-ishrāq is a more suitable comparandum for Kashmir Śaivism than any

other form of Neoplatonism.

Including the development of Neoplatonism that occurred in the Islamic

philosophical tradition in these comparative studies of Neoplatonism and Indian

philosophy should also provoke a “deep reconsideration” (Just 2) of the

possibilities of influence, not only in historical times but even reaching back past

the period of classical antiquity to the oldest known Indo-Iranian traditions. Part

of that reconsideration results from a focus on the metaphysics of Light as it

appears in these traditions. As this study will show, the remarkable similarities

of the Light metaphysics as it appears in the systems of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta occur independently of a major Neoplatonic element—the

doctrine of forms. This suggests the possibility of a broader Indo-Iranian

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common cultural influence that was perhaps the matrix from which all of these

various systems—even possibly Neoplatonism itself, emerged.

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta in Historical Context

There is no attested historical or textual connection between Suhrawardī

and Abhinavagupta, or for that matter between the traditions of Islamic

Neoplatonism and Kashmir Śaivism from which they emerged.18 So to attempt

to explain doctrinal similarities in terms of context, one must fall back on the

same possibilities of indirect influence, perennialism, or common cultural

context that occurred within the broader discussion of the possibility of a

relationship between Neoplatonism and Indian philosophy in general.

Once we shift the focus of the discussion of context to Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta it both expands in time and shifts eastward to Persia and India,

opening to include in its scope the constant interpenetration of Indian and

Iranian culture that has occurred since the second millennium BCE. In this

section I discuss two specific cases out of this long and continuous process which

contain elements which I think are particularly relevant to this study. First,

Suhrawardī’s own understanding of the sources of his tradition invokes

Zoroastrian elements. In any comparison with an Indian philosopher such as

Abhinavagupta this fact will inevitably suggest the Indo-Iranian substratum

18 The Islamic Peripatetic tradition was firmly established during the 9th century CE.

Kashmiri Śaivism arose during the 8th and 9th centuries.

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underlying both the Zoroastrian and Vedic traditions.19 Secondly, although there

was no attested relationship between Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta in their

own lifetimes, Suhrawardī’s illuminationist philosophy had a profound influence

upon and interaction with Indian systems of thought five centuries later during

the reign of Akbar, the greatest of the Mughal emperors. Investigation of these

factors has significance not only for the research project of this study but it may

also call into question some of the assertions of the school of Suhrawardī

discussed in chapter one of this study and represented in particular by John

Walbridge.

Suhrawardī himself claimed that with the ḥikmat al-ishrāq he was

restoring and bringing forward what he called al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah, ancient

wisdom, a sort of Light-based philosophia perennis et universalis that he

understood to have existed among ancient Indians and Persians, Babylonians

and Egyptians and Greeks. He wrote:

In all that I have said about the science of lights and that which is and is not based upon it, I have been assisted but those who traveled the path of God. This science is the very intuition of the inspired and illumined Plato, the guide and master of philosophy, and of those who came before him from the time of Hermes, “the father of philosophers,” up to Plato’s time, including such mighty pillars of philosophy as Empedocles, Pythagoras, and others....This is also the basis of the Eastern doctrine of light and darkness, which was the teaching of the Persian philosophers such as Jamasp, Bozorgmehr and others before them. (ḤI 4)

19 Or at least it should.

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Later in the same work he also wrote:

That there are dominating lights, that the Creator of all is a light, that the archetypes are among the dominating lights—the pure souls have often beheld this to be so when they have detached themselves from their bodily temples. They then seek proof of it for others. All those possessing insight and detachment bear witness to this. Most of the allusions of the prophets and great philosophers point to this. Plato, Socrates before them, and those before Socrates—like Hermes, Agathatdaemon, and Empedocles—all held this view. Most said plainly that they beheld it in the world of light. Plato related that he himself had stripped off the darkness and beheld it. The sages of Persia and India20 without exception agreed upon this. (ḤI 165)

There is of course no question that Illuminationist philosophy lies in a lineage of

transmission that reaches back to Plato and other members of the Greek

philosophical tradition. Questions occur, however, over whether Suhrawardī

derived doctrinal elements of his philosophy directly from traditions in India21

and Persia. It is safe to say that, in general, modern Western scholars tend to

discount this sort of claim, while Iranian scholars have always tended to give it

credence, beginning with Islamic commentators such as Shams al-Din Shahrazūri

and Qutb al-Din Shīrāzi in the 13th century.

حكماءالهند و الفرس 2021 Interestingly in the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq Suhrawardī actually mentions the Buddha by

name (بوذاسف būdhāsaf from बोमिसत्तव bodhisattva (ḤI 230–236)). This occurs within

the context of a discussion of reincarnation. Unusually for an Islamic philosopher, Suhrawardī may have believed in this doctrine. Plato did so and McEvilley has made this a centerpiece of his argument for direct Indian influence on Greek philosophy (Chapter 4). Walbridge thins this sufficient to explain Suhrawardī’s interest, writing that there is “no evidence in his writings that he knew much of anything about Buddhism or India or China, although he occasionally lists the sages of India and China among the Ancients” (Wisdom 65).

58

As I discuss in Chapter 1, John Walbridge, an accomplished and

sympathetic reader of Suhrawardī, has devoted an entire book, The Wisdom of

the Mystic East, to arguing that “Neoplatonists of every age have been

fascinated with an East of their own imagination” (2), so that for Walbridge there

is no perennial philosophy, only a perennial trait among Platonists to fantasize

about one. For him this includes Suhrawardī, whose work he understands to be

derived essentially from the Greek tradition, and which thus fundamentally

represents “a free and creative but essentially responsible attempt to do

philosophy in the tradition of Empedocles, Pythagoras, and Plato” (Wisdom ix).

As far as Suhrawardī’s idea of al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah is concerned, Walbridge

thinks that, while this idea certainly had great significance for Suhrawardī

himself, there is no real basis for it in historical fact.

Pre-eminent among those who argue that Suhrawardī’s account of al-

ḥikmat al-‘atīqah is fundamentally correct was Henry Corbin, the 20th century

scholar who was most responsible for initiating Suhrawardī studies in the West.

Corbin advocates adopting a hermeneutical stance toward Suhrawardī’s texts

that goes outside the norms of orthodox Western scholarship but, he claimed,

was equivalent to Suhrawardī’s own. He is thus a particular bête noire to

Walbridge (among others) who writes that “[Corbin’s] accounts of ancient

Iranian spirituality, Islamic spirituality, and Suhrawardī’s thought are

fundamentally flawed as scientific studies” (Wisdom 109). Corbin had already

anticipated this criticism by noting that his “studies” are not intended to be

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“scientific” at all—at least not in the sense understood by the orthodox Western

academy. He wrote:

Prophetic philosophy is thus a “narrative philosophy” absolved of the dilemma which obsesses those who ask: is it myth or is it history? In other words, is it real or unreal? Is it fiction or is it true? A prophetic philosophy is a liberation from this pseudo-dilemma. The events which it describes are neither myth nor history in the ordinary sense of the words. (Spiritual xii)

In commenting upon Walbridge’s position, Aminrazavi also mentions the

perrenialist possibility:

However, if one were to take seriously the perennialist’s position, which is Suhrawardī’s own philosophical perspective, Walbridge’s close textual analysis becomes somewhat irrelevant, and in a sense, misses the point. A perennialist would claim that Suhrawardī’s presentation of the sages of the Orient and the ancient world is simply a manifestation of the Truth in all its forms. Whether his presentation is symbolic, accurate, or fallacious is beside the point, since the message is that Divine Truth appears in different cultures and different civilizations and in the works of specific figures. (“Rev.” 351)

There are many references in Suhrawardī’s works to specific elements of the pre-

Islamic Persian tradition, in particular his identification of the Platonic forms with

the Zoroastrian Amesha Spenta. Walbridge, however discounts this:

There is no real evidence that Suhrawardī knew any Zoroastrian religious literature directly….Suhrawardī’s allusions to Zoroastrian subjects represents the degree of familiarity with Zoroastrian topics that would have been expected from any educated medieval Iranian Muslim. (Science 63)

As I also discuss in that earlier chapter, a major difficulty with Walbridge’s view is

that it reflects a tendency among Western scholars to discount or ignore

Suhrawardī’s mystical and poetic works wherein the Zoroastrian references are

most prevalent.

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Walbridge himself qualifies his own view to the point of virtually

retreating from it:

This is not to say that Suhrawardī’s use of Zoroastrian themes is without significance. Though light and darkness are symbols for Suhrawardī, they are obviously important symbols and the fact that the Persians made such extensive use of them is significant to him. Second, the association of the Platonic Forms with the Zoroastrian gods is clearly important to him and may even be historically legitimate; modern scholars (and pseudo-scholars) have occasionally argued the relevance of Persian ideas in the origins of Greek philosophy. A third Persian theme that he mentions, the xvarenah or royal light of kings, has clear relevance for this political thought. Finally, the doctrine of light and darkness as first principles of being is obviously associated with Iranian thought, though its Greek and Qur’anic connections are equally clear. Each of these themes appears in Suhrawardī’s writings for good philosophical reasons, and each actually represents a legitimate use of Persian themes in his Neoplatonic philosophical universe. (Wisdom 64)

The question of possible Persian influence on Platonism is both important

and difficult, and there may in fact be more to it than Walbridge is willing to

credit. First there is the testimony of the Greeks themselves who, as Walbridge

admits, credited Persian wisdom with having a significant influence on their

philosophy. But Walbridge discounts this:

This is the tradition of the “Persian sages,” the legendary wise men of ancient Iran who first appear in the imagination of the classical Greeks and who have had a lasting impact on the Iranians’ own view of their history. As we will see, this esoteric interpretation of Iranian spirituality does not have much to do with the realities of pre-Islamic Iranian religion, resulting in the paradox that Neoplatonism, despite its devotion to an Iran of its own imagination, could not flourish in Iran until Iranian spirituality had been partially made over in its own image. (Wisdom 11)

It is at this point that a comparative study of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta

becomes relevant and suggestive. For by prompting an examination of “pre-

Islamic Iranian religion” and its Indo-Iranian source, it allows for an

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interpretation to emerge in which, far from Neoplatonism remaking Iranian

spirituality over in its own image, Zoroastrian influence on Platonism becomes a

possibility. In terms of this study, this account has the advantage of suggesting a

possible explanation of both the similarities and differences in Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta as inheritances from their common, if distant, Indo-Iranian

ancestry.

In examining this possibility, I readily admit that it is speculative. I in no

sense advance it as a claim or argument. But research often begins in

speculation, and I do claim that my suggestion has merit enough to prompt at

least a reconsideration of the issues involved.

The central idea upon which this line of thought is developed is a view

that has occasionally advanced in the comparative study of Neoplatonism and

Indian philosophy examined in the last section. This holds that similarities of

doctrine between Neoplatonism and Indian philosophy should be seen as

coming not (or not only) from influence or contact in classical or Hellenistic times

but from an earlier common Indo-Iranian or even Indo-European “proto-

philosophical” substratum. This view appears for example in criticisms made of

McEvilley for his neglect of Persia (Allen 60–62; Thompson 48–49).

Such views would implicitly suggest that Walbridge’s contention that

there was no doctrinal Persian influence on Suhrawardī may be superficial or

even misconceived. For the basis of Walbridge’s discounting of actual Persian

influence on Platonists (including Suhrawardī) lies in his claim that there are no

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actual doctrinal elements in Neoplatonism that can be traced to Persian thought.

In Chapter 1 I discuss how this view is problematic because it denies the

possibility of an hermeneutic that draws actual knowledge from poetic forms.

Examining the Indo-Iranian “proto-philosophical” substratum can do more than

that. It can suggest that when Suhrawardī identifies the Zoroastrian Amesha

Spenta with the Platonic Forms, he is a reflecting a turn toward abstract

universals that was a defining aspect of the Zoroastrian religious reformation of

the Indo-Iranian tradition. Since this move toward essentialism was not taken by

the Vedic branch of the tradition, this could also suggest an explanation of the

fact that while the categories of reality in Neoplatonism are understood as

Forms or Essences, in Indian philosophy they are not. Thus investigation of the

Zoroastrian reforms and what they actually meant suggests a way to possibly

trace Persian influence on philosophical doctrine in Suhrawardī and

Neoplatonism in general. At the same time it helps to explain what will become

the crucial difference between the systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta

that I discuss in Chapter 5 of this study.

The Indo-Iranian substratum is one of the most firmly established

features of the science of historical and cultural linguistics. As Mallory writes:

“There is…unequivocal agreement…that the Indians and Iranians were extremely

closely related (linguistically) before their emergence into the historical record”

(10). This close relationship extends into the realm of mythology and spirituality:

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The historical divergences are great indeed, but the oldest Vedic Sanskrit and earliest attested form of Iranian, the Gāthās of the Avesta, are so close in language and poetic and formulaic style as to allow a glimpse of the prototype not far below the prehistoric horizon. The same is true of religion and myth. Scraping off the barnacles of the Zoroastrian sea change, we reach a readily inferable Proto-Iranian level that in most essentials closely matches Vedic tradition. Far from overlooking or downplaying the individuality and evolving originality of each, the comparison of the oldest traditions of India and Iran helps understand them in toto by uncovering their starting point and joint prehistory, and hence the preconditions of their separate evolutions. (Puhvel 39–40)

In terms highly suggestive for this study, Calvert Watkins writes of “a remarkable

equation between Indic and Iranian”(241) that is expressed in two expressions,

first in the Vedic and then in the Avestan of the Yasna (Yas):

idaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ jyotiṣāṃ jyotiṣ— “This most beautiful light of lights” (ṚV 1.113.1)

sraēštạm aṯ toi kəhrpəm kəhrpạm— “Thy most beautiful form of forms” (Yas 36.6)

As Watkins writes:

The two superlatives are of course exact cognates. While figures involving genitives…and superlatives…are fairly widespread, also outside Indo-European, the combination is much rarer and more striking…the free formation of this figure was no longer living (or in fashion) after the time of the Rigveda. If we find only five examples in the earliest Vedic, and one in the earliest Avestan, one which shares the same lexical superlative and position of discourse prominence, we are fully justified in assuming a stylistic figure proper to the ritual language of the Common Indo-Iranian period and inherited in both branches. (241)

What is also striking is that the figure jyotiṣāṃ jyotiṣ—Light of Lights—is an exact

cognate with Suhrawardī’s nur al-anwār. It is also remarkable that in these two

cognate figures, Vedic “light” is paralleled with Avestan “form.” This is exactly

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the identity that is made in the Neoplatonic articulations of the metaphysics of

Light.

If the common Indo-Iranian is unquestioned, there is equal certainty

about the establishment of Zoroaster’s message “by way of reaction and

deliberate opposition” to the Vedic tradition (G. Gnoli, “Indo-Iranian”):

The oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, probably were composed by…Zarathustra…himself. Zarathustra was a religious reformer who lived in eastern Iran, judging from the places he named, probably between 1200 and 1000 BCE. His theology was partly a reaction against the glorification of war and blood sacrifice by the poets of the Rig Veda. One of the oldest Gathas was “the lament of the cow,” a protest against cattle stealing from the cow’s point of view. (Anthony 51)

The nature of Zarathustra’s form is explicit. He calls upon humans to turn away

from the ritual sacrifice of the Vedic religion and toward the direction of an

individual choice of Vohu Manah—Good Mind:

Zoroastrianism is the religion of free will par excellence. Each man is faced sooner or later with making his choice between Truth and Lie—the true religion which the Prophet claimed had been revealed to him and the false religion which his contemporaries had inherited from their forebears. Zoroaster projected this from the material to spiritual realms. The whole cosmos was shot through with this fundamental tension; over against a transcendental Good Mind stood the Evil Mind, over against the Bounteous Spirit the Evil or Destructive Spirit, over against Right-Mindedness pride and so on. And on every level a choice had to be made, Ahura Mazdāh, the Wise Lord, himself not being exempt. (Zaehner 41)

The point is that this represents a moral turn toward abstract universals.22 These

qualities such as Good Mind (Vohu Manah), Truth (Aša Vahištā), Wholeness

22 Similar to Socrates’ seeking after piety in the Euthyphro.

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(Haurvatāt) and the others became the Amesha Spenta which Suhrawardī

identified with the Platonic Forms which of course are also abstract universals.

There is nothing like this turn toward essence in Indian thought, which

developed rather within the framework of the internalization of the ritual

sacrifice which Zarathustra rejected.

There is no specific identification of the Amesha Spenta with the Forms in

the literature of Greek Neoplatonism. However, the Amesha Spenta are

mentioned in Plutarch and Posidonius and they are identified with the rays of

the sun (Goodenough 13). As is discussed later in this chapter as well as in

Chapters 3 and 4, in Republic IV (Rep) Plato23 frames his own epistemology of

illumination in terms of the sun as well. All of this is highly suggestive. Nor am I

alone in seeing an essentialist turn in the Zoroastrian reforms. In the latter half

of the 19th century Martin Haug, the great German Sanskritist and founder of

Iranian studies in the West, proposed that Zarathustra himself viewed the

Amesha Spenta as philosophical abstractions and that their personification only

occurred as a later accretion (76, 118). More recently, in his study of Zoroastrian

influence on the development of Judaism, James Barr also noted:

The aspect of abstraction and intention that attaches to the great Amesha Spentas. Wholeness or Immortality are abstract qualities, at least when compared with concepts known from the Old Testament. “Good Mind” and “Dominion” seem close to mental attitudes. (222)

23 All citations of Plato are to The Complete Works, edited by Cooper.

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I emphasize again that these speculations are precisely that. They are to

be taken as lines of possible inquiry that naturally suggest themselves when the

focus on the context moves eastwards toward Persia. Especially when it is

viewed in contrast to the Vedic tradition, the movement toward abstraction

explicit in the meaning of the Zoroastrian reform suggests that it is not

inconceivable that there might be some Persian influence on the development of

Platonism. It might also suggest that in his identification of the Amesha Spenta

with the Platonic Forms, Suhrawardī was reflecting this influence. This is a

possibility that is neglected in Walbridge’s Wisdom of the Mystic East. Further

investigation of the Indo-Iranian substratum might lead to a reconsideration or

even a refutation of his views. In terms of this study, such a reconsideration is

important in that, especially in terms of the issues raised in Chapter 5, the Indo-

Iranian substratum and Zoroastrian reforms provide a possible contextual

explanation for both the similarities and differences in the treatment of the

metaphysics of Light in the systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. It could

be that they are each descended from the separate branches of the bifurcated

Indo-Iranian religious tradition.

Leaving now the possible influence of the Indo-Iranian substratum, the

other area in which the question of possible historical influence appears in terms

of a comparison of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta concerns the general matrix

of cross-cultural influence which has characterized Central Eurasia in general and

which has involved Persia and India in particular.

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Historically, even before the rise of Islam, the philosophical and scientific

knowledge of Alexandria, which was itself the result of the synthesis of Hellenic,

Jewish, Persian, Babylonian and Egyptian traditions, had moved to Antioch

where it was translated into Syriac, and from whence it moved even farther east

to cities such as Nisibis and Edessa. This movement had been brought about first

by the suppression of both Alexandrian and Athenian knowledge in the

Christianized Western Roman Empire and also by the schisms that developed in

the Eastern Christian Church (Nasr, Sages 3). There was also a center of Ṣabaean

learning at Ḥarrān. The Sabaeans were followers of the Prophet Idrīs, or

Hermes, and transmitted the esoteric traditions of Hermeticism and

Pythagoreanism to the East, both before and during the rise of Islam. To rival

the schools of Alexandria and Byzantium, the Persian kings had also established a

school at Jundishāpūr where Indian, Christian and Jewish philosophers were

brought to teach and study. All of these intellectual currents of thought were

taken up by Islam upon its rise and consolidated in Baghdad after the rise of the

Abassids, forming the predominant scientific and intellectual discourse common

to Islamic culture as a whole, running from Al-Andalus to the Indus. It is not

unreasonable to suppose then, that Suhrawardī did in fact make some sort of

formal acquaintance with this knowledge.

There are two other occurrences in the historical relationship between

Islamic and Indian thought and spirituality that bear on the doctrinal similarity

between Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. The first of these concerns what might

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be called a transitive relationship between them, which did in fact result in a

rather remarkable synthesis. Although there was no direct historical relationship

that we know of between al-ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and annutara trika kula, there was

such a relationship between two traditions that were closely related to each of

them. Suhrawardī’s al-ḥikmat al-Ishrāq had strong ties to Sufism, and

Abhinavagupta’s annuttara trika kula was related to the Nath Yogi tradition. In

the medieval period in Northwest India some Sufis and Nath Yogis found such

doctrinal affinity in each other’s traditions that they virtually blended them (Rizvi

25–40 passim).

Suhrawardī’s personal path toward illumination was deeply influenced by

Ṣūfī practice and from fairly early on, the Ṣūfīs had been continuously adopting

and assimilating non-Muslim ideologies and practices and re-interpreting them

in the light of Islamic traditions and this included teachings from India. This may

have occurred as early as Bayazid Bastami (804–874 CE), whose utterances of

fana or “passing away” moved beyond the earlier expressions of Divine Unity

and Love enunciated by such adepts as Hasan and Rab’ia (both of Basra) into

utterances (shathat) of identity with the Divine Self. Scholars such as Zaehner

and Saiyid Rizvi note that Bayazid’s teacher Abu ‘Ali Sind was from India, and

argue that this may explain the apparent parallelisms between the Upaniṣads

and Bayazid’s thought (Saiyid Rizvi 24–25). This is the same Bayazid Bastami who

was commended by a vision of Aristotle to Suhrawardī in a famous dream as

being among the “real philosophers.” Suhrawardī was also influenced by the

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10th century master Mansur al-Hallaj, who stands in Bayazid’s tradition and like

Suhrawardī himself was killed for the candor of his teachings (Schimmel 261).

The Nath yogis were a heterodox siddha tradition founded by

Matsyendranath (9th–10th century CE) and brought to full fruition by

Gorakhnath who was a near contemporary of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta

(11th century). Like the Kashmiri Śaivites, the Nathas based their doctrine upon

the agamas and claimed that their founder was Lord Śiva. Their close

relationship with anuttara trika kula is indicated by the fact that in Tantrāloka,

Abhinavagupta opens the list of teachers to whom he gives reverence with a

tribute to Matsyendranath or Macchandanātha (1.7).24 Referring to the

Amaraughaśāsana of Gorakṣanātha, Lilian Silburn writes that it “stands midway”

between the Kaula and Trika schools and the Haṭhayoga for which the Naths are

much better known (Kuṇḍalinī xvi).25 Like many Śūfi orders, the Nath had

eclectic tendencies. They admitted women and members of all castes to their

order, as well as Muslims. They visited the Śūfi khanaqahs frequently, and these

visits were reciprocated by eminent Śūfis of the Chishti, Firdausi and Shattari

orders (Saiyid Rizvi 29). The Nathas had a profound influence on the Śūfis

through a treatise on yoga entitled Amrita Kunda.

It was translated from Sanskrit into both Arabic and Persian as Hauzu’l Hayat by an eminent Muslim scholar, Qazi Ruknu’d Din of Samarqand, with the collaboration of a Tantric brahman he converted on a visit he

24

स्तवन्म ेस मच्छन्दमवभःु प्रसन्नः

25 Abhinavagupta does not mention Gorakṣanātha in his list of siddha. Silburn wonders

if this might not mean that Abhinavagupta preceded him (Kuṇḍalinī 121).

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appears to have made to Lakhanuti (Bengal) some time between 1209 and 1217. This work was studied continuously by Sufis. (Saiyid Rizvi 38)

The influence was reciprocal:

A corpus of poetic literature in the regional languages, particularly Hindi, which has been recently brought to light, had been ascribed to Gorakhnath but seems rather to be a hybrid mixture of the compositions of his disciples and other saints including Sufis. The study of this literature as the background for the Sufi hagiologies shows that from the 13th to the 16th centuries one was influenced by the other. (Saiyid Rizvi 29)

This development of blended hagiologies is perhaps the aspect that is

most illustrative of the interpenetration of Ṣūfī and Śaivite traditions to the point

where the practical distinction between the two seems to almost disappear.26 A

short Persian text on yoga and the meditation was pseudonymously attributed

to Shaykh Mu’īn al dīn Chishtī, the founder of the Chishtī order. Some Nathas

claimed that all prophets and saints, including Prophet Muhammad himself,

were disciples of Gorakhnath. When they were with Muslims they prayed and

observed the fast of Ramadan. Among Hindus they performed puja to specific

deities (Saiyid Rizvi 39). The most important work in Arabic on hatha yoga, The

Pool of Nectar, was attributed to Ibn ‘Arabi. As Ernst writes:

This form of pseudigraphic attribution to Islamic authorities is paralleled by the repeated assertion of equivalence between the most famous Indian masters of yogic lore with esoteric prophets of Islam (Idris, Khidr and Jonah) or the even more striking identification of the Indian gods Brahma and Vishnu with Abraham and Moses. (“Limits” 10)

26 “In the Nāth Yogis, the Sufis found a group whose yogic practice was highly congenial

to their own mystic bent, and the two groups quickly coalesced, with the Perso-Arabic terms faqīr (fakir, ‘poor man’), dervish (“mendicant”), and sheikh (“chief”) and the Indic term jogi becoming virtually synonymous in the minds of the Indian masses” (White, Sinister 199).

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It is in fact The Pool of Nectar that provides the closest thing to a direct syncretic

relationship between Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist tradition and Śaivism. For this

Nāth-derived text “contains in its preface an Arabic translation of some key

Persian texts by Suhrawardī” (Ernst, “Limits” 5).

There is a second historical example which also indicates an underlying

affinity between Illuminationist doctrine and elements of Indian culture.

Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq included a doctrine of divinely inspired kingship,

which likely led to his own untimely death when he ran afoul of conservative

elements in the ‘ulama.

Four centuries after his death, however, Illuminationist political doctrine

achieved spectacular success in the reign of Jala ud-Din Mohammad Akbar

(1542–1605), the third and greatest of the Mughal emperors (Asher 168).

Although this occurred centuries after the time when Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta both flourished, it serves as additional testimony as to how the

systems of thought based on light permeated Central Eurasia. This aspect of

Suhrawardī’s legacy is particularly interesting in terms of this study, occurring as

it does in North India, where Abhinavagupta had flourished five centuries earlier

at about the same time Suhrawardī was teaching 4000 km away in Syria.

Although Akbar’s reign was particularly significant because of the profound

influence of Suhrawardī’s ishrāqi doctrine, this particular emergence was only

one component of the pervasive interaction between Indian and Iranian

philosophical and spiritual doctrines which extended as far back as the second

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millennium BCE. This process as intensified by the eastward expansion of Islam.

The period of the later Ghaznavid times, from the mid-11th century onwards,

was an epoch roughly contemporaneous with both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta, saw the emergence of Persian influence in Lahore:

It acquired a lively Persian culture, with circles of poets and other literary men around the governors, who were often princes from the royal house.…This cultural florescence of Lahore continued until the end of the Ghaznavid rule in the Punjab. (Bosworth)

In general in the period leading up to Akbar’s reign, as Eaton writes,

Relations between peoples of the Iranian plateau and India were extensive and uninterrupted between the 13th and 18th centuries. Migration, commerce, and politics all led to a range of cross-regional influences, most of which flowed from Iran to India.…As a result of these contacts, a broad axis of distinctly Iranian influences emerged in the medieval period that stretched along the spine of South Asia from Kabul to Lahore to Delhi, with extensions running from Delhi east to Patna, southwest to Ahmadabad in Gujarat, and south into the heart of the Deccan plateau. The steady influx of Persianized Turks and Iranians along the trade and migration corridors that comprise this axis, together with the identification of Iranian culture with prestige and cosmopolitanism, led to the further diffusion of that culture among aspiring ruling houses, both Hindu and Muslim. This is seen in the widespread assimilation of Iranian or Persianized styles of architecture, music, art, literature, technology, dress, and cuisine (“India”).

Starting in the 15th century, the Ishraqi philosophy became increasingly

influential in India, in large part due to Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (1427–1521) a

prominent Persian scholar from Shiraz who was renowned not only for his works

on the Ishraqi philosophy but on the Sufi metaphysics of Ibn ‘Arabi as well. In

addition to being welcomed by the Indian Zoroastrian community, Ishraqi

doctrine had already exerted a profound influence on that same Chishti order of

Ṣūfīs which had close ties to the Nath Yogis and to which Akbar himself was

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particularly devoted (Aminrazavi, School 138; Saiyid Rizvi 67). In the 1570s

Shaikh Mubarak Nagauir of this Ishraqi lineage and his sons, Faizi and Abu al-Fazl

had entered the court of Akbar. As Catherine Asher writes:

The impact of Abu al-Fazl (1551–1602)…on Akbar and the evolving ideology of Mughal statecraft cannot be overemphasized. A brilliant scholar, Abu al-Fazl was trained in illuminationist philosophy by his father, Shaikh Mubarak, whose own reputation and scholarly credentials were impeccable. Although both his father and his brother, the well known poet Faizi, entered service in the Mughal court before Abu al-Fazl, he far exceeded them in stature and rank. Akbar had heard of Abu al-Fazl’s genius before they worked together to systematically consider religious matters in the court….His impact on Akbar’s thought appears to have been immediate, not surprising since the emperor was already sympathetic to many of the ideas that Abu al-Fazl would refine over the next fifteen years or more. (168)

Among the rarely studied features of Akbar’s reign and Abu al-Fazl’s influence

were the extensive translations from Sanskrit into Arabic and Persian. This was,

as Carl Ernst notes “comparable in magnitude and duration to the other great

enterprises of cross-cultural translation (Greek philosophy into Arabic and Latin,

Buddhism from Sanskrit into Chinese and Tibetan)” (“Muslim” 173). Much of

this work reflected a convergence between Ishraqi and Hindu thought and

practice.

In fact all of Abu al-Fazl’s influence bears the mark of Illuminationist

political doctrine. This was congruent both with Hindu beliefs concerning the

divinity of kings (Wink 300) and also with the legends of the descent of Akbar’s

line from a ray of light whereby “the Mughal rulers maintained their belief in

divine light regulating the affairs of kingdoms even after they accepted Islam”

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(Saiyid Rizvi 358). These activities may be said to have culminated in the

establishment by Akbar, with Abu al-Fazl’s guidance and connivance, of the Dīn-i

Ilāhi, which was both a syncretic spiritual doctrine and a sort of freemasonry of

imperial service centered on the person of the Emperor. Discussion and debate

among representatives of the various traditions in the Empire were fostered by

the establishment of the Ibādat Khāna (“house of worship”), which also

functioned as a translation bureau, at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575. As Audrey

Truschke has written:

During this period, the Mughals rose to prominence as one of the most powerful dynasties of the early modern world and patronized Persian as a language of both literature and empire. Simultaneously, the imperial court supported Sanskrit textual production, participated in Sanskrit cultural life, and produced Persian translations of Sanskrit literature. For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals became influential members of the Mughal court, developed a linguistic interest in Persian, and wrote extensively about their imperial experiences. (3)

This cultural interaction extended beyond the court of Akbar. Without

embarking on a complete survey, which would be beyond the scope of this

study, it is possible to note that in the philosophical and mystical renaissance

associated with the establishment of Safavid rule in Persia (c. 16th century) and

described by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr as the School of Isfahan,

interactions between Indian and Iranian thought were an important feature. For

example, Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1640–41), who was one of the founding figures of the

School of Isfahan, travelled extensively in India where he became acquainted

with India philosophy and may have even participated in the movement of

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translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian. He also wrote glosses on a translation

of the Yogavaisiṣṭha by Niẓām al-Dīn Panīpātī as well as a Persian anthology and

commentary on the text by the name of Muntakhab-I jūk as well as a glossary of

Hindu and Arabic philosophical terms (Nasr, Islamic 216).27 It is also significant

to note that the writing of commentary on a Hindu philosophical text by an

Islamic philosopher preceded by a few centuries (217) Islamic philosophical text,

be it medieval, Renaissance, or modern.

In general, then, while investigation of the historical context directly

concerned with Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta adds nothing decisive

concerning the possibility of influence, on the other hand it widens and enriches

the academic discourse in terms of a common multicultural context in Central

Asia in antiquity and the medieval period. Within this context, it is clear that

doctrines concerning Light were pervasive enough that traditions from India and

Persia could find enough affinity with one another as to allow for syncretism to

occur. This suggests that doctrinal similarities with regard to Light in the systems

of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta may have, to some extent at least, come

about as the expression of a common multicultural context.

27 Nasr writes: “It is unfortunate the fruits of this pioneering effort in carrying out

comparative studies between Islamic and Hindu philosophy have not been properly edited or studied. It is also very significant to note that the writing of commentary on a Hindu philosophical text by an Islamic philosopher preceded by a few centuries Islamic philosophical commentaries on a Western philosophical text, be it medieval, Renaissance, or modern” (Islamic 216–17).

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Suhrawardī: Life and Works

In the view of the majority of scholars, Shihāb al-Din Suhrawardī (1154–

1191) would find a place among the dozen or so greatest names in the Islamic

philosophical tradition. Biographical data is somewhat scanty, but it is known

that he was born in the village of Suhraward near the modern city of Zanjān. He

began his education in nearby Marāghah with Majd al-Dīn al-Jīlī. He then went

to the city of Isfahan, where he completed his formal training with pursued

studies in logic with Ẓahīr al-Dīn al-Qārī, who also taught Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d.

1209). It was at this time that he undoubtedly received instruction in the

Avicennian Peripatetic tradition and the philosophy of Aristotle, Plato and the

Neoplatonists as their ideas had come into Islamic civilization. After completing

this period of formal training, he set out to travel throughout Persia and

Anatolia, meeting and studying with many Ṣūfī masters such as Fakhr al-Din al-

Maridini (d. 1198) and engaging in long periods of study, devotional practice and

meditation according to their methods. He then expanded his travels to those

areas of Northern Syria which were centers of Hermeticism before the advent of

Islam.

Even as a young man he became widely known as a philosopher and

doctor of Islamic law. Finally he was invited by Malik Ẓāhir, the son of Ṣalāḥ al-

Dīn al-Ayyūbī (Saladin) to settle in his court at Aleppo. Here, his somewhat

outspoken manner, overwhelming success in scholarly debate and indiscretion in

disclosing esoteric doctrines earned him many enemies among the orthodox

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doctors of the law (‘ulamā). These brought formal complaint to Saladin, accusing

the young sage of being a sorcerer and a heretic: a danger to Ẓāhir specifically

and to religion and the state in general. The great Saladin found it politic to

acquiesce in their urging that Suhrawardī be executed, and after repeated orders

from his father, in 1191 Ẓāhir reluctantly had it done (al-Halveti 27–28; Nasr,

Sages 57). Thus, in addition to being known as Shaikh al-Ishrāq, the master of

illumination, he is also called al-maqṭūl, the one who was killed (Nasr, Sages 52).

However the ‘ulamā were not acting completely without cause, at least

by their lights. As Hossein Ziai has indicated, Suhrawardī’s execution was due at

least in part to a very real and radical political dimension that existed at the very

core of illuminationist doctrine. Recalling both Plato’s philosopher king and the

divine aura of the ancient kings of Persia, this called for a new political order

headed by an initiated monarch radiating a divine Light named Farreh-ye Īzadī

(Knowledge 25; “Source” 306–07, 340–43).28

Despite his short life, Suhrawardī wrote nearly fifty works in Arabic and

Persian, most of which survive. The Persian works particularly are admired for

their literary beauty. These works are typically divided into four categories. First

there are the four large treatises that set forth the philosophical doctrine of the

28 The issue of illuminationist political doctrine has important connections with what

Azadpur calls “the distinctive Islamic philosophical prophetology” that appears as a fundamental aspect of the Peripatetic tradition (11). While important, this issue must remain primarily beyond the scope of a study such as this which is focused primarily on ontology and epistemology.

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illuminationist school. These are al-Talwihāt (The Book of Intimation), al-

Muqāwamāt (The Book of Opposites), al-Mutārahāt (The Book of Conversations),

and finally Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Philosophy of Illumination). The first three of

these works are written in the vocabulary of the Peripatetic tradition, although

they also contain criticisms of elements of Peripatetic doctrine from the

illuminationist perspective. In the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, Suhrawardī’s masterwork,

these criticisms are repeated, and then the Peripatetic doctrine is completely

recast in terms of an ontology and epistemology of Light which, while keeping

the fundamental architectonic of Neoplatonism, abandons completely the

Peripatetic philosophical vocabulary of being (wujud) for one of Light (nūr).

The second category includes a series of shorter works which are also

philosophical in nature but which supplement the major treatises. These

include: Hayākil al-nūr (Luminous bodies), Ālwāh ‘Imādī (The Tablets of ‘Imad al-

Din), Partaw nāmah (Treatise on Illumination), I’tiqād fi’l-ḥukamā (On the faith of

the Theosophers), al-Lamaḥāt (The Flashes of the Light), Yazdān shinākht

(Knowledge of the Divine), and Bustān al-qulūb (The Garden of the Heart). Some

of these works are in Arabic and some are in Persian.

In the third category Suhrawardī wrote a number of esoteric, initiatory

works in the style named “visionary recitals” by the pre-eminent Suhrawardī

scholar Henry Corbin. They are couched in highly symbolic language and

incorporate Zoroastrian and Hermetic symbols as well as Islamic language. Like

their Avicennian precursors, they are important in that they employ the

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language of the imagination to convey aspects of the philosophical/mystical

quest that are beyond the scope of discursive reasoning. These works include:

‘Agl-i surkh (Red Intellect), Āwāz-i par-i Jibrā’il (The Chant of Gabriel’s Wing),

Qiṣṣat al-Ghurbat al-gharbiyyah (Story of the Occidental Exile), Lughat-i mūrān

(Language of the Termites), Risālah fī ḥālat al-ṭufūliyyah (Treatise on the States

of Childhood), Rūzi bā jamā’at-I sufiyān (A Day among the Sufis), Ṣafīr-i simūrg

(The Sound of the Griffin), Risālah fi’l-mi’rāj (Treatise on the Nocturnal Ascent),

and Partawnāmah (Treatise on Illumination). Also included in this general

category are Suhrawardī’s shorter liturgical writings, prayers, invocations and

litanies. Shahrazuri calls them al-Waridāt wa’l-taqdisāt (Invocations and

Prayers).

In the fourth category are commentaries written by Suhrawardī,

especially upon works of Avicenna. These include a translation into Persian of

Avicenna’s visionary recital Risalat al-ṭayr (Treatise of the Birds) and a

commentary, also in Persian, upon Avicenna’s Ishārāt wa’l-tanbihāt (Directions

and Admonitions). There is also a treatise Risālah fī ḥaqiqat al-‘ishq (Treatise on

the Reality of Love), which is based upon Avicenna’s Risālah fi’l-‘ishq (Treatise on

Love). Significantly, these works display Suhrawardī’s approval of Avicenna’s

more esoteric works, which may be taken to indicate that Suhrawardī’s critique

of Avicenna concerned details of the Peripatetic philosophical doctrine rather

than its noetic goals. He also wrote commentaries on verses of the Qur’an and

some Ḥadith.

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This division of Suhrawardī’s work should not be taken to imply anything

about their order of composition, although he does indicate that Ḥikmat al-

Ishrāq is his culminating philosophical work (ḤI 3). While many of the earlier

philosophical works, such as The Flashes of the Light, are written from a

Peripatetic standpoint, most also contain illuminationist elements. It is probably

best to regard his works as reflecting the mature view expressed in the

Introduction to Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq—that the Peripatetic view is “fine and sound”

as far as purely discursive philosophy is concerned, but that it is inadequate for a

full understanding that also incorporates the intuitive or noetic component of

philosophy (ḤI 6). This view is also supported by the fact that all of Suhrawardī’s

works were composed within a ten-year period, which mitigates against there

being a “peripatetic” period followed by an “illuminationist” one.

Suhrawardī’s influence upon the Islamic philosophical tradition has been

lasting and profound, especially in Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia and

India. It is no exaggeration to say, as does John Walbridge, that the ontological

and epistemological issues raised by Suhrawardī in his working out of the ishrāqi

doctrine “shaped the agenda of later Islamic philosophy” (“Suhrawardī” 219).

By the end of the 13th century his works were being studied in major

centers of learning such as Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, and Marāghah. Even at

this early stage there appeared a tendency for commentators to emphasize

either the discursive or intuitive aspects of his work that continues into

contemporary scholarship (Ziai, “Tradition” 473–87). The earliest commentary

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on the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq was written by Shams al-Din al-Shahrazūri (d. c. 1288),

who was himself an illuminationist philosopher. Also well known is the

commentary written in the early 14th century by Quṭb al-Din al-Shīrāzi (1236–

1311). In addition to his own influence, Suhrawardī was responsible in large part

for insuring the continued vitality of the Peripatetic tradition, through his use of

it as necessary preliminary for the study of the Ishrāqī system. Along with

Avicenna and the philosophical Ṣūfīsm of Ibn ‘Arabi, the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq is one

of the pillars upon which the great philosopher of the School of Isfahan, Ṣadr al-

Din al-Shīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadra) (1572—1640) erected his own vast synthesis. In

doing so, however, Mullā Ṣadra positioned himself in opposition to what he

understood to be Suhrawardī’s privileging of essence or quiddity over existence,

thus, arguably, shifting Suhrawardī’s ontology of Light back toward one of Being

(Ziai, Knowledge 166–68).

The Historical Context of the Metaphysics of Light in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-

Ishrāq

Taking up Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, one is immediately and forcibly

struck by the way in which, after what seems to be a standard treatment of

Aristotelian logic, it suddenly shifts into a discourse which deals with nothing but

“Lights.” Here is a text which claims to be a summa of philosophy. Yet there is

almost no occurrence of the standard vocabulary of the Islamic philosophical

tradition. The concepts and terminology of Islamic Peripateticism which occur

even in Suhrawardī’s own earlier writings are almost totally absent. Instead

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there is a completely new vocabulary that deals not in terms of being and

substance, forms and intellect, essences and existents, souls and bodies but

with, and only with, light and darkness, shadow and illumination.

As Walbridge writes:

To know that light is a symbol only casts doubt on its real meaning. In isolation, we can see that it is a break with customary Peripatetic philosophical terminology and thus presumably with that philosophy.…But regardless of how evocative the symbol may be on a religious, historical, or magical plane, it cannot be significant to philosophy until it is brought into systematic relation with philosophical and scientific concepts and its structure and relationships are analyzed. If Suhrawardī’s Science of Lights represents a genuine philosophical departure, then this will be reflected in the picture it shows us of reality. It must make some difference—in what we consider to be real, in what we can know, in the structure of the universe, in some other way. And this in turn will tell us why he chose to begin philosophy with the symbol of light. (Science 42–43)

In order not only to adequately understand the philosophical meaning

and implications of Suhrawardī’s Light metaphysics as such but also to see it in

relation to Abhinavagupta’s, it is necessary to understand it within the context of

the currents of philosophical thought in which it occurred. The originality of

Suhrawardī’s terminology should not obscure his purpose, which was not to

innovate but to rectify and restore. The point of Suhrawardī’s philosophical

vocabulary is that it allows and enables a more accurate description of the

mystical experiences which are its ground. According to Suhrawardī, these

experiences of Light had commonly informed the traditions of Egypt and Greece,

Persia and India. Whether or not this claim is to be taken at face value, it is

certainly the case that Suhrawardī worked within a millennia-old philosophical

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tradition in which Light was arguably as central to cognitive theory as is light to

contemporary theoretical physics. Thus, when Roxanne Marcotte speaks of

Suhrawardī developing “a truly original light ontology” (“Suhrawardī”) or

Walbridge writes of him choosing to “introduce light as a metaphysical concept”

(Science 42), these statements can be somewhat misleading. Suhrawardī’s

language is innovative—startlingly so—but Light as a metaphysical concept was a

predominant feature of both Islamic and Hellenistic philosophy certainly as far

back as Plotinus and arguably as far back as Parmenides.

Suhrawardī’s purpose was not to introduce the metaphysics of Light—

clearly not, since he speaks of it as being primordial—but to give a correct

philosophical account of it in the face of the inaccuracies and misconceptions

which he finds and criticizes in the Peripatetic philosophy. Referring again to

Walbridge:

The symbolism of The Philosophy of Illumination is not just a code in which Illuminationist symbols are used in place of Peripatetic terms. Although there is a systematic relation between them…the Illuminationist symbols are the object of the science, not the Peripatetic terms that correspond to them. The properties of lights are investigated, not the properties of intellects or being….His symbolism is something like a new set of mathematical notations that in principle are reducible to simpler concepts but in practice acquire a certain autonomy and open up new mathematical possibilities. (Science 36-37)

Again, this is good in spirit but inaccurate in what it actually says. Surely

Walbridge cannot really mean that the illuminationist symbols are the object of

the illuminationist science—after all, the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq is not an early text in

semiotics—but rather what he himself says in his next sentence: the objects of

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the science whose properties are investigated are Lights. Lights are not symbols.

They are rather, as Walbridge himself often insists, real existents that are both

manifest and bring other existents into manifestation. Just as Peripatetic

philosophy is about intellects and beings, not the terms that refer to them, so

Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq is about the properties of Light, and one property in particular,

the one that defines it—Light is that which makes all things manifest.

Also better than Walbridge’s analogy with mathematical notation is the

one which Suhrawardī himself makes with astronomy: “Just as by beholding

sensible things we attain certain knowledge about some of their states and are

thereby able to construct valid sciences like astronomy, likewise we observe

certain spiritual things and subsequently base divine sciences upon them” (ḤI 6).

Thus, the relationship between Suhrawardī’s Illuminationist philosophy and the

Peripatetic philosophy that preceded it could be likened to that of Einstein’s

physics to Newton’s: a revolutionary theory that gave a fundamentally different

and much more accurate description of observed states of affairs, yet to which

the older system could still serve as a useful preliminary introduction.

So to understand Illuminationism in context, it is necessary to understand

what the Science of Lights was before Suhrawardī and how he intended to

correct it. In fact the doctrine of Light had been the predominant

epistemological theory for over a millennium throughout Western Eurasia

wherever the influence of Greek thought held sway. Like the metaphysics of

Light itself, this predominant current of thought has been given its own name in

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the western History of Philosophy: “divine illumination.” Roger Pasnau defines it

as follows: “I understand a theory of divine illumination to be a theory in which

the human mind regularly relies on some kind of special supernatural assistance

in order to complete (some part of) its ordinary cognitive activity.” The one

qualification to be made to this is that, for those philosophers who subscribed to

it, the assistance was not “supernatural” at all, but rather part of the natural

world as they understood it in terms of the science of their times. When the

theory of divine illumination was integrated, as it often was, with theories of

cosmology, and the illuminative source of cognitive theory was also the source of

being, one arrives at the full metaphysics of Light. Although the term “divine

illumination” itself has typically been used in a strictly Western context, the

theory itself was much more pervasive. As Pasnau writes in the introductory

section of his article on “Divine Illumination”:

The theory of divine illumination is generally conceived of as distinctly Christian, distinctly medieval and distinctly Augustianian….it is better to think of the theory in a wider context. Divine illumination played a prominent part in ancient Greek philosophy, in the later Greek commentary tradition, in neo-Platonism, and in medieval Islamic philosophy.

Indeed, in its characteristic formulation as the theory of the Active

intellect, divine illumination assumed in cognitive theory for nearly fifteen

hundred years the status of what Thomas Kuhn, working within the philosophy

of science, has called a paradigm. Paradigms have two aspects. Firstly, the term

refers to exemplary experiments or tropes that are copied and emulated within

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the tradition (43–51). Secondly, there are the shared metaphysical assumptions

that underlie and provide an explanatory context for the exemplars (41, 88). In

the case of the theory of divine illumination, the paradigm is exemplified by the

trope which says that there is a transcendent Principle which illuminates the

objects of cognition for the human intellect in the same way that the sun

illuminates the objects of sight for human vision. The metaphysics underlying the

paradigm is what Pierre Hadot has called the neo-Platonic synthesis:

beginning with the third century AD, Platonism, in the culmination of a movement underway since the first century…came to absorb both Stoicism and Aristotelianism in an original synthesis, while all the other traditions were to become marginal. This unifying phenomenon is of major historical importance, thanks to the writers of lesser antiquity but also to the Arab translations and the Byzantine tradition, this Neoplatonist synthesis was to dominate all the thought of the Middle Ages and was to provide, in some fashion, the common denominator among Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theologies and mysticisms. (56)

It is within this current that Suhrawardī’s illuminationist philosophy occurs. As

Mehdi Yazdi writes: “The principles of illumination—such as those based on the

idea of emanation and the theory of knowledge by presence—were initiated and

developed exclusively by the Neoplatonists” (9–10).

Of course, even before the theory of illumination took its paradigmatic

form, the idea of Light as source of both being and knowledge existed in those

traditions which Suhrawardī identified as al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah. In Zoroastrianism,

the primordial Light, uncreated because it was the essential nature of divinity

was the energy out of which Ahura Mazda created everything in existence (Yas

12.1, 13.7, 35.10). Images of the Sun predominated in ancient Egyptian religion.

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As early as Homer, “seeing with the mind’s eye” appears in a variety of contexts

(Tarrant 182) and Parmenides “stands at the head of the long tradition of poets

and philosophers who have used light as the symbol of truth in knowledge”

(Notopouolos 169).

It is with Plato that the theory of divine illumination first takes its explicit

paradigmatic form. In Republic VI the sun is called the offspring of the Good,

which the Good creates “as its analogue,” then “What the Good itself is in the

intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in

the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things” (508b). Just as we cannot

see colors that are not illuminated by the sun, so we cannot know things that are

not illuminated by the Form of the Good (508c–e). It is with Aristotle, however,

that the theory acquires the technical formulation which it will retain in the West

well into the Renaissance and in the Islamic tradition to the present day: the

doctrine of the active intellect. This formulation rests upon Aristotle’s

fundamental metaphysical theory, which argues that in all of its aspects the

universe discloses an active agent that leads a receptive matter from a state of

potentiality to one of actually. As he writes in De Anima (DeAn), since this is

universal, it must be “present in the soul” (3.5). Following Plato, Aristotle defined

this agency in terms of light:

And in fact mind as we have described it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by making all things; this is a sort of positive state like light, for in a sense light makes potential colors into actual colors. (DeAn 3.5)

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The intellect which “becomes all things” became known as the potential,

possible or material intellect.29 The intellect which “makes all things” became

the active or agent intellect.30 This became the predominant theory of human

cognition for Middle Platonism, the Greek Commentary Tradition, Neo-

Platonism, early Christian philosophy, and both the Islamic and Jewish

philosophical traditions: that the human mind relied on the Light of a

transcendent, independent, unitary, and immortal active intellect to bring the

individual potential intellect into a state of cognition. Moreover, it was held in

these traditions that a recognition and cultivation of this relationship with the

transcendent intellect could lead to an ultimate eudemonic state that was

understood as the goal of philosophical activity.

It is particularly important to placing Suhrawardī within his historical

context to recognize and understand that the mystical aspect of his

illuminationist philosophy was as much a part of the paradigmatic current of

divine illumination as was the theoretical. As Pierre Hadot has written: “In

general, historians of philosophy pay little attention to the fact that ancient

philosophy was, first and foremost, a way of life” (296). This way of life included

a regime of spiritual practice for which philosophical texts were guides and

supports rather than being the primary locus of philosophical activity as they are

29 νους παθέτικος, العقل الهوالني, intellectus possibilis. 30 νους ποιέτικος, العقل الفعل, intellectus agens.

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in the West today. As Hadot writes, we must change our perspective in our

reading and understanding of these texts to include this aspect:

Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages and from the modern era, they consider philosophy to be a purely abstract-theoretical activity. (107)

Recognizing this aspect allows for a fuller recognition of the essential continuity

of Suhrawardī’s illuminationist theory with the theory of divine illumination

which preceded it and which it was in part intended to place on a sounder

philosophical basis.

Especially in terms of this nexus of the mystical quest with the doctrine of

divine illumination, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) is an important nexus on

the path to Suhrawardī for a number of reasons. Firstly, he was a Hellenized Jew

whose philosophical project was the integration of Platonism with the Judaic

revelation. Thus he was the first in the long line of thinkers from the Jewish,

Christian and Islamic traditions who sought to combine Greek philosophy with

Abrahamic revelation. Secondly, his philosophy anticipated Suhrawardī’s in that

it was an explicit metaphysics of Light in which for the first time there is an

explicit formulation of the doctrine of emanation and return that will be a

consistent feature of the theory of divine illumination throughout its history.

This doctrine is that the Light represents both a creative outpouring of the

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ultimate ground of being and the means to return to it. As Pierre Hadot records,

it is also thanks to Philo that we have one of the few lists of actual spiritual

practices from classical antiquity (84).

Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 CE) is the next crucial figure in setting

the context for Suhrawardī’s illuminationist philosophy. It was he who, in his

commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (DeAn(Al)) first enunciated the paradigm in

its characteristic form as the Light of a transcendent active intellect:

That intellect,…the one that stands outside [us]...is an active cooperator with the intellect in us….Light is the agent which produces actual vision: [in the act of vision we] see light and its concomitants, and color too through the agency of light. In the same way, the intellect from without becomes…the cause of our knowing [other things]. (DeAn(Al) 1.111.27–112.5)

Even more importantly, with Alexander we have the explicit identification of the

Active intellect as first, a supreme intelligible and second, Aristotle’s First Cause.

As Athanasios Fotinis writes, this makes possible, through Plotinus’s

identification of Plato’s Good as a supreme intelligible, the identification of the

active intellect with the divine Light of the Good:

Further, Alexander’s notion of the productive intellect as the supreme intelligible influenced the notion of the “One” and the “Good” of Plotinus. Following Alexander’s notion of the productive intellect as divine and intelligible in the supreme degree Plotinus develops his doctrine of the “Good” as the ultimate intelligible. Although Plotinus’ notion of the “Good” may derive from the Aristotelian notion of the cause or agent of all things, he receives this view through Alexander. For it was Alexander who clearly transformed the intellect into a divine intellect. (159)

Although Plotinus (204–270 CE) considered himself a faithful follower of

Plato, and this is certainly true in essence, there are many features in his system

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which go quite beyond Plato’s thought, Plotinus creates a completely articulated

system where Plato writes from many different points. There are three aspects

of this system which are defining characteristics of the metaphysics of Light and

where the influence of Plotinus on subsequent currents of philosophic thought is

paramount. The first is that Light is raised to the status of the fundamental basis

of reality. The second is that reality is understood to radiate outwardly from the

luminous source as emanation. The third is that this luminosity is understood in

terms of νους or consciousness. These three elements, and their articulation in a

well-formed system by Plotinus, became the paramount philosophical theory of

both late Hellenism and Islamic culture. Although in his systemization Plotinus

did not employ Aristotelian terminology, still its paradigmatic influence through

Alexander was evident. As David Knowles writes:

Plotinus does not explicitly and formally take over the Aristotelian distinction of the Active and Passive Intellects, but his noetic is unquestionably influenced by Aristotle, not only on the level of sense perception, but on this higher level also. For Plotinus therefore Mind (Nûs) takes the place of the Active Intellect of Aristotle, while Soul (Psyche) corresponds to the Passive Intellect (Enneads V 9. 4. Cf V. 3. 8). Mind is spoken of as in act and impassible while Soul is potential and passive; soul acts as “matter” to mind and mind confers a “form” on soul. This is pure Aristotelian technique. Moreover, it is illumination by Mind that makes the Soul intelligent, and Mind is compared to the Sun some of whose light is retained by the Soul (V 3.8). Since in Plotinus, Mind and the Platonic forms are identical, this is equivalent to saying that the soul is illuminated or irradiated (the phrase is that of Plotinus) by the Forms. (44)

Plotinus also clearly distinguishes between the “instruction” which considers the

object of knowledge in an “exterior” way and the “path” which leads us to an

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actual and concrete knowledge of the Good. In the Enneads (Enn) he writes: “We

are instructed about it by analogies, and the knowledge of things which come

from it…we are led towards it by purifications, virtues, inner settings in order,

and ascents into the intelligible world” (6.7.36).

The path begun by Philo of integrating Platonism with Abrahamic religion

also continued, laying foundations to be adopted by Islamic philosophy.

Christian middle Platonism retained Philo’s concept of God as being beyond

qualification but manifesting as a first qualified being in the formative power of

the λόγος, which in turn causes forms, sensibles and matter (Berchman 37).

Beginning with Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215 CE) however, and culminating

in Origen of Alexandria (185–254 CE), there is also a thoroughgoing adoption of

an Aristotelian epistemology, and in particular an Alexandrian doctrine of the

active intellect. Thus, although Origen calls the active intellect Divine Perception

(θεια αισθησίς), a Platonic and Christian term, its function is nonetheless

identical with Alexander’s active intellect (Berchman 194). Like Alexander’s

active intellect, Origen’s divine intellect is a transcendent, incorporeal, divine

substance that is immanent in the human intellect and actualizes it for the

recognition of forms. It is one and many. Conjunction with this intellect means

that the human intellect becomes like the divine/active intellect, apprehending

the divine/active intellect which knows the Primal intellect (God the Father) and

is assimilated to the divine/active intellect to come “face to face” with the

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Father.31 Origen co-ordinates this with a Platonic epistemological model in

which conjunction with the divine/active intellect is accomplished via an “ascent

of the soul through various stages of reality, viz. the sensible, the intelligible and

the divine” (Berchman 194). In Origen’s Commentary on John this is all explained

in terms of John 9:5: “I am the Light of the World.” We thus obtain the

identities: Light= λόγος = the Son = active intellect, along with the possibility of

conjunction by the human intellect with the λόγος as the supreme eudemonic

state and the goal of philosophic endeavor.

These ideas are carried forward and developed by Augustine (354–430

CE), who incorporates them with those of Origen, although without the latter’s

emphasis on an Alexandrian active intellect:

Augustine has even less trace than Plotinus of any division of the intellect into active and passive, but all the Plotinian constituents of the intellective process are present in his scheme. The Plotinian Mind is replaced by the divine Word, and the human soul is the recipient of its illumination; Its light irradiates into the soul the immaterial intelligible objects—forms, ideas, reasons, rules—and illuminates them for its perception. (Knowles 44)

In a sense, Augustine’s formulation of the theory of illumination was more

radical than that of its predecessors, for unlike them, it has no role for sense

impressions in the intellective process. The objects of thought are not innate to

the soul, even in potential, nor are they abstracted from sense objects. Rather,

31 “For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know only in

part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (New Oxford Annotated Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:12).

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they are simply “irradiated” into the soul, “participated” by created light, and

“illuminated” for the mind’s perception. As with Origen, this light is understood

to be the Divine Son after the manner of John 1.9.32 As he writes in the

Confessions (Conf): “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside

itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of

truth. You will light my lamp, Lord” (4.15.25).33 The locus of the current of the

tradition now shifts eastward with the rise of Islam and the descent of Europe

into five centuries of darkness. But what the philosophers of the Islamic

Peripatetic tradition (al-Mashsha’ iyun) received and developed had already

been established as the predominant theory of cognition based upon the

illumination of the human potential intellect by a transcendent, unitary and

divine active intellect.

The first truly pre-eminent figure in this phase of the development of the

doctrine of divine illumination is Abū Naṣr ibn Muḥammad al-Fārabi (870–c. 950

CE), known in Muslim intellectual culture as “The Second Master,” that is, the

successor to Aristotle, “The First Master.” Al-Fārabi created a comprehensive

structure which further integrated, developed and refined the integration of

Aristotle and Plato which had been a decisive feature of the Neo-Platonic

32 “That was the true Light, coming into the world, which enlighteneth every man.” 33 Confessions. IV.xv.25. Compare this with the Qur’anic Light Verse: “Allah is the Light

of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of his Light is as a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp within a glass, and the glass as if it were a shining star” (The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān. Trans. ‘Abfullah Yūsuf‘ 24.35).

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synthesis of late Hellenism. This was especially so since Aristotle’s corpus of

works reached Islamic culture including Books IV–VI of the Enneads of Plotinus,

which were attributed to him as the Theology of Aristotle, and Proclus’ Elements

of Theology, known as Aristotle’s Book of Causes. Thus Aristotle’s thought was

taken up by the Islamic philosophers with a much more Neo-Platonic cast to it

than was perhaps justified. As Corbin writes:

The effect…was to impose the intelligible universe of Neoplatonism, proceeding by contemplation, upon Aristotle’s more sense-based world. The world of the human soul, of human experience, was thereby connected by a hierarchy of angelic, casual intelligences, to the One or God. (Voyage xxvi)

Al-Fārabi’s great contribution was his integration of the neo-Platonic

doctrine of emanation with Aristotle’s cosmology. In his system, the Divine

Intellect emanates Its Light through a descending series of Intellects which

govern the concentric planetary spheres of the Ptolemaic Universe.34 According

to this theory, the active intellect is the intellect which governs the sphere of the

Moon, within which is the field of generation, corruption and matter (the higher

spheres, being immaterial, are perfect and incorruptible). In keeping with the

now millennial tradition of divine illumination, the active intellect emanates the

34 He thus laid the foundation (derived in part from the Zoroastrian doctrine of the

Amesha Spenta) that produced the angelology common to and predominant in Jewish, Christian and Islamic medieval thought, as well as the emanational cosmology of planetary spheres adopted by Kabbalists in Muslim Spain and from thence passed on to the Renaissance and the Western esoteric tradition. It is likely that few devotees of the New Age know that the fundamentals of their esoteric cosmology derive from Al-Fārābī.

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Forms which, when received by the human potential Intellect, bring the rational

soul into a state of cognition. In his Mābadi’ ārā’ Ahl al-Madina al-Fādila (MFā)

Al-Fārabi enunciates the illuminationist paradigm with particular clarity:

The potential intelligibles become actual intelligibles when they happen to be intelligized by the intellect in actuality, but they are in need of something else which transfers them from potentiality to a state in which [the intellect] can make them actual. The agent which transfers them from potentiality to actuality is an existent. Its essence is an actual intellect of particular kind and it is separate from matter. It is that intellect which provides the “material intellect” which is only potentially intellect with something like the light which is the cause of its ability to see and the sun which is the cause of the light, and by the very light it sees things which are potentially seeable so that they are actually seen and viewed. In the same way the material intellect becomes aware of the very thing which corresponds to the light in the case of sight, and through it comes to know the intellect in actuality which is the cause of having that thing imprinted on the material intellect and through it the things which were potentially intelligible become actually intellect after having been potentially intellect. The action of this separate intellect upon the material intellect is similar to the action of the sun upon the sight of the eye. (MFā 13.2)

Al-Fārabi went on to create a brilliant integration of these philosophical

elements with the Islamic revelation to produce a metaphysical and

epistemological science of prophecy—a prophetology—which has informed

Islamic intellectual culture ever since. This is of particular importance in

understanding Suhrawardī’s illumanationist philosophy because for the first

time, importance is given to that realm of reality which Henri Corbin later named

(in reference to Suhrawardī), the imaginal. Al-Fārabi taught that it was possible

for exceptional human beings to achieve an exalted state in which their souls

where in a perpetual state of conjunction (ittiṣāl) with the active intellect, which

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was identified with Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation. This resulted not only in the

highest felicity possible for a human being, but it also granted prophetic power.

When this occurred, the human intellect was able to grasp the whole range of

intelligible forms, giving superior insight. Not only this, but in such cases the

human representational faculty—which was “intermediate between the faculty

of sense and the rational faculty” (MFā 14.1)—would clothe, as it were, the

intelligible forms with images that were consistent with their nature:

When it happens that the faculty of representation imitates those things with sensibles of extreme beauty and perfection, the man who has that sight comes to enjoy overwhelming and wonderful pleasure, and he sees wonderful things which in no way whatever can be found among the other existents. It is not impossible, then, that when a man’s faculty of representation reaches its utmost perfection he will receive in his waking life from the Active Intellect present and future particulars of their imitations in the form of sensibles, and receive the imitations of the transcendent intelligibles and the other glorious existents and see them. This man will obtain through the particulars which he receives “prophecy” (supernatural awareness) of present and future events, and through the intelligibles which he receives prophecy of things divine. (MFā 14.1)

This is not only an extraordinary explanation of prophetic revelation strictly in

terms of the predominant paradigmatic cognitive theory of its time, it also

anticipates exactly Suhrawardī’s world of the imagination (alam al-mithal,

mundis imaginalis) which likewise lies between the sensible world and the world

of intellect and reflects the higher to the lower. While conjunction with the

active intellect in its most developed sense resulted in prophets such as Moses,

Jesus and Mohammed, it was also the fruit of spiritual practice for humanity in

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general and was, for al-Fārabi as well as Philo and Plotinus, the explicit goal of

philosophical activity.

The Islamic Peripatetic tradition reached its apogee with Avicenna (Abū

al-Ḥusayn Ibn Sinā c. 980–1037 CE), one of the great figures of world philosophy.

In many respects al-Fārabi’s successor, he developed the Aristotelian aspects of

the tradition into a fully articulated philosophy of Being, bequeathing to both

Islamic and Western philosophy the crucial distinction between essence

(māhīyyah) and existence (wujūd) and the analysis of the modalities of being into

impossibility, contingency and necessity. He fully continued and expanded the

tradition of divine illumination as he received it, enunciating the paradigm in a

manner similar to Al-Farabī but finally rooted in Aristotle and Plato. As he writes

in Kitab al-Nafs (KN):

Now, just as the Sun is actually visible in itself and through its radiant light (nūr) makes actually visible what is not actually visible, so likewise is the state of this intellect vis-à-vis our souls. [That] is because when the intellectual faculty reviews the particulars that are in the retentive imagination, and the aforementioned Active Intellect radiates its light into us [and] upon them, the things separated from matter and its concomitants are altered and impressed upon the rational soul.…Discursive thought and selective attention are then certain motions that prepare the soul to receive the Active Intellect’s emanation.…Just like when luminous light falls on colored objects, it produces from them an impression on the visual system…so likewise the images that are potentially intelligible become actually intelligible.…In fact, just as the impression of the sensible forms conveyed by means of luminous light is not itself those forms, but rather something related to them that is engendered by means of the luminous light in the recipient…so likewise when the rational soul reviews those forms in the retentive imagination and the radiant light of the Active Intellect comes into a type of contact with them, then they are prepared so that from the

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luminous light of the Active Intellect they come to be the abstract version of the forms. (KN 5.5, 234.14–236.2)

A major reason why Islamic philosophers found the theory of divine

illumination so natural and congenial was that Light (al-nūr) was one of the

Divine Names, and was particularly enshrined in the Light Verse of the Holy

Qur’an:

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of His Light is as if there were a Niche and within it a Lamp: The Lamp enclosed in a Glass; The Glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed Tree, an Olive, neither of the East nor of the West, whose Oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it. Light upon Light! (24:35)

Avicenna wrote a commentary on this verse that was framed explicitly in terms

of the theory of divine illumination: God is Light; the niche is the potential

intellect. The active intellect is symbolized by the fire that illuminates the oil

within the lamp. The lamp itself is the acquired intellect (al ‘aql al mustafad),

which is Avicenna’s term for the intellect of the philosopher or prophet who has

attained conjunction with the active intellect. According to Yazdi, the purpose of

Avicenna’s exegesis of the light verse is to “free the human mind altogether

from possession of any kind of initial activity by attributing all intellectual

operations to the separate activity of the Active Intellect” (14). Thus we have a

clear statement of the fundamental tenet of the theory of divine illumination—

human cognition dependent on a separate transcendent active intellect—stated

in explicit terms of the metaphor of light and in terms of the Qur’anic revelation.

Avicenna reached all the way to embrace a full-bodied metaphysics of

Light, where the ultimate Reality was understood in terms of the self-

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illuminating Light of a Divine Intellect as the source of being. As Hossein Nasr

writes:

According to Ibn Sinā, creation itself is intellection by God of His own Essence. It is this intellection and the knowledge of His own Essence that brings all things into being. This act of intellection is limitless (lā yatanāhā) and the manifestation of the Universe is God’s eternal knowledge of Himself. Creation is at the same time the giving of being by God and the shining of the rays of intelligence so that each creature in the Universe is related to its Divine Source by its being and its intelligence. In some of Ibn Sinā’s more esoteric works, in fact, God is identified with the source (al-manba’) of the overflowing of light (fayaḍān al-nūr) which fills all things. So, one can say that Creation is the realization of the intelligible essences and existence the theophany (tajallī) of these essences, so that being and light are ultimately the same. To give existence to creatures is to illuminate them with the Divine Light which is the ray emanating from His Being. (Cosmological 213)

The purpose of this narrative has been to show the continuity of Suhrawardī’s

doctrine of the metaphysics of Light with the tradition of divine illumination.

Suhrawardī’s philosophical project was to return that tradition to its original

form by reframing its metaphysical and epistemological formulation in terms

which avoided pitfalls that he understood to have accrued to it in the Peripatetic

philosophy. Historically, Suhrawardī’s project occurred in the time of—and as a

response and solution to—a crisis that had broken out in Islamic intellectual and

spiritual culture in the time just preceding his. This crisis emerged out of the

tension between what in Islam are called the intellectual sciences (al-‘ulūm al-

‘aqlīyah) and the transmitted sciences of revelation (al-‘ulum al-naqlīyah). This

same tension has been and continues to be a central dynamic within the

intellectual traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

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Many of the Muslim spiritual elite (particularly the early Ṣufīs) had never

been really happy with what they perceived to be the Peripatetics’ overemphasis

on rational method. The same criticisms had also been leveled against the

Mu’tazilite school of theologians, who also employed Greek methods of

reasoning. This opposition finally became effective when in the 11th century CE

the Seljuq sultans established a strong central authority which ruled in the name

of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. It was at this point that there developed a

widespread and effective movement against Greek rationalism in the Western

Muslim lands. In the field of theology or Kalām this took the form of the

curtailment and waning away of the Mu’tazilites in favor of the rival Ash’arites,

who favored a much more literal and exoteric interpretation of Islam. The Śūfīs

began to more openly question the rationalist foundations of both philosophy

and theology. All of this culminated in the decisive attack upon Peripatetic

philosophy by Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (c. 1058–1111 CE), whose influence was

such that philosophy was almost completely discredited in the Western Muslim

lands, surviving only in Andalusia, where Averroes (Ibn Rushd) taught a

thoroughly rationalist interpretation of Aristotle that, while it was of great

influence in an awakening Europe, remained effectively on the far margins of

Islamic intellectual life (Nasr, Sages 52–54; Aminrazavi, School 4–6).

The standard interpretation of al-Ghazālī’s attack is that he criticized the

Peripatetic method as elevating rationality above the direct knowledge of God.

Nasr puts it as follows:

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The philosophers like Ibn Sinā, especially when they followed the Neoplatonists, began with metaphysical intuitions of the profoundest order which are more or less direct applications of the first Shahādah35 of Islam. It was when they hid these intuitions with an excessively rationalistic system that they moved away from the domain of gnosis, which is the meeting-ground of faith and science, to that of reason, which is the battleground of their conflict. In the case of Ibn Sinā we…find an oscillation between doctrines both metaphysical and cosmological in nature, which, being in conformity with the Islamic perspective, became integrated into its viewpoint. Moreover, we also encounter ideas that belong more strictly to philosophy understood in a purely rationalistic sense, and have always remained on the periphery of Islamic civilization. (Cosmological 214)

But as Mohammed Azadpur has argued persuasively in Reason Unbound, this

involves a profound misunderstanding of the Peripatetic philosophical project

(not only by al-Ghazālī, but by many philosophers ever since, particularly in the

Western tradition) (81–82). From the perspective of the continuity of the

millennial tradition of the theory of divine illumination, particularly in its

paradigmatic form of the illumination of a transcendent active intellect, not only

is Azadpur’s view supported, but Suhrawardī’s own revisionist project is

explained.

Al-Ghazālī thought to restrict the function of the intellect to purely

discursive functions. But, as Azadpur writes:

Ghazali’s misunderstanding of philosophy as mere rational discourse issues from a misapprehension of the function of the faculty of intellect, and culminates in an unnecessary restriction of the spiritual reach of the philosophical enterprise. (82)

35 The declaration of the oneness of God (tawḥīd).

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This is precisely correct. For the Peripatetics, the function of the human intellect

is, through the illumination of the active intellect, to contemplate and

understand the intelligibles, including those that are transcendent (al-ma’qūlāt

al-mufāriqa). This is conjunction (ittiṣāl) with the active intellect. But as al-

Fārabi argued (and Avicenna agreed), a perfected human intellect can achieve a

constant conjunction with the active intellect and this results in prophethood,

which is the highest degree of enlightenment and felicity of which a human

being is capable. Nor is this last statement one with which al-Ghazālī would

argue.

This idea, that the human rational soul can (and in the case of a

philosopher, should) attain its highest eudemonic state by re-uniting with the

Light that illuminates it, is a constant of the entire tradition of divine

illumination, from Plotinus back through Philo and perhaps even to Plato and

Parmenides.

Avicenna also amplified the strictly philosophical and theoretical

explanation of the spiritual return to the Light through non-philosophical works

that spoke more immediately to the areas of spiritual experience and practice.

In the last three chapters of his last work, the Kitab al-Ishārāt wa-Tanbīhāt (the

Book of Directives and Admonitions) in a section entitled Fī Maqāmāt al-‘Ārifīn or

“The Stations of the Knowers” (FMā), Avicenna gives a comprehensive treatment

on the soul’s ascent toward the Light. Significantly, “the knowers” are named

“al-ārifīn” which denotes those who know by direct experience, as opposed to

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al-‘ālīmīn who know by natural or rational means. These knowers are enjoined

to spiritual practice in order to attain that state of tranquil bliss where “the

lightening becomes a clear flame” (FMā 11). The theme of Light pervades both

Avicenna’s theory of cognition in the form of the active intellect and his more

visionary formulations. In his Visionary Recitals, Hayy ibn Yaqẓān, Risālat al-ṭair,

and Salāmān wa Absāl, as Nasr writes:

The Orient in its symbolic meaning appears as the world of light or pure forms as the Occident symbolizes the world of shadows or matter. The soul of man is caught as a prisoner in the darkness of matter and must free itself in order to return to the world of lights from which the soul of man originally descended. (Sages 44)

Toward the end of his life Avicenna wrote a treatise which he called

Manṭiq al-mashriqīyīn—“The Logic of the Orientals” which is the opening section

of a larger work. This work has been a subject of much controversy36, because in

it Avicenna appears to repudiate at least some aspects of the Peripatetic

philosophy in favor of an “Oriental philosophy” drawn from non-Greek “Eastern”

sources. The text is an introductory fragment to a completely lost work and is

not at all clear, thus the controversy. However, it is clear from the text that

Avicenna does not repudiate the Peripatetic philosophy as such, but rather the

way in which it had been adopted and applied. In fact Avicenna is at pains to

36 Nasr writes: “In connection with the study of the significance of Ibn Sinā’s philosophy,

his ‘Oriental Philosophy’ has produced the most bewildering array of opinions among scholars” (Cosmological 185).

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praise the wisdom and sagacity of Aristotle. In the Manṭiq al-mashriqīyīn (MMq)

Avicenna writes:

[Aristotle]…was superior to those who came before him. The men who came after him should have brought to order whatever confusion had existed in this thought, mended whatever cracks they found in his structure, and expanded his principles. But those who came after him could not transcend what they inherited from him….Whatever they sought but had not found and their wisdom had not penetrated, we completed. (MMq 269)

Avicenna goes on to say that he was able to accomplish this by drawing upon

non-Greek, Eastern sources. This sounds not a little like Suhrawardī’s own

invocation of al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah, and so it has been understood, both by

philosophers in the Islamic tradition up into our own times.

Corbin and Nasr have understood it as an esoteric background to the

Peripatetic foreground. For example, Nasr writes:

As for Ibn Sinā, his works may be divided into an “official,” or “exoteric,” philosophy and a more hidden or “esoteric” set of doctrines. The “exoteric” philosophy represents the most masterly expression of the philosophy of the Peripatetic school in Islam, a school which itself drew its principles from the teachings of Aristotle, his Alexandrian commenters, the Neoplatonists, and the monotheistic perspective of Islam. In his Peripatetic works, Ibn Sinā seeks to study the world of becoming in terms of the Aristotelian categories, relating becoming to Being and particulars to Universals. He considers the science of any object in the Universe as the science of its being and a realization of its ontological status in the great chain of Being. The Universe at all levels of its existence emanates from Pure Being and ultimately returns to it. (Cosmological 276)

Nasr then relates this exoteric to the esoteric as theoretical to practical:

In the “esoteric” philosophy, which in many ways is akin to the later school of the Ishrāqi theosophy, Ibn Sinā considers knowledge as “operative” and as a process by which the being of the knower is transformed. In this phase of his writings, which in its cosmological

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aspect also resembles the doctrines of the Ṣūfīs, knowledge of the cosmos is reached by means of the effective journey through it. All natural phenomena become interiorized within the being of the gnostic until, having come to know the whole of the cosmos in principle, he is able to transcend formal manifestation itself and reach the Divine Presence. Nature in this perspective provides the background for the gnostic’s journey and the knowledge of it, the means of reaching spiritual deliverance. (Cosmological 276)

This is significant for if, as Azadpur has shown, the Peripatetic philosophy

included spiritual practice as well as a theoretical structure, then both al-

Ghazali’s and Suhrawardī’s critical reception of Peripatetic philosophy must be

differentiated according to whether their critique was directed at the

theoretical, the practical, or (perhaps) both.

As Azadpur has noted (114), at the very outset of Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (ḤI 5–

6), Suhrawardī distinguishes between two types of wisdom (ḥikma): there is

discursive philosophy (al-baḥth) which involves the mastery of theoretical

reasoning, and intuitive philosophy (al-ta’alluh) which involves attainment

through spiritual practice of direct apprehension of spiritual realities (literally,

becoming God-like: ta’alluh). These then would correspond to what Nasr calls

the exoteric and esoteric aspects of Peripateticism. Indeed, Nasr describes the

esoteric in terms which immediately call to mind Suhrawardī’s l-ḥikmat al-

‘atīqah:

A close study of “esoteric” writings of Ibn Sinā will reveal that the “Oriental Philosophy” is not at all a philosophy in the rationalistic sense, nor a system of dialectic to fulfill certain mental needs; rather it is a form of wisdom or a “theosophy” which has for its purpose the deliverance of man from this world of imperfection to the “world of light.” It is non-Greek in the sense that the specific “genius” of the Greeks of the

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historical period was dialectical. They even hid the Egyptian, Orphic, and Babylonian mysteries, upon which Pythagoreanism was based, under a veil of dialectics. The “Oriental Philosophy” removes this veil and seeks to present the philosophia perennis not as something to satisfy the need for thinking but as a guide, or at least a doctrinal aid, for the illumination of man which arises from the inner experience of its author. Its language is therefore primarily symbolical rather than dialectical even if it begins with Aristotelian logic and employs some of the cosmological ideas of the Peripatetic philosophers. (Cosmological 191)

What informs all of this is the millennial-old current of the theory of

divine illumination, incorporating as well the Islamic appreciation of the Divine as

Light. In treating of this, Henri Corbin made much of the fact that, in Arabic, the

adjective for “eastern” (mašriqīya) also connotes the rays of the rising sun.37

Thus it is similar to our “oriental.” The same root can be found in Suhrawardī’s

Hikmat al Ishraq or “philosophy of illumination.” Thus Ibn Sinā’s eastern or

oriental philosophy can be taken to also be illuminative and all of this relates

back to the active intellect and the illuminationist paradigm. “Suhrawardī, and

with him his entire spiritual prosperity, had conceived their own philosophy as

“Oriental Philosophy” and the terms ishrāqī and mashriqī to them represented

interchangeable notions” (Visionary 79). Yet in the Paths and Havens: Logic,

37 The structure of Arabic is based upon verbal roots of three consonants, which are

then inflected to give nuances of meaning. In this case the root is sh-r-q, “to shine.” Sharq is “East.” Ishrāq means “to illuminate.” The prefix ma, “where,” when attached to the verbal root, indicates the locus of action for the verb. Westerners will be most familiar with the example madrasa, “school, place of teaching” from the root d-r-s. “to teach.” So similarly mashriq is “place of illumination, the Orient.” Both Arabic and Persian delight in such wordplays. As Nasr writes: “In fact this double meaning of the root (shrq) itself plays a major role in the whole plan of the visionary recitals where the East is identified with the realm of the spiritual and intelligible essences, or the realm of Light, and the West with the material or corporeal world, the world of darkness” (Cosmological 186).

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Suhrawardī expressly denies that Avicenna should be numbered among the

Eastern philosophers. Significantly, this statement is made with the context of

Suhrawardī’s criticism of Avicenna’s theory of definition, among the most

Aristotelian features of Peripatetic doctrine (qtd. in Ziai, Knowledge 109–10).

This is the key to understanding Suhrawardī’s place within the context of

the tradition of divine illumination and the particular thrust of illuminationist

doctrine in those terms. He can be seen as standing between Avicenna and al-

Ghazāli and assuming the role of rehabilitating the Peripatetic tradition38 by

bringing its discursive element to more accurately and adequately reflect and

describe (and thus be a guide to) its intuitive element.

What unites all three of these great philosophers is their place within the

historical context of the theory of divine illumination. Following Avicenna,

al-Ghazāli wrote a commentary on the Light Verse of the Qur’an, the Mishkāt

al-Anwar which, as I discuss in Chapter 3, was clearly formative in Suhrawardī’s

own understanding of Light. Moreover, despite the usual depiction of Ghazāli as

an anti-philosopher, as Herbert Davidson has noted,

Ghazali accepted virtually all of Avicenna’s picture of the universe; for Ghazali is not rejecting the structure of the universe depicted by Avicenna or even the possibility that God produces everything outside himself through a series of emanations. He is merely rejecting Avicenna’s explanation of the process. (153)

38 Interestingly, this is exactly what Avicenna said should be done with Aristotle in Logic

of the Orientals and what he himself has claimed to have accomplished.

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Thus, Ghazali’s understanding of the Light Verse is couched in terms of the

theory of illumination: Prophetic revelation is related to the intellect as to the

eye and Divine wisdom is emanated as light which illuminates human minds as

the sun illuminates vision. Light is that “which is seen in itself and through which

other things are seen, such as the sun” (MA 1.5). In the light of the revelation of

the Qur’an, reason “comes to see in actuality, after having been able to see only

potentially” (MA 1.24). This sounds much like what I have been calling the

illuminationist paradigm. Al-Ghazāli states it, substituting the Qur’an itself for

the Platonic Good or the active intellect:

You have learned from this discussion that the eye is two eyes: outward and inward. The outward eye derives from the world of sensation and visibility, while the inward eye derives from another world—namely the world of dominion.39 Each of these two eyes has a sun and a light through which sight in these worlds is perfected. One of the two suns is outward, while the other is inward. The outward sun belongs to the visible world; it is the sun perceived by the senses. The other belongs to the world of dominion, it is the Qur’ān and the revealed books of God. (MA 1.26)

So for the Peripatetics, the inner Light is, as active intellect, identified with

Gabriel, the Angel of Revelation, for al-Ghazāli, the Inner Light is the Book of

Revelation itself. But the central idea of illuminative revelation is the same. In

fact, al-Ghazāli’s conflict with the Peripatetics did not arise entirely out a conflict

between the rational methods of philosophy and the revealed knowledge of

religion. The conflict was as much about matters of fact as it was about ways of

39 The term “dominion” (malakūt) is derived from Qur’ān (6.75, 7.18) but is identified in

Illuminationist philosophy with the world of the archetypes or Images (Corbin, Spiritual 59).

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knowing.40 It may be even the case, as Azadpur has proposed, that al-Ghazāli’s

attacks on the Peripatetic tradition were motivated politically (93).

It became the great task of Suhrawardī to effect a reconciliation and

synthesis of the sciences of reason and revelation. He did so by, in effect,

reaching back through Peripatetic philosophy to its original sources in Platonism

and other earlier traditions and thus refocusing the Islamic philosophical

tradition on a noetic of Light that, while encompassing rationalism, integrated it

with direct intuitive apprehension of an all-illuminative fundamental Reality.

Suhrawardī’s intent was not to completely refute Avicenna, but to correct him by

replacing an Aristotelian metaphysics of being with a more Platonic metaphysics

of Light. As Ziai writes:

The impact of Suhrawardī’s new methodology, his reconstruction of philosophy more along the lines of Platonism, is a monumental one. It marks the beginning of a well-formulated religious and mystical philosophy in Islam. It transcends Peripatetic philosophy by according a fundamental epistemological position to revelation, personal inspiration and mystical vision….A reconstruction of philosophy more along the lines of Platonism. (Knowledge 1)

Similarly, Walbridge writes that Suhrawardī’s project was “first and

foremost the revival of the non-Aristotelian tradition of Greek philosophy”

(Science 109). As Azadpur writes:

Genuine philosophy as the practice of hermeneutic spiritual exercises is at the heart of the philosophies of Suhrawardī’s Peripatetic predecessors, Alfarabi and Avicenna. Therefore, Suhrawardī’s legacy lies not only in

40 The major matters of fact as raised by al-Ghazāli: ls the world eternal or created?

Does God know individuals or only universals? To what extent does the human soul survive death?

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opening up a new road, but also in retrieving the path opened up already by Islamic Peripatetic philosophers. This retrieval is, in turn, a response to Ghazali’s attacks on the Peripatetic philosophers. (114)

Throughout his body of work, Suhrawardī demonstrates that he recognizes and

applauds the spiritual dimension of Avicenna’s work. This is most immediately

evident in the way that Suhrawardī took up and worked with Avicenna’s

visionary recitals, wherein the spiritual and mystical aspects of Avicenna’s

philosophy were most fully expressed. As Nasr writes:

Suhrawardī’s Story of the Occidental Exile (Qiṣṣat al-ghurbat al-gharbīyah) continues the theme of the visionary recitals of Ibn Sinā, and it was the master of Ishrāq who translated the Risālat al-ṭair into Persian and praised Ibn Sinā for having begun to tread upon the path which led to Ishrāqī theosophy, although he never succeeded in unveiling all of its mysteries. (Cosmological 278)

Suhrawardī’s Risālah fī ḥaqiqat al-‘ishq (Treatise on the Reality of Love)

was based upon Avicenna’s Risālah fi’l-‘ishq (Treatise on Love). Most tellingly, in

the Paths and Havens, Suhrawardī criticizes the Peripatetic theory of essentialist

definition as being an inadequate foundation for knowledge (qtd. in Ziai,

Knowledge 113). As Ziai writes:

[Suhrawardī] indicates that innate ideas are the basis for knowledge, and thus, from an epistemological point of view, they serve as the basis of definition. This means that there must be something most prior, with respect to knowledge, in relation to which things are to be defined. As examples of such innately known things, Suhrawardī cites the personal inspirations and mystical experiences of such philosophers as Avicenna…. This is somewhat a change of heart on the part of Suhrawardī vis-à-vis Avicenna, whom at one point he had ridiculed for claiming to be one of the Eastern philosophers. (Knowledge 113)

Perhaps more than a change of heart, what this may indicate is that the

philosophical problem that the ishrāqi system is meant to correct is not that the

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Peripatetic philosophy eschewed mystical intuition of the Lights in favor of

rationalism, but that the Peripatetics give a theoretical account that, while it is

valuable—even essential—in a preliminary way and even in some respects

sound, is finally inaccurate and thus misleading as a guide to intuitive practice.

Suhrawardī never mentions al-Ghazāli. As Walbridge aptly observes, this

makes al-Ghazāli “the ghost at Suhrawardī’s feast”:

For a reader familiar with the Islamic literature on the subject, it immediately brings to mind Ghazālī and his commentary on the Light Verse, The Niche for Lights. But where in Suhrawardī’s works do we find Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, supposedly the dominant intellectual figure of medieval Islam His project was parallel to Suhrawardī’s, a reconstruction of Islamic thought on anti-Peripatetic and Sufi principles. He was only seventy-five years dead when Suhrawardī wrote The Philosophy of Illumination, long enough to be generally known but not so long as to be forgotten or completely superseded….Like Suhrawardī he had rejected the dogmas of his youth, had weighed the philosophy of Avicenna and the Peripatetics and found it wanting, and had found his answer in mysticism. (Science 54)

Other commentators have noticed the many doctrinal similarities between al-

Ghazāli and Suhrawardī with regard to Light. The point is well taken that both

Suhrawardī and al-Ghazāli embraced Sufism. In his seminal vision, recorded in

al-Talwīḥāt (The Intimations)—which he described as a summary of Peripatetic

doctrine—Suhrawardī encountered the first teacher, Aristotle (although it was

actually more likely to have been Plotinus). Suhrawardī asked him if the

Peripatetics such as al-Fārābī and Avicenna were the true philosophers.

Aristotle/Plotinus replied, “Not a degree in a thousand. Rather, the Sufis Basṭāmī

and Tustari are the real philosophers” (qtd. in Amanrazavi, School 10). Once

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more this indicates Suhrawardī’s positioning himself in the tradition of divine

illumination as one who reconciles the tension between discursive reasoning and

direct intuition by recasting the Peripatetic ontology of being as an ontology of

Light. This is also seen in his handling of the paradigm.

Suhrawardī describes a Light, which he names the Isfahbad al-Nāsūt,

whose activities resemble those of the Active Intellect, yet with significant

differences. Like the Active Intellect, this Light, which is also called the managing

Light (al-nūr al-mudabbir), is the Light that controls the sentient activity of

individual animal bodies and the faculties of their souls. Like Avicenna’s

conception of the Active Intellect in particular, it is also the dator formarum or

giver of forms (wāhib al-‘ilm) and is identified with Gabriel the Angel of

Revelation (ḤI 145–49). However, as is discussed more fully in Chapters 3 and 4

of this study, whereas in Peripatetic philosophy the Active Intellect is seen as a

single, transcendent intellect that directly illuminates each human potential or

material intellect, in illuminationist philosophy the light Isfahbad al-Nāsūt acts

though multiple manifestations which establish a direct, continuous relationship

between each individual human intellect (each of which is itself a Light) and,

ultimately, the Light of Lights Itself. It is this relationship of continuity, the

illuminative relationship (al-iḍāfa al-ishrāqiyya) that, in Suhrawardī’s

understanding, allows for the possibility of mystical unification between the

individual human consciousness and the Light of Lights.

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To summarize then, Suhrawardī’s metaphysics of Light, while strikingly

original in its terminology, nonetheless takes it place with the powerful current

of the doctrine of divine illumination which had by his time been established as

the predominant cognitive theory in the great civilizations of Western Eurasia for

over a thousand years. The role that Suhrawardī understood his ḥikmat al-ishrāq

to perform within this tradition was to reconcile the tension between the

sciences of reason and intuition and return the tradition to its original primordial

form. This involved the affirmation of direct mystical intuition as did al-Ghazāli,

but also the affirmation of the Peripatetic tradition as a prerequisite that

nonetheless required theoretical alteration and rectification in order to be able

to adequately explain and support full spiritual attainment.

Abhinavagupta: Life and Works

Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1014 CE) was the most illustrious teacher of the

doctrines of a set of interrelated lineages that were focused on the Hindu deity

Śiva and that flourished in Northwest India from the 6th to 13th century CE and

are known in the West as Kashmir Śaivism. There can also be little quarrel with

the judgment of Mark Dyczkowski that Abhinavagupta was “one of the greatest

spiritual and intellectual giants India has produced” (Doctrine 10).

Abhinavagupta’s work is a culminating synthesis of the literature of ritual,

doctrine and practice that began with the revelation of the Śivasūtra (Aphorisms

of Śiva) to Vasugputa at the beginning of the 9th century. In his masterpiece, the

Tantrāloka (Light of the Tantras), Abhinavagupta produced a unified exegesis of

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the Anuttara trika kula, or Trika school, of Śaivism learned primarily from his

teacher Śambhunātha but ramified by the scope and depth of his learning

(Dyczkowski, Doctrine 11). Not only did Abhinavagupta produce a summa of the

Trika lineages, but he did so from a perspective that surveyed and incorporated

the elements of the entire range of prior developments on the Indian

subcontinent, including the Vedic tradition, the praxis of the yogins, the

Brahmanical synthesis embodied in the Puranas and Epics, and the Buddhist and

Jain traditions (Muller-Ortega, “Seal” 574, “Luminous” 49).

Abhinavagupta was a Brahmin of Atri gotra. His family were devoted

followers of Śiva and distinguished scholars at the court of Kanauj who had been

brought to Kashmir by King Lalitāditya (725–761 CE). His mother died when he

was very young and his father was his first teacher, providing him with an

essential grounding in grammar, logic, literature and philosophy. At some point

during his studies, he was overcome with a spontaneous and blissful state of

devotion toward Śiva, an experience of the descent of divine grace. Inspired by

this, he embarked upon a pilgrimage of learning, taking full advantage of the

many Masters who lived in Kashmir. His spiritual search finally led him to

Jalandhara, where he was initiated into the Kaula tradition by Śambhunātha.

He finally settled in Pravarapura near Srinigar where he taught a small

group of disciples, mostly from among his family. He achieved wide recognition

during this time as the foremost preceptor of the various Śaiva lineages, as well

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as being revered as a Mahāsiddha, one who has attained a state of perfected

spiritual accomplishment.

In literary output Abhinavagupta was prolific, producing over 60 works, of

which 21 are still extant, some of them quite extensive. Similarly to Suhrawardī,

scholars have divided his work into three distinct categories, and there has been

some attempt to regard these as representing chronological stages. But also

similarly to Suhrawardī, it is probably more reasonable to suppose that his

interests were co-extensive throughout his life and he produced works in all

three areas throughout his productive lifetime (Muller-Ortega, Triadic 28).

The first category contains strictly philosophical works of which the two

most important are: Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī, which is a commentary of

Utpaladeva’s Īsvarapratyabhijñākārikās, and Īsvarapratyabhijñāvivŗtivimarśinī.

This second work is an additional commentary on Utpaladeva’s commentary,

now lost, upon his own kārikās.

The second category is of more general works that, while incorporating

philosophical doctrine, also include liturgical material. By far the most important

in this category, as well as Abhinavagupta’s work in general, is the Tantrāloka,

the verses on light, which is the most voluminous of his works and the

culmination of his system in much in the same way that the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq

culminates Suhrawardī’s. In this category there is also the Tantrasāra (TS), a

summary of the Tantrāloka, as well as the Parātriṃśikāvivaraṇa, a commentary

on a set of verses which are said to form the concluding portion of the

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Rudrayāmalatantra. The verses, together with the commentary, are also known

as the Anuttaraprakriyā. This is an important work since its main subject matter

consists of a discussion of the theory of phonematic emanation, one of the more

original elements of Kashmir Śaivite doctrine. The Parātrīśikālaghuvŗtti is a

shorter commentary on the same set of verses. Mālinīvijayavārtika is another

partial commentary, this time of the Mālinīvijayatantra. It is an important text

because this tantra was considered as the most authoritative revealed scripture

by Abhinavagupta. Paramārthasāra is a summary text of the essential teachings

of Annutara trika kula and the Bhagavadgītārthasaṃgraha is a commentary on

the Bhagavad Gitā.

The third category is Abhinavagupta’s texts on aesthetics. These assume

a particular importance because they concern the use of the poetic as a means

of conveying aspects of reality that are beyond the reach of discursive reasoning

and can only be suggested rather than named. The two most important are the

Abhinavabhāratī—a commentary on Bharata’s Naṭyaśastra, the foremost

treatise of Sanskrit dramatics—and a commentary on Ānandavardhana’s

Dhvanyāloka. His emphasis was upon the power of suggestion as the means

whereby sentiment was conveyed to the subject of aesthetic experience—a

point of view which bears strongly on the metaphysics of Light.

Unlike Suhrawardī, whose legacy and influence were not only extremely

important within the Islamic philosophical tradition but acknowledged and

revered, Kashmiri Śaivism in general and Abhinavabupta’s system in particular

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went into occultation as a result of the Islamic conquest of Kashmir and the

resulting obliteration of kingly patronage upon which it depended and for which

it provided initiatory support. Abhinavagupta’s family had been invited to

Kashmir by King Lalitāditya Muktapida (724–760 CE) who had established one of

the most powerful kingdoms of pre-Muslim India. The following centuries saw a

progressive decline of his Karkota dynasty, which was finally displaced in 1003

CE by the Lohoras, who did nothing to reverse the trend toward corruption and

decadence. The first Muslim dynasty was established in 1323.

During the centuries preceding Abhinavagupta, Kashmir Śaivism by and

large existed as an esoteric practice among the Śaivite community who tended

to publicly practice the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition. Starting in the 10th century,

however, the kula tradition assumed more of the status of a public discourse, in

large part through the efforts of Abhinavagupta’s student Kșemarāja (fl. 1000–

1050 CE). Although this became practically irrelevant in Kashmir with the arrival

of Islam, it nonetheless had an effect:

While the Hindu culture of Kashmir declined in influence and vitality with large-scale conversion to Islam and periodic persecutions, the Tantrics of the far south continued the classic tradition, and through their many and outstanding contributions to Tantric literature guaranteed in a pan-Indian influence down to modern times. (Sanderson 663)

So that while Kashmir Śaivism may be said to have had an important, and in

some senses perhaps even a pervasive effect on Indian spiritual and intellectual

culture, as a distinctly identified discourse it has been little known until the late

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19th and 20th centuries when the work of both Indian and Western scholars has

brought it into increasing prominence.

The Historical Context of Light in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

Unlike the Ishrāqi philosophy of Suhrawardī, Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara

Trika Kula was not his original conception.41 Rather it was the culminating

synthesis of the Kashmiri Śaivite current of that intellectual and spiritual

movement that has become known in the West under that general name of

“Tantrism.”42 Although this complex of doctrine and practice only emerged into

full flower in the early medieval period (500–1200 CE) it has deep roots which

can be traced back to the Vedas.43

Nonetheless, Tantrism was in several ways as much a departure from the

currents of Indian thought as was Suhrawardī’s from Islamic Peripateticism.

Abhinavagupta considered the Agamic texts to be divine speech and so eternal

like the Vedas (TĀ 1.35). Kashmir Śaivism did not so much deny the authority of

the Vedas as to insist that their authority was not final. This is how many Hindu

Tantriks regarded their tradition, the Agamic texts being described as “the

essence, the best part of the Veda, ‘churned’ by Śiva from the ocean which is the

41 As Pandey writes: “It is…not possible for us to attribute the authorship of any

particular theory to Abhinava as we can do to Kant or Hegel. This, however, does not mean that he did not contribute anything to the ‘Realistic Idealism’ of Kashmir The fact, on the contrary, is that the philosophical system of Kashmir, with Abhinava’s contribution to it left out of consideration, loses most of its importance” (291). 42 Skt. तन्त्र tantra, “loom, warp” from verbal root tan, “stretch, extend, expand” and

suffix tra, “instrument,” hence “principle, system, doctrine, theory.” 43 The word “Tantra” first appears in ṚV X.71.9.

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Veda with the churning-stick of intuitive wisdom” and being revealed in this

particular age of the world (the Kali age) when the pure Vedic wisdom and

practice was becoming increasingly incomprehensible (Gupta, Hoens, and

Goudriaan 15).44

Suhrawardī’s replacement of the Peripatetic ontology of Being with an

ontology of Light turned on an understanding of Light as self-consciousness

awareness. Similarly, the Kashmiri Śaivite retrieval of Śiva’s true teaching

involved the replacement of the final term or seat of consciousness awareness as

a passive spectator with an active power: the triple goddess understood as

vimarśa, the creative self-awareness of Light of Prakāśa—that which makes

manifest through the radiance of its own effulgence.

This idea of śakti or creative power of consciousness was in complete

contrast to the pervasively influential view derived from Saṁkhya, wherein

consciousness, puruṣa, is described as isolated, indifferent, a spectator and

inactive, as Larson puts in his translation of Iśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāmkhya Kārikā (SK

19).45 Similarly, in the YogaSūtra (YS) of Patañjali, while puruṣa is indeed

described as self-luminous (YS 4.18–19, 22–23) and his commentary on

44

In the Mahānirvānatantra, Śiva says: “I will now speak to Thee in brief of the

purificatory and other rites, suitable for the weak men of the Kali Age, whose minds are incapable of continued effort” (9.13). 45

तस्मवच च मवपयवासवत मसद्वां

समित्वम अस्य परुुषस्य

कैवल्यां मवध्यसथ्यां

द्रषृ्टत्वम अकतृाभववश च

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Patanjali’s Yoga Philosophy (YB) Vyasa says that in kaivalya “puruṣa stands alone

in its true nature as pure light” (YB 3.55),46 nonetheless, consciousness is

described as being merely the “seer” (draṣṭṛ: YS 1.3, 2.17, 2.20) of the or the

“power of seeing” (dṛś śakti: YS 2.6) which is absolutely unmixed with the

manifest which lacks all luminosity (YS 4.19). This contrasts absolutely with the

triplicity of goddesses whom Abhinavagupta salutes in the very beginning of

Tantrāloka (TĀ 1.2–5) and who are the luminous creative source of the manifest

as the powers of will, knowledge and action. This is the source of what R. C.

Dwivedi terms Utpaladeva’s “vehement opposition” to the “lack of integrality

between Puruṣa and Prakṛti of the Saṁkhya” (vi) in the Īśvarapratybhijñāsūtra

and which is elaborated by Abhinavagupta in his commentary, the

Īsvarapratyabhijñāvimarśini (ĪPv 2.7–8). The argument proceeds as follows. The

Saṁkhya holds that the whole universe is an evolute of Prakṛti; Puruṣa, as

altogether passive, simply looks on indifferently at the work of the former. In

this system freedom can be attained only through the attainment of an

understanding of the categories of reality (the tattvas) as distinct from the Self.

But Abhinavagupta asks, where and how can this knowledge of distinction

actually take place? Not in Prakṛti, for Prakṛti is insentient and “therefore no

knowledge such as ‘I have been seen and, therefore, let me not work for him’

can reasonably be attributed to her” (Pandey 318). Nor can Puruṣa perform this

46

ततपरुुषस्य कौवल्यां

तदव परुुषः स्वरूपमवत्रज्योमतरमलः केवली भवमत

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act of liberating realization, because it is perfectly passive (nirlepa). So the

Saṁkhya account of liberation is utterly inconsistent with its own ontology.

Criticism on these grounds is also leveled at Vedānta, for, as Dyczkowski

writes, even though “Advaita Vedānta emerged, to a large extent, as a critique of

Sāmkhya dualism” it retained the Self but made it one with the Brahman and

thus absolute, eternal and undetermined, so that “It is beyond the reach of the

senses but, like the Person, is the witness (sākṣin) of all things” (Doctrine 34–35).

Thus, like Puruṣa, the Vedāntin’s Brahman is “perfectly inactive.” Moreover,

Māyā, which is the complex illusionary power of Brahman which causes it to see

a separate world of separate forms, is not an actively creative power. For the

supposed creation is actually unreal. A creator implies that the creation is a

separate reality and this would contravene the fundamental principles on which

Advaita Vedānta bases its concept of non-duality (Dyczkowski, Doctrine 59). For

Kashmiri Śaivism, what the Light manifests to itself out of itself is absolutely

real.47

The use of Light imagery was not new to the Indian tradition with

Kashmir Śaivism, but unlike Suhrawardī’s historical context, Light had not

assumed a pre-eminent paradigmatic form as it had in with the doctrine of

divine illumination and the active intellect. In India the way Light was treated,

while pre-figuring in many important respects its appearance in Kashmiri

47 For Suhrawardī also, the manifest Lights are real.

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Śaivism, was more diffused and diverse48 and, while important, it shared

prominence with other conceptions.

Light is certainly among the most ancient images in the entire Indian

tradition. Indeed, there is extensive evidence for the Sun as a deity within the

entire Indo-European language family.49 There is one Indo-European god whose

name can be traced across a wide area, from India to Italy. The original form is

reconstructed as *D(i)yéus. But this originated in words built upon the root

*di/dei “give off light” (West 167).

The Vedas are rich with Light conceptions that prefigure Tantric

elements. The triad of fire, moon, and sun which figures so prominently in

Kashmir Śaivism and which I discuss in Chapter 4 are all prominent in Vedic

thought and ritual. In the Ṛg Veda (ṚV) there is jyotir uttamam, the supreme

light (ṚV 1.50) and idaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ jyotiṣāṃ jyotiṣ, the most beautiful light of

lights (ṚV 1.113.1) which strikingly anticipates Suhrawardī’s own formulation of

nūr al-anwar, the Light of Lights. The same figure of the light of lights (jyotişām

jyotiḥ) appears later in Muņdaka Upaniṣad as a description of Brahman (2.2.10)

and in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad there occurs the dialogue between Yājñavalkya

and King Janaka which identifies Light progressively with sun, moon, fire, speech

and the self and thus suggestively foreshadows elements of Kashmir Śaivite

48 Muller-Ortega speaks of “multiple and rich” contexts (“Luminous” 46). 49 The word for “sun” in nearly all branches of the Indo-European family, or at least of

MIE, are related. There is some controversy, but most scholars postulate a prototype *s.h2w.l. For example, Vedic súvar/svár Avestan hvarə (West 196).

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thought (4.3.2–5). Sun and Light imagery occur in the Upaniṣads but not in the

predominant sense that they assumed in the theory of divine illumination to the

West. The same is true of the Epic and Puranic traditions. So, for example, in

the Bhagavad Gita, there is reference to brahmatejas, or the splendor of the

absolute and it is said that the effulgence (bhasa) of the Universal Form

resembles hundreds of thousands of suns (suryasahasrasya) (11.12). It has

already been mentioned that in the Yogasūtras, Patañjali writes of the light of

consciousness, although in what is, for Kashmir Śaivism an unsatisfactory and

inadequate way. Patañjali also elaborates on jyotiṣmatī, “that which is filled with

effulgence” in referring to advanced state of consciousness (YS 1.36) and he even

employs the term prakāśa (YS 2.18). In addition to these more orthodox sources,

Abhinavagupta’s vimarśa prakāśa was also foreshadowed to a certain extent by

such movements as early sectarian Śaivism, where by the time of the Śiva and

Linga Purāṇas, the jyotir-linga, the linga of light, was assuming its place within

the iconographic and soteriological dimensions of Śaivite thought (Muller-

Ortega, “Luminous” 46).

Nonetheless, despite this background of Light imagery, it is still both

remarkable in itself and in comparison with the tradition of divine illumination to

observe the way that Light came to dominate the doctrine of Kashmir Śaivism,

especially considering that Light imagery had no part at all in the primary texts

upon which the tradition was based.

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Kashmir has always enjoyed a great reputation as a center of learning,

not only in terms of the spiritual studies of Buddhists and Hindus, but in more

secular fields of learning as well. This rich intellectual and spiritual climate

positioned it to take the lead in developing and defining the extraordinary

development in Indian culture that emerged in the middle of the first millennium

CE. Little is known about the origins of Śaivism in Kashmir, and the history of

Śaivism itself is complex and at times obscure. As Muller-Ortega writes:

There are simply too many large gaps in the sequence that leads from the Mohenjo-Dara Proto-Śiva through the Vedic Rudra, the Yajur Vedic Śatarudirya, the Rudra-Śiva of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, the aṣṭamūrti and pañcavaktra of the Purāṇic Śiva, and the notions of early sectarian groups such as the Pāśupatas, to the increasingly complex theologies of Śiva in different agamic revelations, that finally result, in one branch of the process, in the concept of Śiva as taught by Abhinavagupta. (Triadic 26)

The literature of the Śaiva or Trika system which it was Abhinavagupta’s

task to bring into a final and fully synthesized can be broadly divided into three

somewhat consecutive segments. The first are the Āgama Śāstra, the

revelations received from Śiva. In Kashmir Śaivism by far the most important of

these are the ŚivaSūtras, the Aphorisms of Śiva, which the tradition avers were

revealed to Vasugupta in the middle of the 9th century CE. As Muller-Ortega

writes:

The Śiva-sūtra-s in effect begin the non-dual Kashmir Shaiva tradition as a separate branch of Shaivism. Thus, Vasugupta in some sense may be considered the founder of the tradition, although from the point of view of the tradition itself, it is of course Śiva who is its founder. (Triadic 44)

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A series of commentaries were written on these Sūtras including the Vārttika of

Bhāskara and Varadarāja and the Vimarśini commentary by Kṣemarāja, who was

Abhinavagupta’s principle disciple. The ŚivaSūtras also gave rise to the second

segment of Kashmir Śaivite literature, the Spanda Śāstra. These elaborate the

principles of the ŚivaSūtras and begin to formalize the doctrines of the system,

especially in terms of the important concept of spanda or vibration. Vasugupta

had two disciples, Kallaṭa and Somānanda and there is some debate whether

Vasugupta or Kallaṭa wrote the Spandakārikās, the Stanzas on Vibration, the

major spanda text. This had a number of important commentaries, including

Vivŗti by Rāmakaṇṭha, Pradīpikā by Utpala Vaiṣṇava, Spandasandoha by

Kṣemarāja, and Spandanirṇaya by Kṣemarāja.

The third segment of the literature was the Pratyabhijñā Śāstra, which

contains the most strictly philosophical elements, including arguments and

dialectics, discussions and reasoned discourse. Somānanda is credited with

founding this branch of the system, but perhaps its foremost exponent was

Utpaladeva, whose most important work is the Iśvarapratyabhijñā, which had a

number of commentaries, including Utpaladeva’s own commentary, the Vŗtti,

and Abhinavagupta’s Pratyabhijñāvimarśinī and Pratyabhijñāvivŗtivimarśinī. A

digest of the Pratyabhijñā, the Pratyabhijñāhŗdayam was also prepared by

Kṣemarāja. There is finally the Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka and his

Tantrālokasāra, which give an exhaustive treatment of all the important

doctrines and disciplines of all three elements of the Kashmir Śaivite system.

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It is in the extensive commentarial tradition, rather than the foundational

texts themselves—the ŚivaSūtras and the Spandakārikās—that a Light

metaphysics and noetic emerges and comes to dominate all aspects of the

system, finally becoming complete with Abhinavagupta. As Dyczkowski writes:

It is with Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta that [Light] terminology really comes into its own. Somānanda makes but sparse use of it, while in the Aphorisms of Śiva and the Stanzas on Vibration which predate Somānanda, the terms “light” (prakāśa) and “reflective awareness” (vimarśa) are entirely absent. (Doctrine 26)

Muller-Ortega suggests a reason:

While the imagery of light is not new in Indian mysticism, it is nevertheless noteworthy that such a rich and varied exploration of light should be present in this tradition. It seems reasonable to presume that in the Kashmiri mystical treatises this rich array of light terminology is rooted in and transcripted of the meditative phenomena encountered by Tantric mystics. (“Luminous” 46)

This is probably quite correct. Moreover, the elaboration of the doctrine

in the commentaries and discussions of the Pratyabhijñā reflect the same

process as Suhrawardī’s, where he writes:

Just as by beholding sensible things we attain certain knowledge about some of their states and are thereby able to construct valid sciences like astronomy, likewise we observe certain spiritual things and subsequently base divine sciences upon them. (ḤI 6)

It is reasonable to suppose that similar mystical insights have led to similar

“divine sciences.” In both cases the theoretical move toward the pre-eminence

of Light expresses the recognition of its character as self-reflective, self-luminous

awareness as the source of manifestation: prakāśa-virmarśa. In his discussion of

Bhāskara’s commentary on the ŚivaSūtras, Dyczkowski makes this point:

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The “abiding in one’s own nature” [svasvabhāva] central to the teachings of the Stanzas on Vibration as the goal and the ultimate ground of all conditioned existence, perception and the ego is here given a brilliant new dimension. Bhāskara presents us with a mysticism of Light. The Divine, our true nature, our “own Being” is Light. Its realization is therefore a powerful vision of Light expanding and unfolding as all things. To realize this is to acquire “Pure Knowledge”, to miss it is to be subject to the impure knowledge of thought constructs that, far from revealing reality, hide it. The attentive reader will notice Bhāskara’s continuous reference to this Light throughout his commentary. (Aphorisms 6)

Similarly, describing Utpaladva’s innovation of Light terminology in the

development of the Pratyabhijña doctrine beyond Somānanda in his

introduction to A Journey in the World of the Tantras, Dyczkowski writes:

Utpaladeva, Somānanda’s devoted disciple, intervenes to open up what he rightly calls a “new path” by developing his philosophy to its ultimate conclusion.…Cognitive consciousness is like light. It illuminates even as it lights itself up. The physical body, cognitive apparatus, concepts, cognitions, objects, all that appears in any form is the shining of this divine Light. This is Śiva. His powers to will, know and act, already extensively described by Somānanda, fuse into the one power of reflective awareness. This is the awareness that consciousness has of its own nature—by virtue of which it is a subject—and of its contents, by which it is the object. This is Śakti. The interplay between these two polarities is the one universal, absolute I-ness. (12)50

By the time we reach Abhinavagupta, the terminology of Light, as Muller-

Ortega notes, “permeates every facet of his symbolic vocabulary” (“Luminous”

45). This includes not only the doctrine of spanda, but also that other

characteristically unique aspect of Kashmir Śaivism: the doctrine of phonematic

emanation. André Padoux draws all these strands together:

50 As I discuss in Chapter 3, for both Abhinavagupta and Suhrawardī, it is perhaps more

correct to understand the metaphor as going the other way: consciousness is not like (physical) light, rather light is like consciousness, which is the primary meaning of Light.

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For these traditions the first principle, Śiva (referring in that case to his supreme plane, Paramaśiva) which is both pure light-consciousness (prakāśa) and self-awareness (vimarśa) of this light: it is prakāśavimarśamaya, that is to say light and/or transcendent and immanent consciousness, a consciousness which, far from being a still, inactive absolute, is on the contrary a luminous throbbing (sphurattā), a luminous vibration (spanda), a power or energy (śakti), all these aspects expressing its vimarśa nature.…Now the aspect of energy, of life, of active awareness, of freedom or autonomy (svātantrya) of the first principle, is also its aspect of Word (Vāc). (77)

So that finally, as is seen in greater detail in Chapter 5, the Light

emanates as Divine Speech: “Sound and the Word eminently partake, in effect,

of the luminous nature of consciousness…the energy of the Word manifests,

emits, the universe through a pulsating, radiant light, sphurattā, prakāśa”

(Padoux, Vāc 110).

Divine Speech in its absolute aspect is identified with Light as prakāśa-

vimarśa:

Parāvāc…is identified with the supreme consciousness, which for the Trika is prakāśavimarśamaya, that is both undifferentiated light or pure consciousness (prakāsa), and awareness, realization of the pure light (vimarśa). (Padoux 174)

Thus Abhinavagupta’s master synthesis in the doctrine of anuttara trika kula is

one that is deeply imbued with the metaphysics of Light:

It is this reworked and enriched notion of the prakāsa as the light of consciousness which is one of Abhinavagupta’s most enduring conceptual contributions to later forms of Hindu Tantra. It survives in those later, less philosophically oriented texts as a definitive moment of conceptual crystallization in the Hindu Tantra. (Muller-Ortega, “Luminous” 47)

This crystallization, like Suhrawardī’s is best understood philosophically as the

articulation of the fundamental insight that reality is correctly understood and

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the human soul to finally be liberated through the realization of the manifest

effulgent radiance of an undifferentiated and self-aware consciousness, that is,

Light.

Conclusions Concerning the Question of Context

In the lack of any attested evidence of influence between systems or

traditions, the more that doctrine is similar and historical context is different,

then the more there is for a comparative study to attempt to explain. There are

four characteristic doctrinal elements that make up the metaphysics of Light:

(a) Reality is Light, (b) Light is reflective self-awareness, (c) Light is beyond being

yet emanates being, and (d) it is possible for human beings to recognize and

experience a sense of union with or return to the Light. These doctrines are by

no means universal among those cultures in which light imagery occurs, yet all

four are fundamental to the systems of both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. As

will be seen in the course of this study, Suhrawardī’s doctrine of nur al-ānwar

(the Light of Lights) and al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī (knowledge by presence), and

Abhinvagupta’s prakāsa (primordial Light) and vimarśa (reflective self-

awareness) in Abhinavagupta articulate this fundamental notion of self-

luminosity as “epistemological ontology” in remarkably similar ways.

In particular, both of these systems, in their own way, fasten upon the

idea of a primordial and absolute radiant and self-luminous self-awareness as

the fundamental ground of both manifest reality and the way in which human

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beings know it. Moreover, they develop philosophical systems which articulate

this idea using similar argumentative and conceptual structures.

As this study shows, the “strikingly precise” similarity between

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta is most evident in the first two doctrinal

elements of the metaphysics of Light: ontology and epistemology. When the

third is reached—emanation—significant divergence begins to occur. The

cosmogony of both systems is based upon emanation, but the categories or

principles that are emanated differ. In Suhrawardī, following the Platonist

tradition, these categories are intelligible forms—quiddities or mahiyat—

“whatness.” In Abhinavagupta, following the Sāṃkhya tradition, they are

tattva—"thatness.” Moreover and in each case, although the categories of

reality and the emanational system in which they are deployed are received

from prior tradition, they are both modified and supplemented in both the

ishraqī and anuttara trika kula systems. Partially as a result, the manner and

method whereby the individual human self may return to the Light differ in very

significant ways although there remain some general similarities. Both

philosophers emphasize the use of the imagination to convey knowledge about

both the Light and the return to by suggestion rather than rational explication,

although again in differing ways.

So starting from a remarkable similarity in Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta as to the reality of Light and how it illuminates thought, there

occurs a progressive divergence as each theory unfolds. This might be taken to

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suggest a similar insight into the nature of Light which is then expressed in

different form due to the influence of the traditional context in which each

occurred.

Not only is there no attested historical or textual connection between

these two systems of the metaphysics of Light, but the historical contexts in

which they occur are radically different. The Ishraqi tradition brought forth by

Suhrawardī occurs as part of a broad current of Neoplatonic thought that

dominated intellectual and scientific culture throughout the Mediterranean and

East and Central Asia for well over a millennium. Suhrawardī’s role within that

tradition may be understood as that of rehabilitating it in the face of a radical

(and to large extent effective) criticism leveled against it by al-Ghazali. Yet he

did so as part of the tradition and well within its Platonist philosophical context,

although, as he himself states, he also drew upon Persian and Hermetic sources.

In the case of Abhinavagupta, even though there was considerable Light

imagery to be found in the Vedic, Upanishadic, and Puranic traditions that were

to a great extent the historical substratum of Kashmir Śaivism, the version of

what might be called the metaphysics of Light that reached its culmination in

Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula was fundamentally sui generis. Kashmir

Śaivism emerged as a new dispensation in Indian thought taking form in a set of

original revelatory texts. Pervasive Light imagery did not originally figure in this

material at all, nor did it appear in the first fundamental texts of the Kashmir

Śaivite tradition proper, including the formulation of those more original

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elements that characterized it—the doctrine of vibration and phonematic

emanation. Yet as the major commentaries and theoretical works began to

develop—particularly those of Bhāskara and Utpaladeva—all of this material was

completely and thoroughly recast in terms of Light—a process that culminates in

Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka. Moreover, even in terms of the Indian tradition out

of which it emerged, the particular way in which the Light doctrine was

articulated in Kashmir Śaivism is strikingly original. This can be seen, for

example, in the radical departure that Kashmir Śaivism makes from the pervasive

influence of the Sāṃkhya system even while continuing to use it as the basis for

its own emanational structure. In classical Sāṃkhya, consciousness is primarily

seen as inactive (akartŗbhāvaś) and a spectator (draṣṭŗtvam). In Kashmir Śaivism

consciousness is seen as active and creative, expressing itself through the

threefold power of will (icchaśakti), knowledge (jñanaśakti), and action

(kriyaśakti).

So not only did a remarkably similar structure of ontological and

epistemological thought based upon Light occur within two different intellectual

cultures and with no attested contact, but it appeared within each culture under

very different circumstances: in the case of Suhrawardī as part of the millennia-

old tradition of Platonism, and in that of Abhinavagupta as a seemingly sudden

innovation that occurred within what was itself the recently emergent

intellectual and spiritual current of Tantrism.

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As far as the question of a shared doctrine of Light derived from prior

influence between Greek and Indian philosophy, it is attested that Greek and

Indian philosophers did meet one another. Presumably they exchanged views,51

but it is going too far to suppose that there was the sort of influence that we find

elsewhere such as the influence of the Greeks on Islamic philosophy or influence

of Islamic philosophy on Western medieval philosophy, or even the influence of

Vedānta on Emerson or Schopenhauer. This, which is the sort of thing McEvilley

claims, is unlikely. A principle reason for this is that a fundamental doctrinal

element of Greek philosophy, the essentialism that is fundamental to both the

Platonic doctrine of Forms and Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance, is foreign to

Indian thought in general.

A much more likely possibility is that suggested by Suhrawardī’s own

account of al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah: that throughout the Central Eurasian Culture

Complex there existed a primordial substratum, perhaps going back to Indo-

Iranian or even Indo-European mythological systems, that emphasized the

illuminating quality of light within spiritual contexts. This would provide a

possible explanation for the ease with which different streams of thought from

different cultures embraced each other’s doctrines, as in the case of the Nāth

Yogis and Chisthi Sūfīs, traditions which each had some relationship with the two

51 “I would not deny the possibility that Plotinus may have had vague and dim

knowledge of one or two Vedāntic doctrines, mediated to him through inexact translations or accounts” (Hacker 161).

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under present study. In this sort of model, Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and

Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula might represent the re-emergence of similar

doctrines (although, puzzlingly, at about the same time) out of the same

primordial historic substratum, perhaps the Indo-Iranian “proto-philosophy”

posited by some scholars (Allen, “McEvilley” 60–62; Thompson 48–49). Taking

another leaf from Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (ḤI 6), similarities of conceptual

reasoning concerning Light would occur because the results of gazing inward

would result in the same “divine sciences” precisely as human beings from

different cultures will not differ on the number or movement of celestial objects

when they look skyward. Their interpretations of what they see may differ,

however, according to the specific contexts of intellectual and spiritual culture in

which they occur. This would explain how two fundamentally similar doctrines

of Light would begin to diverge in content as they were elaborated in different

cultural contexts.

This sort of narrative verges onto perennialism and so conjures all those

difficulties associated with evaluating mystical experience mooted by Aminrazavi

and Muller-Ortega and discussed in Chapter 1 of this study. Nor are these

matters raised in any definitive sense, but merely as suggested avenues of

further research to which the present study serves as the merest of

preliminaries.

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CHAPTER 3: LIGHT AND BEING

The investigation of historical context, while suggestive, offers no definite

answer to the research question posed in this study, that is, whether Suhrawardī

and Abhinavagupta’s systems can be legitimately considered to be examples of

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. It is thus necessary to turn to an

investigation of their philosophical doctrines to in order to attempt to adjudicate

this issue. As discussed in Chapter 1, the metaphysics of Light has three

components: ontology, epistemology, and cosmology. This chapter considers

the first of these in a comparative analysis of the philosophies of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta with respect to Light and Being.

Whenever the metaphysics of Light appears in either the western or

Islamic philosophical traditions, it assumes a form that ultimately can be traced

to Platonism. The locus classicus is Republic VI 507b–509e. Here Plato has

Socrates point out that sight is unique among all the senses because in addition

to itself and its sensible object, it requires a third thing for its operation, namely

light whose source is the sun. He then goes on to say:

The sun is not sight, but isn’t it the cause of sight itself and seen by it?...

Let’s say, then, that this is what I call the offspring of the good, which the good begot as its analogue. What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things. (508b)

Socrates continues:

You’ll be willing to say, I think, that the sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, growth, and

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nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be. Therefore you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it. Although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power. (509b)

Here are all the elements of the metaphysics of Light in its relationship to being.

First is the notion that physical light, the light of the sun, is in fact a subordinate

aspect or “analogue” that was “begotten” by the higher form of Light that is the

ultimate Reality, the Good. Second is the identification of the illuminating

function of light in the physical realm with that of Light in the realm of cognition.

Third is the interrelation of the power to bring about knowledge of entities with

the power to bring them into being and the identification of these powers with

Light. Fourth is the statement that the Light of the Good is beyond being, yet

produces it.

As I discuss in Chapter 2 of this study, all of these elements took

paradigmatic form as the doctrine of the Active Intellect and theory of Divine

Illumination which dominated late Hellenic and Islamic thought, reaching

perhaps their purest expression in the Ḥikmat al-Ishraq of Suhrawardī. These

same four characteristic elements appear as a similar current in the Indian

Tantric tradition and may be said to culminate in the anuttara trika kula doctrine

of Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka. This is not to say that the two doctrines are

identical. As I note in Chapter 2 and is seen in the rest of this study, there are

significant differences not only in the doctrines of these two philosophers

especially within the broader context of their respective traditions. Nonetheless,

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when the doctrines of these two philosophical systems are examined, it is

impossible not to be struck by the way in which Abhinavagupta’s Kashmir

Śaivism, especially in the elements drawn from the philosophically oriented

pratyabhijña, parallels in the articulation of its doctrine these same four

elements that Suhrawardī expressed in their characteristic Platonic form.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine these relationships with regard

to Being. In a real sense, however, as will be seen, in both these philosophies

Being, Cognition and Emanation form a conceptual unity.52 In a way that is the

point, for both philosophies solve, as it were, the problems of the philosophy of

Being by replacing it with a philosophy of Light. This works because self-

illumination is reflexive—it is a relationship between the self and itself, in which

the self is both what illuminates and what is illuminated. This means that what is

and what thinks are identical and it is out of this relationship of the self with

itself that manifestation occurs. Nonetheless it will be useful in terms of clarity to

consider each separate aspect of this philosophical unity in isolation in order to

clarify the theory as a whole.

This unity and its relationship are already explicit in the Republic, where

Plato has Socrates say that the objects of knowledge owe not only their being

known to the Good, but their very being itself. The nexus of Being and

thought—and its associated philosophical problems goes—back to Parmenides

52 A unity that, as discussed in Chapter 2, Hacker refers to as an “epistemological

ontology” (167).

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(fl. 5th century BCE) who in the Proem wrote “It is the same thing to think and to

be” (3).53

The underlying insight of both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta is to

replace an ontology of Being with ontology of Light. This does not mean that a

terminology of Being is replaced with a terminology of Light, nor is “Light” used

as a symbol or metaphor for “Being.” Rather, the ground of both being and

becoming is to found in the self-illuminating attribute of consciousness, which in

turn allows for the illumination of its objects. Nor is this an idealist philosophy,

rather it is realist: what the Light manifests before itself is real and independent

of its cognition. But the source of manifestation is to be found beyond

manifestation, in consciousness. Nor do the philosophers of Light hold that

Being comes from not-Being. Rather they say that Being comes from what is

beyond both Being and not-Being: Light. Yet this does not involve metaphor or

symbol, or, if it does, the sense of the symbolism is to be taken in the opposite

way from which it is normally understood. Just as Socrates tells us that the Good

is that which creates the Sun as its analogue (Rep 508b) so in the metaphysics of

Light, the physical light of the Sun is the subordinate form and appearance of

Light.

53 το γαρ αυτο νοειν εστιν τε και ειναι

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Light and Being in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq

In Chapter 2 I touch upon al-Ghazāli’s important—if unacknowledged—

influence upon Suhrawardī. Nowhere is this more evident in the understanding

of Light shared by both Suhrawardī and al-Ghazālī (and Abhinavagupta as well),

namely, that when they use the term “Light” to refer to the ultimate ground and

source of reality, it is not as a symbol or metaphor, but as a simple statement of

fact. Naturally enough, in order to understand this it is first necessary to attend

to what they mean by “Light.” This point is often difficult even for scholars of

these traditions. Walbridge, for example, recounts how his own project “was

made more difficult by Suhrawardī’s use of a strange symbolism of light” (Science

xiv). Yet al-Ghazālī is quite explicit in his superscription to the very first chapter

of the Mishkāt al-anwār (MA): “In declaration that the real and true Light is the

transcendent God and that the name ‘light’ in any other linguistic usage is sheer

metaphor without truth or reality” (MA 1.0).54 He then goes on to amplify. The

real definition of Light, in its primary and most real sense, is that which is seen in

itself and through which other things are seen, for example the sun (MA 1.5).55

There is a gradation of Lights, with the more superior being those which not only

illuminate or make manifest other things, but make other things manifest to

themselves, and thus allow cognition to occur, so that which sees itself and

others is more worthy of the name “light.” Even more worthy of that name is

ن اسم النور لغترہ مجاز محض الحقيقة له 54

ن النور الحق هواّلله تعالى وا

فت بتان ا

ول 55 وعلى الجملة فالنور عنارة عما يبص بنفسه و يبص به غيرہ کاالشمسن هذا حدہ و حقيقته نالوضع اال

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that which not only sees itself and others, but allows others to see as well (MA

1.32). At the summit of the continuum is the Primal Light, which possesses Light

necessarily—in Itself, for Itself, and by Itself and not by another (MA 1.49).

Moreover, in this gradation, it is the rational, supersensory Lights, the “inner”

Lights, rather than physical light, that are superior and constitute the higher,

divine worlds (MA 1.50–56).56

Thus, in the Islamic tradition generally, following upon its development of

the theory of Divine Illumination and the Light metaphysic, it is the case that, as

Yazdi writes, Light is “intended to encompass a larger meaning of which physical

light is primarily a mode” (72). In short, if there is symbolism or metaphor, the

sense of it is not that consciousness is like physical light, but rather that physical

light is like consciousness, which is the true Light.

This is what Suhrawardī means by Light, and it is on this foundation that

he builds the entire illuminationist system. He begins Part Two of Ḥikmat al-

Ishrāq with the straightforward declaration that since there is nothing more

evident in existence than Light, there is nothing less in need of definition

(ḤI 107).57 He then expands this statement in terms identical to al-Ghazālī’s:

If you wish to have a rule regarding Light, let it be that Light is that which is evident in its own reality and by its essence makes another evident. It

56 Al-Tahānawī, in his dictionary of technical terms used in the arts and sciences, gives

as the basic definition of “light” (nūr): “the name of the quality occurring from the sun, moon, or fire upon the outside of coarse bodies like earth. It has the property that by reason of it the body becomes visible, manifest, and revealed. For this reason it is defined as that which manifests in itself and manifests another” (vol. 2:1394). الشى اظهر من النور فال شى اغنى منه عن التعر يف 57

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is thus more evident in itself than anything to whose reality being evident is a superadditon.…Light is evident, and its being evident is its being Light. (ḤI 117)58

As John Walbridge has remarked, later philosophers, both in the Islamic tradition

and in the modern west have often said that Suhrawardī “simply substituted

light for existence” (Science 40). This is to misunderstand him. What Suhrawardī

has done is much more radical: he has substituted an ontology of Light for one of

Being, and he has done so in the service of facilitating the recognition by the

immaterial Light that lives within each human of its essential unity with the Light

of Lights.

Suhrawardī, then, holds that there is nothing more evident than Light.

This is in complete contrast to the normal procedure in Peripatetic works,59

which usually begin with a statement such as Avicenna’s: “We say: The ideas of

‘the existent,’ ‘the thing,’ and ‘the necessary’ are impressed upon the soul in a

primary way. This impression does not require better known things to bring it

about” (Shifā 1.5.1).60 As Nasr writes:

Ibn Sinā is above all a “philosopher of Being”; all knowledge for him involves the analogy of the beings of particular things with Being itself which stands above an anterior to the Universe. The highest form of knowledge, in fact, is the knowledge of Being itself….Being in itself is the cause of all particular existents without being reduced to a genre

ظهر فى نفسه من کل ما تکون 58

فليکن النور هو الظاهرفى حقيقة نفسه المظهر لغير ہ بذات و هو ا

خر بل هو ظاهر و ظهور ہ فى فيكون٠ ٠٠الظهور زاًىدا عاى حقيقيه حده نفسه ليس بنور فٌيظهر ہ شًى ا

نوريته59 Including Suhrawardī’s own! ولياً ليس ذلك االرتسام مما 60

فبقول ٳن المود واشىء والضرورى معانيها ترتسم فى النفس ارتسا ماً ا

ن إلى يحتاج شياء يجلب ا

عرف با

. مبها ا

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common to all of them. Being is above all distinctions and polarizations and yet the cause of the world of multiplicity, casting its light upon the different and distinct quiddities (māhīyāt) of all things. (Cosmological 197–98)

Suhrawardī is, in contrast to this, a philosoher of Light, and while the Light of

Lights (nūr al-anwar) does have aspects in common with Avicenna’s Necessary

Being (wājib al-wujūd) it is a mistake to consider them to be equivalent.

Suhrawardī’s ontology of Light is fundamentally distinct from the philosophies of

Being in that it recognizes self-reflective awareness rather than existence as the

primary and most self-evident category of reality. For those who would attain

the unification of their own awareness with that ultimate Awareness that is the

ground and source of Being, it is necessary that they know the science of Lights

in order to correctly understand the path to that ultimate goal. For those others

who are not called to mystical union, the science of Being is adequate for their

needs. As he writes in the “Introduction” to Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq:

This book of ours is for the student of both intuitive philosophy and discursive philosophy. There is nothing in it for the discursive philosopher not given to, and not in search of, intuitive philosophy. We only discuss this book and its symbols with the one who has mastered intuitive philosophy or who seeks it. The reader of this book must have reached at least the stage in which the divine Light has descended upon him—not just once, but regularly. No one else will find any profit in it. So, whoever wishes to learn only discursive philosophy, let him follow the method of the Peripatetics, which is fine and sound for discursive philosophy by itself. We have nothing to say to such a person, nor do we discuss Illuminationist principles with him. (ḤI 6)

Suhrawardī’s fully developed and articulated ontology of Light thus has

both a description of the nature of reality in terms of Light and a critique of

those elements of the Peripatetic philosophy which he finds to be in error. It is

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important to note that those elements which he criticizes are precisely those

elements of the Peripatetic philosophy in which the influence of Aristotle is most

prevalent and pervasive. The Peripatetic philosophy inherited much of the

outlook of the Neoplatonic synthesis of late Hellenism, but, due to the mistaken

reception by Islamic intellectual culture of parts of the Enneads of Plotinus as

works of Aristotle, the Peripatetic philosophers accepted much of Aristotle’s

system as being aligned with Neoplatonism. As Corbin writes, the Peripatetics

“found themselves in the presence of an Aristotle who was actually a

Neoplatonist” (History 153). There was thus a tendency in Islamic philosophy to

bring the ideas of Plato and Aristotle into agreement. According to Lloyd Gerson,

this “harmonizing” view was a prevalent characteristic of the Hellenistic

Neoplatonists as well. He writes:

The Neoplatonists…knew or intuited that Aristotelian analysis served Platonic ends. Neoplatonists readily adopted, apparently ungrudgingly and without mental reservation, many of the concepts by which Aristotle articulated the structure and functioning of the sensible world. They would not have done so had they thought they were introducing contaminants. (290)

Gerson’s view is that Aristotle was “as it turns out, actually analyzing the

Platonic position or making it more precise, not refuting it” (290). If this is

correct, then Suhrawardī’s explicit judgment of the Peripatetic philosophy in the

Introduction of Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq—that it is adequate for discursive philosophy

alone but inadequate for both discursive and intuitive philosophy, may be

understood as a finding against analytic elements of Neoplatonism which are

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somehow inconsistent with the elements of intuitive philosophy which become

apparent to the philosopher after the Light has “descended upon him—not just

once, but regularly” (ḤI 6). Looking at the primary texts of Suhrawardī and

Avicenna, it seems likely that a good place to look for these elements of

difference lies in what each philosopher takes to be most self-evident. For

Suhrawardī this is Light (ḤI 117) and for Avicenna, as he writes in the Kitab al-

Shifā (Shifā) it is existence or the necessary (Shifā 1.5.1).

In positing a Necessary Being as the ultimate principle of reality,

philosophers such as Avicenna (and Aquinas as well, for that matter) run into the

inevitable difficulties and problems with such a step that have been well known

since Parmenides.61 It is this sense that Suhrawardī’s illuminationsm has been

correctly understood by scholars as a recovery of Platonism.62

As Arthur Lovejoy pointed out is his classic study The Great Chain of Being

Neo-Platonism, if understood as a philosophy of Being, has three mutually

inconsistent elements. First, Absolute Being must be transcendent, immutable

and free of all limitation. Second, this Being must be inclusive of all reality, thus

holding within itself the whole universe of manifold and temporal existence. Yet

third, this immutable and Absolute being must necessarily transcend itself and

become the dynamic ground of the coming into existence of all possible modes

61 Problems that as Gilson points out, still “deserve to hold our attention” (7). 62 This is the one thing that everyone—from Corbin through Yazdi and Ziai all the way to

Walbridge—agrees upon.

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and scales of beings. The problem is with a Being transcendent, immutable and

perfect in itself that nonetheless needs—and is often described as needing by

necessity—to produce something other than Itself (ch. 2 passim).

The Neoplatonic solution is to recognize that the ultimate Principle is not

Absolute or Necessary Being, but what lies beyond it. As Gilson writes:

Let us hasten to add, however, that, strictly speaking, the One is no object, precisely because it lies beyond being…being is no longer the first principle, either in metaphysics or reality. To Plotinus, being is only the second principle, above which there is to be found a higher one, so perfect in itself that it is not. More than, that, it is precisely because the first principle is not being that it can be the cause of being. (22)

In the words of Plotinus himself:

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it: in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being’s generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance had produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle. (Enn 5.2.1)

In this passage the complete metaphysics of Light is summarized. For the One,

whose self-effulgence emanates all things, does so in a turning back upon itself

in an act of self-reflection. It is thus a Light, which illuminates itself and, in the

process of doing so, illuminates all other things and so manifests them:

The life in the Divine Intellect is also an Act: it is the primal light outlamping to itself primarily, its own torch; light-giver and lit at once; the authentic intellectual object, knowing at once and known, seen to itself and needing no other than itself to see by, self-sufficing to the vision, since what it sees it is; known to us by that very same light, our knowledge of it attained through itself, for from nowhere else could we find the means of telling of it. By its nature, its self-vision is the clearer but, using it as our medium, we too may come to see by it. (Enn 5.3.8)

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In his ontology of Light, Suhrawardī posits precisely this Platonic vision.

As Aminrazavi puts it, the system consists of “a hierarchy at the top of which

exists the light of lights, from all which all lights emanate. At the bottom there is

darkness or absence of light (‘adam) represented by corporeality or inanimate

objects” (School 78). The Light of Lights, also called the All-Encompassing Light,

the Holy Light, the Eternal Light, and Almighty Light and the Dominating Light, is

like the Necessary Being of Avicenna and Aquinas, necessary in its essence.

Suhrawardī argues that the presence of two such Lights is inconceivable, using

the classic argument common to non-dualists from Plotinus to Spinoza. For, he

argues, if there were two such Lights:

They would not differ In reality.…One would not be distinguished from the other by something they have in common; nor would they be distinguished by something assumed to be a concomitant of their reality, since they share in this as well. They would not differ by a foreign accident, dark or luminous, since there is nothing beyond them that would cause them to become particularized. If one of them particularizes itself or the other, both would be individual before their particularization without something to particularize them—though individuality and duality are inconceivable without a particularizer. Therefore, the independent incorporeal light is one. It is the Light of Lights. (ḤI 129)

The Light of Light emanates and operates through the effulgence or dominion of

a graded cascade of higher ‘triumphal’ or ‘victorial’ Lights and the corresponding

and reflexive desire of the lower Lights for the higher ones, operating on all

levels and hierarchies of reality (ḤI 97–98). Similar to the relationship between

the Plotinian One and the First Intellect, the unfolding of this emanation begins

with the reflex awareness of the Light of Lights in a First Light or Proximate Light

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(nūr aqrab).63 This first emanation is the cause of all the subsequent Lights

whose reflexive interactions bring about the manifestation of all entities.

In keeping with the Neoplatonic tradition, Suhrawardī shows that from

pure Light only Light can occur, so that darkness (that is, insentience) while

having its ultimate source in the Light of Lights, can be generated “only through

an intermediary” (ḤI 135). In a sense, there can only be a single incorporeal

Light. Yet multiple Lights and darkness clearly exist.

Suhrawardī explains this in terms of the relationship between the Light of

Lights and its first emanate, the Proximate Light. The Light of Lights and this first

Light that results from it are only to be distinguished by “perfection and

deficiency” (ḤI 136). Now, the only sense in which the Proximate Light is

deficient is in that It understands Itself to be so, and this is by virtue of Its own

recognition of Its dependency on the Light of Lights for Its manifestation: “The

Proximate Light is dependent in itself, but independent by virtue of the first”

(ḤI 138). It is incorrect to think of the Proximate Light—or anything else for that

matter—to be actually separate from the Light of Lights, for the notion of

separation is only relevant at the level of beings which the immaterial Lights

transcend: “The existence of a light from the Light of Lights does not happen by

63 Suhrawardī identifies the Proximate Light, also called the Mighty Light, with Bahman

(ḤI 138). This is the new Persian or Arabic form of Avestan Vohu Manu (Good Thought), the first of the archangels or amsesha spenta to be created by Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrian Thought. This can be seen as functionally equivalent to the relationship between the Plotinian One and Intellect.

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the separation of something from It, for you know that separation and

connection are specific properties of bodies. Far exalted is the Light of Lights

above that!” (ḤI 138). Nonetheless, in the case of the Proximate Light, “By the

manifestation to itself of its own dependence and the darkening of its own

essence in its contemplation of the glory of the Light of Lights in relation to itself,

a shadow results” (ḤI 142). This darkness then ramifies throughout the

manifestation of reality. Through these interactions among the Lights on

different levels there emanate both a vertical order of Lights—the Intellects

corresponding to the spheres of the planets in the Ptolemaic cosmos—and a

horizontal order of a vast number of Lights of equal intensity but which differ by

their attributes. This horizontal order of Lights was what Plato referred to as the

Forms and what the ancient Persians called the amesha spenta or angels. It is

through their illumination that earthly quiddities and species are manifested and

maintained.

As the Light emanates, its reflexive activity causes it to progressively lose

its inherent quality of self-evidence or self-illumination. Thus, at levels more

proximate to the Light of Lights are produced the immaterial and substantial

lights such as the immaterial intellects of the angels and human souls, but

farther away Light also begins to produce shadow and brings about dark

substances such as bodies as well as the accidents corresponding to both Light

and darkness (ḤI 77–78).

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This results in a fourfold ontology, in which reality is divided into

(a) self—subsistent or immaterial pure Lights (al-nūr al-mujjarad, al-nūr al-

maḥḍ)—the self-illuminating sentient intellects, capable of manifesting to

themselves and manifesting others; (b) the accidental lights (al-nūr al-‘āriḍ),

inhering either in immaterial lights or in physical bodies—non-sentient lights,

such as the material light of fire and the sun, that depend upon something other

than themselves; (c) barriers (al-barzakh) or dusky substances (al-jawhar al-

ghāsiq)—physical bodies or object-like entities that obscure the lights, but at the

same time reveal them through reflection, although they do not illuminate

themselves, in other words, they are non-sentient; and (d) dark modes (al-hay’a

al-ẓulmānīya)—accidents in either immaterial lights or physical bodies—the

types of darkness that depend upon another to manifest as shadow (ḤI 109–13).

While all these things are in a sense caused by the Light of Lights, it is the

proximity of any entity to the Light of Lights that determines its reality. Thus the

gradation of Being in the Peripatetic philosophy is replaced by a gradation of

Light. This fundamental distinction is best explained by reference to the primary

texts of Suhrawardī and Avicenna. For Avicenna, what is most self-evident are

“the ideas of the ‘existent’, ‘the thing’ and ‘the necessary’, which do not require

“better known things” to be known (Shifā 1.5.1). For Suhrawardī, what is most

self-evident is Light: that “which is evident in its own reality and by its essence

makes another evident” (ḤI 117). The difference is between a philosophy that is

grounded in Being as the most self-evident constituent of reality and one that is

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grounded in Light. As Aminrazavi writes: “Suhrawardī’s classification is based

upon intensity of light or darkness which is different from the traditional Ibn

Sinian concept of hierarchies of realities, each of which are different in the

degree to which they possess ‘being’” (School 78). In terms of the development

of the Islamic philosophical tradition, this may be understood as reflecting the

range of meanings of wujūd. As Nasr writes:

Wujūd as used in traditional Islamic philosophy cannot be rendered simply as existence. Rather, it denotes at once Being, being, Existence and existence, each of these terms having a specific meaning in the context of Islamic metaphysics. (“Existence” 411)

In particular, in the Peripatetic philosophy, God or the Necessary Being

(wājib al-wujūd) takes on the attributes of the Plotinus’ ultimate Principle the

One or the Good, which is that which is defined beyond being and not-being.

Everything in the Universe, by the very fact that it exists is plunged in Being; yet, God or Pure Being, who is the Origin and Creator or all things, is not the first term in continuous chain and therefore does not have a “substantial” and “horizontal” continuity with the beings of the world. Rather, God is anterior to the Universe and transcendent with respect to it. (Nasr, Sages 25)

Moreover, the effusive emanation from the Necessary or Pure Being is described

in terms of Light (Nasr, Cosmological 202). Yet whatever the similarities of the

Peripatetic Necessary Being with the Illuminationist Light of Lights, the

fundamental difference between the two systems remains in terms of what they

take to be most self-evident and fundamental in reality. For the Peripatetics,

The reality of a thing depends upon its existence, and the knowledge of an object is ultimately the knowledge of its ontological status in the chain of universal existence which determines all of its attributes and qualities. (Nasr, Sages 25)

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For the illuminationist philosophers, on the other hand,

The origin and source of all things is the Light of Lights (nūr al-anwār), which is infinite and absolute Light above and beyond the rays that it emanates. All levels of reality, however, are also degrees and levels of light distinguished from each other by their degrees of intensity and weakness and by nothing other than light. There is, in fact, nothing in the whole universe but Light. (Nasr, Islamic 160)

The fundamental difference between these two views is made clear

when one recalls what Light is. Light is that which makes manifest or makes

evident. The immaterial Lights are those which are self-illuminating or self-

manifesting and thus the most sentient and self-aware. For as Suhrawardī says,

“whatever perceives its own essence is an incorporeal light” (ḤI 114).64 The shift

is from a hierarchy of existence to one of consciousness—of the awareness of

self-existence—as the criterion of reality. Self awareness is also the criterion of

spiritual attainment and so this is why Suhrawardī advances the illuminationist

doctrine as being the only sound basis for intuitive philosophy. Intuitive

philosophy involves “climbing the ladder of the soul” whereas discursive

philosophy does not. That is why the philosophy of Being is adequate for

discursive philosophy, but not for intuitive philosophy.

This accent of the primacy of self-awareness also informs all the

arguments that Suhrawardī’s brings to bear against the Peripatetic philosophy in

Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq. It is, again, also significant that the specific elements of the

Peripatetic system that he critiques are the most Aristotelian and least Platonic.

انه من تدرك ذاته فهو نور مجرد 64

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Where the differences between Avicenna’s philosophy of Being and

Suhrawardī’s philosophy of Light is displayed most evidently is perhaps with

regard to one of the most historically important doctrines of Avicenna—the

doctrine of essence and existence.65 As Nasr writes: “There is no issue more

central to Islamic philosophy and especially metaphysics that wujud (at once

Being and existence) in itself and in its relation to mahiyyah (quiddity or

essence)” (“Existence” 409). Moreover, as Aminrazavi notes: “Suhrawardī’s view

on the principality of the essence is absolutely crucial in the understanding of his

philosophical views” (School 35). Most of the Islamic tradition, and the

Peripatetics in particular, have been committed to a doctrine of the primacy of

existence (asālat al-wujūd), whereas Suhrawardī advocated the primacy of

essence or quiddity (asālat al-māhiyyah).

Suhrawardī’s critique begins with noting that when something comes into

existence, then it acquires the attribute of existence. But then existence itself

must exist, and so the concept of existence is itself distinct from the existing

thing:

“Existence” is used with a single meaning and as a single concept for blackness and substance, for man and for horse. It is an intelligible meaning more general than any one of these, as are the concepts of quiddity taken absolutely, thingness, and reality taken absolutely. We claim that all these predicates are purely intellectual.…This is because the concept of existence with respect to things is that an existent is

65 I consider Suhrawardī’s critique of the Peripatetic theory of Definition in Chapter 4 of

this study.

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something having existence, while in the case of existence itself it would be that it is the existence. (ḤI 56)

An immediate consequence of this is that it does away with the

Peripatetic notion of the gradations of existence, since a single existence is

common to all beings and so it cannot be the case that some beings exist more

than others. Worse, if existence is a common notion then it itself must exist and

so have its own existence.

If so, the actuality of the existence would not be the existence itself, and the existence would have existence. This same argument applies to the existence of the existence, and so on to infinity. But a simultaneous ordered infinity of attributes is absurd. (ḤI 56)

Since existing objects and existence are two separate things and

existence can be conceived only with respect to some existent being, then

existent beings must precede existence in their order of coming into existence.

Since existence as a universal concept requires an existent being in order for it to manifest itself, and since existent beings require an essence in order to be, then essence must precede existence in the order of actualization. In other words, since essence is needed for an existent being to exist and existence is contingent upon an existent being, then existence is contingent upon the essence. (Aminrazavi, School 34).

Yet like existence, essence also is purely intellectual:

The “universal meaning” has no reality outside the mind.66 If it had, it would have an identity by which it would be distinguished from everything else and which not be shared. It would thus become a specific thing, whereas it has been supposed to be universal—which is a contradiction. (ḤI 11)

هو ان المعنى العام ال يتحق فى خارج الذهن 66

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But if both essence and existence are purely of the mind, then wherefore the

primacy of essence over existence? Suhrawardī’s answer is that since existence

is the same for all external objects, it is only through their essence that we can

actually distinguish things as they are, thus its primacy. On the other hand, it is

important to recall that in a sense, Suhrawardī does distinguish between the

degrees of reality of individual “beings” or things. But, again, this degree of

reality is not understood in terms of degree of existence, as it is for the

Peripatetics, but in terms of light. As Ziai explains,

Suhrawardī does treat being in an “equivocal” sense, i.e. the being which corresponds to the differences that are apparent in things out there. But Suhrawardī calls this being “light,” and his “science of lights” (‘ilm al-anwār) examines the essence (dhāt) of things out there, and their gradation in terms of intensity and priority. Since the most intense and prior “light” for Suhrawardī is that which corresponds to pure self-consciousness, it is the degree of self-consciousness that determines the rank as well as order of being in the equivocal sense. (Knowledge 167)

Although it is beyond the scope of this study to go into details, the final

reconciliation of the Peripatetic and Illuminationist views of what is most

evidently real—wujūd or nūr—did finally occur as the result of the work of the

major figure of the School of Isfahan, Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadrā) (1572–

1640). As Nasr writes:

Although Suhrawardī considered wujūd to be merely “mentally positied” (i’tibārī) he bestowed all the attributes of wujūd upon light (al-nūr), while Mullā Ṣadrā and other later philosophers of his school who accepted the unity, gradation, and principality of wujūd often identified wujūd with light and in fact used the term kathrah nūrāniyyah (luminous multiplicity) when they referred to the multiplicity resulting from the gradation of wujūd. (Islamic 80)

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In essence, Mullā Ṣadrā creatively resolved the tension between the Peripatetic

philosophy of Being and the Illuminationist philosophy of Light by affirming that

Light and Being were the same. As he wrote in On the Hermeneutics of the Light

Verse of the Qur’an: “In truth the reality of ‘light’ and existence (al-wujūd) is the

same thing. The existence of everything is its manifestation, accordingly, the

existence of corporeal bodies (al-ajsām) would also be the degrees of Light” (43).

By identifying existence with manifestation, Mullā Ṣadrā is able to correlate

existence with the self-evidence which defines Light. Thus he mentions with

complete agreement and approval Suhrawardī’s definition of Light as “the simple

and self-manifesting reality which brings other things to manifestation” (36).

But to return to Suhrawardī’s specific vision, the one that concerns us in

this study, between the Light of Lights and total darkness, there are only levels

upon levels of Light, of differing degrees of intensity, and their intensity

determines their reality, the sole criterion of which is the ability to be self–

manifest (ḤI 150–58). To a certain extent, these degrees of reality correspond to

Avicenna’s other great epochal contribution to the Islamic and western

traditions: the classifications of beings into necessary (wajib), possible (mumkin),

or impossible (mumtani). Thus, the self-subsistent or immaterial Lights partake

of the necessity of the Light of Lights, accidental lights are contingent in their

reality, and darkness inherently lacks reality and so corresponds to impossibility

(Aminrazavi, School 80).

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However, one of the key aspects of Avicenna’s theory was the idea of

necessary existents and this Suhrawardī subjects to a critique. In Avicenna’s

scheme, if something does in fact exist, then its existence must be either

necessary or contingent. More precisely, its existence is either necessary in itself

or it is contingent in itself. If it is necessary in itself (wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi)

then it contains the sufficient reason for its own existence. But if it exists only

contingently in itself (mumkin al-wujud di-dhatihi) then it requires a cause

outside of itself for its existence. However, if that outside cause does contain a

sufficient reason for the thing’s existence, then, according to Avicenna, its

existence is no longer contingent. So Avicenna says that, although a thing may

be contingently existent through itself, it is necessarily existent through

something else (wajib al-wujud bi-ghayrihi). But, Suhrawardī argues, if a thing’s

coming into existence through an external cause makes it lose its contingent

nature and it becomes necessary, “as some have imagined,” then, by a simple

inference, this thing’s opposite, which does not exist, becomes impossible by

virtue of its non-existence (in the same way that the original thing becomes

necessary through its existence). But then this makes all-non-existent entities

impossible and so if follows that it is not logically possible for anything at all to

be contingent, which contradicts Avicenna’s theory (ḤI 54).67

67 Avicenna’s argument P Ↄ ~~P ˫ P Ↄ □P implies its converse ~P Ↄ ~P ˫ ~P Ↄ□~P

(Aminrazavi, School 36).

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The doctrine of necessary contingents became an important question in

both medieval European and Islamic philosophy. Al-Ghazāli attacked it and

Averroes defended it. In the Latin West, St. Thomas adopted it along with

Avicenna’s doctrine of the Necessary Existent (Menn 147–58). In the Islamic

philosophical tradition, centuries of debate may be said to have finally

culminated in the doctrines of Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī (Mullā Ṣadrā) (1572–1640). To

go into great detail is beyond the scope of this study, whose concern in primarily

the comparison of Suhrawardī’s doctrines of Light with Abhinavagupta’s.

However, in broadest terms, Mullā Ṣadrā revisioned the tripartite division of

beings into necessary, contingent and impossible into a continuous hierarchy

existentially dependent upon the self-evident Being and differing from It in the

intensity, strength and perfection of the degree of being that each received from

it as Source. In this way the continuum of Suhrawardī’s hierarchy of Lights was

maintained and reconciled with the Avicennian philosophy of Being by

understanding the Reality of Lights as being identical with that of Being (Nasr,

Islamic 80).

In arguing against the Peripatetic notion of a Pure or Necessary Being as

the absolute ground of reality, Suhrawardī notes that the prime matter posited

by the Peripatetic school turns out on examination to also have all the

characteristics of the Necessary Being. More, if it is the case that the Necessary

Being knows itself and all existents because it is pure being, “then this must also

be the case with prime matter, since it too is an existent and nothing more”

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(ḤI 120). Similarly, Suhrawardī argues that were it the case, as the Peripatetics

claim, that it is the simple immateriality of an entity (rather than its self-

illumination) that makes it sentient, then prime matter would also be sentient:

Were the fact that a thing is free from prime matter and barriers sufficient to make it aware of itself, as is the opinion of the Peripatetics, then that prime matter whose existence they assert would also be aware of itself, since it is not a state of something else but has its own quiddity and is free from any other prime matter—there being no matter of prime matter. (ḤI 119)

Once again the thrust of Suhrawardī’s arguments is to overthrow the

Peripatetic idea of existence as being the most evident aspect of reality, and to

replace it with the self-subsistent self-awareness of Light:

[Suhrawardī’s] is an ontology which regards the real beings of things out there to be a continuous whole, composed of what we may call self-conscious and self-subsistent ‘monads,” not separate from the whole, and known in themselves by themselves. These ‘monads’ are light-entities conscious of their “I”’s (anā’iyya), and collectively they constitute a whole cosmos that is also conscious of itself (Ziai, Knowledge 170)

Suhrawardī’s ontology in all its aspects always return to what Yazdi calls the

“examination of the very performative reality of ‘I-ness. This is most

characteristic of illuminative philosophy and its realistic posture in its drive to

the light of truth” (83).

For Suhrawardī, then, the self-evidence of consciousness is the primordial

and fundamental fact of reality. His critique of the Peripatetic philosophy turns

upon the recognition of the fundamental error of attempting to ground our

understanding of reality in any other fashion than by reference to this most self-

evident of facts, that is, conscious self-awareness or Light. In particular, it is an

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error to ground philosophy in Being, because consciousness is what makes Being

evident, thus it is prior to being in fact and so it must also be taken in philosophy.

Everything relates back to the self-subsistent: the incorporeal Lights. The

problem with the Peripatetic philosophy occurs when the philosopher seeks to

move beyond discursive reasoning to an actual knowledge of the Lights—to

know as she is known. By failing to acknowledge the primacy of self-subsistence,

that is, self awareness, Peripatetic philosophy is an inadequate theoretical guide

for the philosopher in her attempt to recover her correct and true relationship to

the Light of Lights.

Suhrawardī’s exegesis of the corporeal world as an inherently indigent phenomenon and his analysis of corporeality in terms of light is fundamentally related to the spiritual journey of man. In a sense, Suhrawardī lays the philosophical foundation for the explanation of the journey of the soul from the darkness of the corporeal world to the luminous world of the incorporeal light and the light of lights. A thorough reading of the dense philosophical arguments of the second part of the Ḥikmat al-ishrāq reveals a firm mystical doctrine. (Aminrazavi, School 80)

Light and Being in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

For Abhinavagupta, as for the Kashimiri Śavite tradition in general, the

ultimate principle of reality (paraṁ tattvaṁ) and thus the final possible object of

cognition (jñeya) is Śiva Who is Light. Whatever does not partake of the

illuminative nature of Light cannot be manifest and thus cannot even have

existence (TĀ 1.52).68 Śiva is the sole Light of manifestation (prakāśaḥ kevalaḥ)

68

जे्ञयस्य मि परां तत्त्वां यः प्रकवशवत्मकः मशवः ।

नह्यप्रकवशरूपस्य प्रवकवशयां वस्ततुवमप वव ॥

161

and attributes and accidents, indeed everything that manifests, is only Śiva as

Light. The existence of means and ends finally reduces to this single non-dual

absolute of Light (TĀ 2.17).69 In fact, the meaning of the word “one” refers to

the Light alone, since it is the sole reality. In contrast to the views of other

schools of philosophy, Kashimiri Śaivism holds that multiplicity can only occur as

the result of the diverse manifestations of a single absolute consciousness

(TĀ 2.23).70

The word used throughout the Kashmiri Śaivite literature for Light is

prakāśa, derived from pra kās—“to become visible, appear shine, become

evident or manifest” (Monier-Williams 653). Thus, prakāsa denotes that which

makes manifest, that is, consciousness. As Dyczkowski writes:

The absolute is Śiva Who is universal consciousness and man’s authentic nature (atman) Who, reflecting on Himself, actively generates and discerns his own manifestations. Thus a striking feature of Pratyabhijñā literature in its original sources is the regular use of analogies with the properties of light to express and explain the nature of manifestation. It is common in these works for the author to express the notion that an object is manifests, appears, is visible, or just simply exists, by saying that “it shines.” Thus, typically, the Pratyabhijñā establish that all things participate in the one reality that nothing “shines” (i.e. appears, manifests or exists in its apparent form) if it is not illuminated by the lights of consciousness. If phenomena were to be anything but “light” they could not “shine” that is, exist. (Doctrine 26)

As Abhinavagupta writes:

69

नीलां पीतां सखुमममत पकवशः मशवः

अममुममन्परमवद्वतेै प्रकवशवत्ममन कोऽपरः।

उपवयोपेयभवस्यवत्प्रकवशवः केवलां मि सः ॥

70 प्रकवशमवत्रममुदतमप्रकवशमनषेिनवत ्।

एकशब्दस्य न त्वथाः सांख्यव मचद्् यमिभेदभवक् ॥

162

Therefore the Highest Lord manifests the universe in diverse forms, the ultimate reality of which consists in shining. The universe is essentially identical with Self. It is real in its nature. Its highest reality lies in its being one with the Light of consciousness, and its oneness with the Light of consciousness is never disrupted. (ĪPv 4.20)

This ontology of Light supports a “mysticism of Light” (Aphorisms 6). For

if the full reality of the universe lies in its being one with the Light of Śiva’s

absolute consciousness, then our own true nature is not being but Light. Our

self-realization consists in our recognition (pratyabhijña) of our fundamental

nature as self-manifest and thus self-illuminating, that is, we are Light. Since,

finally, all Light is identical with Śiva, so are we.

The concept of consciousness is the firm foundation upon which Kashmiri Śaiva metahpysics is constructed.…Consciousnesss is more than the awareness an individual has of himself and his environment; it is the eternal all-pervasive principle. It is the highest reality (paramārtha) and all things are a manifestation of this consciousness (cidvhyakti). All entities, without distinction, are of the nature of consciousness. (Dyczkowski, Doctrine 44)

As Abhinavagupta writes in the Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇa (PTv), “Without

Consciousness which is Light itself, no entity which is devoid of the light of

manifestation (aprakāśamānaṃ vapuḥ) can acquire existence” (PTv 31).

It is the nature of Light to be conscious: to illuminate itself. Entities are

more or less real to the extent that they are self-luminous, that is, sentient. It is

the degree of consciousness, rather than existence, that determines how real

something is. Since insentient entities are not self-luminous, they do not

manifest in and of themselves, but only through another that is self-luminous.

According to Abhinavagupta, it is impossible for anything to arise, that is,

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become manifest, apart from the light of consciousness. It order to exist, an

entity must be manifest, and in order to be manifest, it must be illuminated. But

it is the inherent nature of the Light of manifestation to be self-luminous, thus

Light formally precedes existence.

The recognition of the illuminative nature of consciousness precedes

discursive reasoning concerning being. Abhinavagupta writes: “If the principle of

consciousness were not to exist and were not self-luminous all things would be

unconscious and so could not illumine (anything). What use are (many)

arguments (to establish this point)” (TĀ 2.10)?71 This argument is similar to that

which Abhinavgupta uses in Iśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī (2.7) and which

parallels Suhrawardī arguments for knowledge by presence (al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī)

and which I examine in Chapter 4. The point here, as it is with Suhrawardī, is

that the direct consciousness of the self of itself is ontologically prior to any

determination of existence for any entity. “The Light (of consciousness) is that

which illumines all things (and makes them manifest). There is nothing without

this Light and the world is reflected in its true form” (TĀ 3.2).72 As Dyczkowski

writes: “Even when the light of consciousness is apparent to us as the universe of

our experience, there is no question of its becoming anything else” (Doctrine 87).

71

सांचवत्तत्त्वां स्वप्रक िचमत्यचस्मचन्कां न ुयचुक्तचिाः ।

तदि व ेिवेचिश्वां जडत्व दप्रक िकम ् ॥

72 यः प्रकवशः स सवास्य प्रयच्छमत

न च तद्् यमतरेक्यमस्त मवश्वां सद्वववभवसते ।

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The result is that for Abhinavagupta:

Light, rather than being is the fundamental determinate of reality and existence. The innate nature of all entities is of the nature of Light (prakāśa) as that which is not Light cannot be shown to have an innate nature (that is, self evidence). (TS 1 55)73

Abhinavagupta argues that were it the case that something that was not

self-luminous would shine, that is, be manifest, then all the distinctions between

Light and darkness would cease, in other words, everything would be sentient.

But then, since all sentient things would be one with the Light there would be

only Light (prakāśa) and therefore the absence of Light (aprakāśa), that is, the

insentient, would have no existence (vastutā). Despite what other schools of

philosophy may contend, he argues, it is not correct to hold that the Light itself

has specific and individual features, but rather that it shines uniformly as all

things (and brings them into manifestation) (TĀ 2.20–22).74 Thus while all the

phenomena of experience, such as the sense data of blue or yellow or the feeling

of pleasure are real, they do not exist independently. In their ultimate reality

they are the same Light of Śiva (TĀ 2.16).75

73

स च सवाभवववनवां प्रकवशरूप एव अप्रकवशस्य स्वभववतवनपुपते्तः

74 प्रक ि ेह्यप्रक ि ांिाः कथां न म प्रक ित म ्।

प्रक िम न ेतचस्मन्व तदि्तै स्तस्य लोचपत ाः ॥

अप्रक िऽेथ तचस्मन्व वस्तुत कथमचु्यते ।

न प्रक िचविेषत्वमत एवोपपद्यते ॥

अत एकप्रक िोऽयचमचत व दऽेत्र सचुस्थते ।

िर द व ररत ाः सत्यां चवचिन्नज्ञ नव चदनाः ॥

75 नीलां पीतां सखुचमचत प्रक िाः केवलाः चिवाः ।

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While real, they are nonetheless thought-constructs (vikalpa) that are the

products of Absolute Consciousness that have no power to differentiate that

Consciousness, add to it, or in reality effect it in any way. They are in fact

nothing but consciousness itself (TĀ 5.5).76 Consciousness perceives them in all

their multiplicity and diversity through its power (śakti) of reflective awareness

(vimarśa) and assumes their forms (TĀ 7.30b–32a).77 As Pandey writes:

The chief characteristic of an insentient thing is that it is of a certain fixed appearance and that by itself it cannot manifest itself in any other than a fixed form. A stone, for example cannot assume multifarious forms of a man, a tree, a mountain, etc. and again after some time regain its original form. (438)

While insentient entities are themselves brought into manifestation, that

is, they are illuminated, they themselves cannot illuminate others, that is, they

cannot bring other entities into manifestation or appearance. It is only sentience

that can bring other entities into its own field of consciousness. “No object

whatsoever can exist apart from the veritable Bhairava who is both prakāsa or

Light and vimarśa or the consciousness of that Light as I” (PTv 80).

76

मवकल्पो नवम मचन्मत्ररस्वभववो यद्यमप मस्थतः |

तथवमप मनश्चयवत्मवसववणोः स्ववतन््ययोजकः ||

77 अत एकैव सांचवचत्तन ान रूप ेतथ तथ ॥

चवन्द न चनचवाकल्व चप चवकल्पो ि वगोिरे ।

स्पन्द न्तरां न य वत्तदचुदतां त वदवे साः ॥

त व नेको चवकल्पाः स्य चिचवधां वस्तु कल्पयन ्।

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The Indian tradition began its engagement with the problems of Being

about a thousand years before they were taken up by the Greeks.78 Long before

Plato and Plotinus wrote of the Good that was beyond Being but produced it,

one finds in the Ŗgveda:

These Brahmaṇaspati produced with blast and smelting, like a Smith, Existence, in an earlier age of Gods, from Non-existence sprang. Existence, in the earliest age of Gods, from Non-existence sprang. Thereafter were the regions born. This sprang from the Productive Power (10.72.2–3).

And in Arthavaveda it is written:

What is, is based on what is not; The present lies on that which is. The present on the future is imposed; And the future on the present is based. (Hymns 17.1.19)

This is continued into the Upaniṣads, where in the Taittirīya Upaniśad it is

written: “Indeed, in the beginning this [world] was non-existent. From that,

indeed, emerged Being. That [non-existent] created itself by itself. Therefore it

is called the self-creator” (2.7).79 But then in Chāndogya Upaniṣad this is refuted

in the rather indignant manner typical of the philosophies of Being:

In the beginning, my dear, this world was just Being, one only, without a second. To be sure, some people say: “In the beginning this world was just Non-being, one only, without a second; from that Non-being Being was produced.” But verily, my dear, how could this be? How from non-

78 Assuming the customary date of c. 1400 BCE for the Ŗgveda. Parmenides fl. early 5th

century. 79

असि इदमग्र आसीत् ।

ततो वै सदज यत ।

तद म न ाँ स्वयमकुरुत ।

तस्म त्तत्सकृुतमचु्यत इचत ।

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Being could Being be produced? On the contrary, my dear, in the beginning this world was Being, one only, without a second. (6.2)

Abhinavagupta’s position in this is the one adopted by the philosophers

of Light in general—to locate the ultimate principle beyond the dichotomy of

Being and non-Being altogether. Again, it is consciousness that is primary:

“Consciousness abides within the Light in the center that is between (the

polarities) of Being, Non-being and the rest” (TĀ 1.84).80 As Muller-Ortega points

out, this movement to a transcendent Light beyond Being allows even the

“depersonalizing and absolutizing [sic] of the deity Śiva” (“Luminous” 46). This

ultimate Light whose nature cannot be adequately expressed by the finite

concepts of thought and language is anuttara: the one than whom nothing is

higher.81 This Ultimate is neither Being nor Non-Being, nor is it devoid of either.

Anuttara is difficult to know in any way, because manifestation in the world

involves taking on a form that is limited by nature, such as a jar that exists in the

world. But this is not the case with Bhairava as the Ultimate (TĀ 2.28-29).82 It is

not in the range of speech, beyond all determinations of existence or non-

80

प्रक ि वचस्थतां ज्ञ नां ि व ि व चदमध्यताः ।

81 न चस्त उत्तरां यस्म त

82 न सन्न चवसत्सदसन्न च तन्नोभयोमज्ितम ।

दमुववाजे्ञयव मि सववस्थव मकमप्येतदनतु्तरम ॥

अयममत्यवभवसो मि यो भववोऽवमच्छदवत्मकः ।

स एव घटवल्लोके सांस्तथव नैष भैरवः ॥

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existence. Inexpressible, it resides within power (śakti) yet it is devoid of power

(TĀ 2.33).83

Yet, inexpressible as it is, nonetheless it is this Ultimate that bestows

luminosity on all things. It is the supreme subjectivity that makes manifest the

universe of subject and object and as such, it may be described as Light: “It is

anuttara itself, of the nature of eminent Light, which has implicitly within itself

the expansion of the universe as identical with consciousness” (PTv 34). As

beyond both Being and non-Being, Abhinavagupta takes this Ultimate source of

illumination to be even beyond the established categories of emantated

existence (tattva).84 These are typically numbered to be thirty-six. Abhinagutpa

gives anuttara as the thirty-seventh, called śūnyātiśūnya—the “void beyond the

void” (TĀ 11.21).85

What gives the Ultimate at once its inexpressibility and immediacy is the

capacity for reflexive awareness which is inherent in the very nature of the Light

of consciousness. In Kashmiri Śaivism this is called vimarśa which is derived from

the root mŗs which means to touch, stroke handle, touch mentally, consider or

reflect (Monier-Williams 831). It thus connotes a capacity which is at once

reflexive and active. As Muller-Ortega writes:

83

न भववो नवप्यभववो न द्वयां ववचवमगोचरवत ्।

अकथ्यपदवीरूंां शमिस्थां शमिवमजातम ्॥

84 I treat these and the Kashmiri Śaivite system of emanation more fully in Chapter 5 of

this study. 85 There are thirty-seven chapters in Tantrāloka.

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Even as the light of consciousness illuminates the world of objectivity (that will appear to arise within it), the light, as it were, curves back on itself to illuminate itself. The idea of vimarśa precisely asserts that consciousness has this capacity of being conscious of itself. It expresses the freedom and spontaneity of the light of consciousness. Even more important, the notion of vimarśa indicates the essential capacity of consciousness for self-referral. It exists only in reference to itself and no other. (“Luminous” 59)

What gives the Ultimate at once its inexpressibility and immediacy is the

capacity for reflective awareness that emanates existence through the formal

means of the categories:

Bhairava who is of the nature of Light is self-proved, beginningless, primal, the ultimate in all respects, and present in everything. What else is to be said regarding him? He displays His Light identically (svaprakāśam prakāśayati) in the expansion of all the categories of existence (e.g. the 36 tattvas), all the objective phenomena (bhāvas) and views them all as Himself (tathaiva ca vimarśat). (PTv 111–12)

The way this occurs is through a kind of recursive reflexivity, in which the subtle

interplay of subjectivity and objectivity (aham and idam) produce the universe

through the act or power of self-reflection. This is understood and experienced

as a sequence of five steps issuing out of the Ultimate and which, in terms of

doctrine, are placed formally prior to the traditional series of tattvas which

Kashmiri Śaivism inherited from the Sāṃkhya and then adapted and revised.

The level of manifestation most formally proximate to anuttara is Śiva

Tattva in which the power of pure subjective being (cit) predominates. As

Pandey describes it:

The experience of this state, if the use of a word is permissible, is pure “I”.…It is wrong to use even such a predicate as “am” in reference to it; because “am” also implies some kind of relation of identity, which

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presupposes both the self-consciousness and the consciousness, however vague or indefinite, of something apart from itself. (364)

With the next category, the idea of something apart from the Self makes its first

appearance, although it is extremely subtle—perhaps no more than a

suggestion—and while still occurring within the general ambit of subjectivity, it is

conceived as being marked by the addition of the “am” to the “I” to produce

“I am.” However subtle and suggestive, this is the first indication of the

production of the manifest universe out of pure self awareness, and so it is

recognized as an active creative power: Śakti as an evolute of but still virtually

identical with Śiva.

I bow to that Absolute, which is the Unity of Paramamaśiva and Śakti: the Unity, which from its ultimate state, first of all manifests the Pure Ego “I” and then, through its will, divides its power into two, the Ultimate State, which, being without any manifestation, is self-contained and is responsible for Creation and Dissolution through the play and suspension respectively of its power. (ĪPv 1.1)

Following this is sadāśiva tattva, the state of consciousness in which there

emerges the dual relationship of “I am this” where “this” represents the

universe. So here the subject becomes aware of the possibility of a relationship

to an object. What occurs at this stage is the emergence of the power of the will

toward manifestation: icchaśakti.

The next emanational stage is īśvara tattva. Here, having recognized the

possibility of objectivity, consciousness takes the object back in upon itself in a

movement represented as “this am I” where the universe is understood by

consciousness as an expansion of its own inherent nature. This understanding or

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knowledge is recognized in the name given to the power associated with this

stage: jñanaśakti.

With the next stage, śuddha vidyā, will and knowledge overflow into

action, kriyasakti, and the view that consciousness has of its own manifestation

as objective begins to take a tangible form. This in turn creates the veils or

coverings upon the Light, which creates a sense of differentiation, form out of

the formless, limited out of the unlimited, darkness out of the primordial Light.

The first and most fundamental of these obscuring coverings is the creative

power of māyā. It is that power which is responsible for its own self-limitation,

(ĪVp 1.2). It is the power that obscures and, through obscuring, brings things into

being. Thus the manifestation of the of the universe of experience occurs as a

result of a progressive mirroring of the Ultimate of itself to itself, in which it

manifests itself not only as subject, but that object which it sees in its own veiling

reflection:

[Utimate Reality] manifests the universe, which is ever within itself in the form of universal energy, as apparently separate from itself on the back-ground of itself without losing its oneness, much in the same manner as that in which a mirror manifests what is reflected on it. The most important difference between the two cases is that, while in the case of an ordinary mirror reflections are cast by an external object, in that of the mirror of the Universal Consciousness they are caused by its own powers (śaktis) which constitute different aspects of its Svātantrya śakti. (Pandey 439)

Thus, Śiva, by virtue of the freedom of his own self-contemplation (bhāvanā),

finally appears to himself in the form of each existent (ṣŗṭa) entity which

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manifests within the mirror of each individual subject whose consciousness

nonetheless remains Śiva’s own.86

As I discuss in Chapter 2, what is critical in this development of the

Kashmiri Śaivite ontology of Light is the replacement of a passive and inert

witnessing consciousness with one that manifests as an active creative power.

As Muller-Ortega writes:

The light of consciousness, says Abhinavagupta, is not just a clear crystal which, mirrorlike, reflects all things that fall upon it. It has an intrinsic capacity for self-referentiality which makes it alive and powerful rather than inert and powerless. This self-referential capacity is the śakti, the intrinsic power of consciousness. The śakti is but the expression of the freedom of consciousness, and, as such, it is responsible for the process of manifestation of all finite appearances within the infinite light. (“Luminous” 59)

In Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula, this power is explained in terms of the

three Goddesses or śakti. As Dyczkowski says, they are “essentially defining” for

Abhinavagutpa’s system (Doctrine 113). This is shown by their positioning in the

very first verses of Tantrāloka itself, even before the invocation to Ganesha and

the listing of the masters of the lineage.87 Here these Goddesses are given their

characteristic names of para, “She who is beyond manifestation”; apara, “She

who is within manifestation”; and parāpara, “She who is both within

manifestation and apart from it.” One of the correlations of the triple Goddess

86

चिवश्च लुप्तचविवस्तथ सषृ्टोऽवि सते ।

स्वसांचवन्म तमृकुरे स्व तन््य द्भ वन दष ु॥

87 This placement means that, in effect, the following verses of all thirty-seven chapters

are but commentary upon these first verses.

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has already occurred in this discussion, for para is identified with icchaśakti,

parāpara with kriyasakti, and apara with jñanaśakti. The three represent the

states of consciousness associated with Light in its various levels of

manifestation or veiling. Para is the creative intuition of self awareness, united

with the absolute that contains within itself all three powers of consciousness.

These are understood as the subject, object, and means of knowledge, which are

represented as fire, moon and the sun88 but all understood as unified in the

supreme Light (TĀ 1.2).89

Apara is the supreme Light of consciousness understanding itself as

limited. As such, She appears like a flash of lightening which pierces the

darkness of the obscuring veils on the Light which make up the body of Śiva’s

eternal dance of manifestation and are in their own way an expression of the

absolute autonomy of the Ultimate Consciousness (svātantrya) in that in

manifesting it wills to veil Itself (TĀ 1.3).90 Yet it is this realization, expressed in

the power of knowledge, that what seems in fact to be limited is in truth and in

fact the Light of unlimited and ultimate consciousness that allows that Light to

88 Discussed more fully in Chapter 4. 89

नौचम चित्प्रचति ां दवेीं पर ां िैरवयोगनीम ्।

म तमृ नप्रमेय ांििलू भबजुकूत स्पद म ्॥

90 नौचम दवेीं िरीरस्थ ां नतृ्यतो िैरव कृते ।

प्र वणृ्मेघघनव्योमचवद्यलु्लेखचवल चसनीम ्॥

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burn away the obscuring veils and reveal the truth of its own inherent nature to

itself, and this is parāpara (TĀ 1.4).91

Although in speaking thus of the creative powers as aspects of the

Goddess in contrast to Śiva in his ultimate form, it might seem as if

Abhinavagupta is introducing a duality into his system, he explains that this is

only apparent. For in fact all of these ṣaktis reduce to the essential attribute of

the one Consciousness, that is, its power of creative autonomy (svātantrya). Just

as the one Consciousness manifests as many, so also does its single power of

autonomy appear to be manifold in its operartion. Nonetheless it remains one

without a second (advaya). Just as there is no difference between fire’s capacity

to burn and fire itself, similarly there is no difference between the powers of the

Divine and the Divine itself, except insofar as it is perceived as such. So although

there is a perceived sense in which the difference between power and its

possessor may be considered to be real, the more fundamental reality is that the

Goddess transcends the multiplicity of Her powers in her unity with Śiva

(TĀ 1.66–72).

This active power of the Ultimate as śakti leads to the most

characteristically unique element of Kashmiri Śaivite thought: the notion of

vibration (spanda). In this conception the Ultimate, both in terms of being and

91

चदप्तज्यीचतश्छट प्लुष्टिेदबन्धत्र स्परुत ।

स्त ज्ज्ञ निलूां सत्पक्षचवपक्षोत्कतानक्षमम ्॥

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cognition, is continually pulsing outward into manifestation and then

withdrawing the manifest back into self.

Abhinavagupta writes that the inherent nature of consciousness is its

capacity for self-referral, and because of this there arises a spontaneous

mirroring of the Light that may be understood as a vibration or sound (dhvani).

This supreme manifestation is also known as the great heart. Through this

vibration the entire universe is dissolved at the beginning and end, not only of

the cycles of creation and dissolution, but—in what amounts to the same thing—

of each act of cognition. This is what the texts of the tradition call vibration

(spanda) or universal vibration (sāmānyasaṃjñakaḥ spanda), the overflowing of

the Self. Spanda is thus a unique form of effulgent Light, which is a wave of the

ocean of Consciousness. To be sometimes filled with waves and sometimes

without waves is of the nature of the ocean. Similarly, the vibration of

consciousness, is the inherent self-referral of consciousness (vimarśa). This

takes reality (sat) through the creative action of the Ultimate, expressed through

the threefold powers of will, knowledge, and action (TĀ 4.181–87).

This vibration is effulgent, active, and identified with Light. As Padoux

writes:

For these traditions the first principle, Śiva (referring in that case to his supreme plane, Paramaśiva) is consciousness (cit, saṃvid) which is both pure light-consciousness (prakāśa) and self-awareness (vimarśa) of this light: it is prakāśavimarśamaya, that is to say light and/or transcendent and immanent consciousness, a consciousness which, far from being a still, inactive absolute, is on the contrary a luminous throbbing

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(sphurattā), a luminous vibration (spanda), a power or energy (śakti), all these aspects expressing its vimarśa nature. (77)

Metaphysically, the point is to replace an ontology of Being, which is inherently

passive, with an ontology of Light, which is inherently dynamic:

The Kashmiri Śaiva approach understands the world to be a symbol of the absolute, that is, as the manner in which it presents itself to us. Again we can contrast this view with that of the Advaita Vedānta. The Advaita Vedānta understands the world to be an expression of the absolute insofar as it exists by virtue of the absolute’s Being. Being is understood to be the real unity which underlies empirically manifest separateness and as such is never empirically manifest. It is only transcendentally actual as “being in itself.” The Kashmiri Śaiva position represents, in a sense, a reversal of this point of view. The nature of the absolute, and also that of Being, is conceived as an eternal becoming (satatodita), a dynamic flux of Spanda, “the agency of the act of being” (ĪPv 2).92 (Dyczkowski, Doctrine 52)

Śiva did not, however, reveal the agamas simply to promote philosophical

discourse. On the contrary, in Kashmiri Śaivism the final and paramount purpose

of the correction and improvement of the understanding is to support the real

goal of the system, which is self-realization. Nonetheless, it is absolutely vital:

But while the yogi’s development depends upon faith and personal experience of the higher states of consciousness, he can, and must, strengthen his conviction in the light of reason. When reason (upapatti) and direct insight (upalabdhi) work together, they serve as a means to liberation. Reason alone cannot help us, but when it is based on an intuitive insight of fundamental principles along with a direct experience of reality, error is eradicated and the yogi is freed.…Right reasoning is based on, and ultimately blossoms fully into, the Pure Knowledge (śuddhavidyā) that: “I am this universe and this universe is me.” In this way argument not only sustains doctrine but also leads to the firm conviction that results in, and essentially is, the recognition of one’s own authentic identity as Śiva. (Dyczkowski, Doctrine 169–170)

92

भवनकतृातव

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Thus, Abhinavagupta writes that the sharp edge of the axe of correct

reasoning (sattarka) is indispensable to the wise in eradicating the deep-rooted

tree of the impression of duality (TĀ 4.13).93 This is because, somewhat

paradoxically, even the impression of duality is not something different from

Consciousness. Only right reasoning can allow pure thought forms (śuddha

vikalpa) to arise and subordinate the impressions of duality. Right reasoning

supports realization, and the reason is purified through the practices such as the

various oblations, repetition of mantras, rituals and forms of yoga (TS 4 70–71).94

Nonetheless, in the final analysis the yogi or yogini must come to the goal only

through him or herself. Correct reasoning reveals itself spontaneously in the

mind of the yogin, and the texts declare such a one to be self-proven. As it is

said in the Kiraṇāgama, even the texts themselves and the teacher are

subordinate to the self as means to the attainment of knowledge (TĀ 4.40–41).95

93

दिुेदप दपस्य स्य मलूां कृन्तचन्त कोचवद ाः ।

ध र रूढेन सत्तका कुठ रेणचेत चनश्चयाः ॥

94 तकं तु अनगुहृ्णीयरुचप सत्तका एव स क्ष त ्तत्र उप याः स एव ि िदु्धचवद्य स ि बहुप्रक रतय सांस्कृतो िवचत

तद्यथ य गो होमो जपो व्रतां योग इचत ।

95 स त वत्कस्यचित्तका ाः स्वत एव प्रवताते ।

स ि स ांचसचद्धकाः ि से्त्र प्रोक्ताः स्वप्रत्यय त्मकाः ॥

चकरण य ां यदपयकु्तां गरुूताः ि स्त्रताः स्वताः ।

तत्रोत्तरोत्तरां मखु्यां पवूापवूा उप यकाः ॥

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Comparing Being and Light in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and

Abhinavagupa’s Anuttara Trika Kula

In examining Suhrawardī’s and Abhinavagupta’s treatment of Light and

Being, it seems clear that there are impressive and important parallels. Once

one allows for differences of terminology and context, Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta express a virtually identical doctrine of an ontology of Light in

virtually identical terms, buttressed by virtually identical reasoning. Moreover, it

is clear that both philosophers understand and affirm Light in terms that are

completely in agreement with the Metaphysics of Light as it is understood in its

original, Western, context.

For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, reality is finally and

fundamentally Light. Light is paraṁ tattvaṁ, the ultimate principle, and al-ghanī

al-muṭlaq, that which is absolutely rich or full in its reality. Moreover, by “Light”

they do not mean a metaphor or symbol of physical light. Rather, just as with

Plato, the light of the sun is the analogue of the true Light, which in both systems

is defined in precisely the same way. For Suhrawardī, nūr, Light is that which is

manifest in itself and manifests others. It is that which is ẓāhir, evident. In fact it

is that which is most evident and the most self-evident, and so is the source of

ishrāq, illumination, that is manifestation, for other things. For Abhinavagupta,

Light is identically prakāsa, that which illuminates, brings things into

manifestation or makes them evident.

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Both philosophers draw precisely the same set of implications from this

definition. The first and most obvious is that Light is essentially consciousness.

For Suhrawardī, the essential nature of the anwār mujarrada, the immaterial

Lights is anā’iya, “I”-ness, or ‘ilm bi-dhātihi, self-awareness. For Abhinavagupta,

the essential nature of prakāśa is vimarśa: again, self-awareness or reflexive

awareness. For both philosophers, consciousness is what brings things in

manifestation through its own self-evidence. Thus, consciousness is Light and all

entities are, in their most fundamental reality, of the nature of consciousness: all

things are Lights.

In terms of metaphysics, this entails for both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagutpa a decisive movement away from a philosophy of Being toward a

philosophy of Light. This does not mean that a terminology of Being is replaced

with a terminology of Light, nor is “Light” used as a symbol or metaphor for

“Being.” Rather, in both cases, it involves the fundamental insight that self-

reflective awareness rather than existence is the primary and most self-evident

category of reality. An ontology of Being is one that looks to the entities that are

manifest as fundamental. An ontology of Light looks to that which makes

entities manifest. If Being is taken to be most self-evident, then the philosopher

of Light asks—evident to whom?96 For if an ontology is to be grounded on the

self-evidence of Being, then Being in turn must be grounded on self-evidence

96 Or, with a nod to the Buddhists, evident to what?

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itself. Self evidence is thus most prior, and self-evidence is defined as Light in

both systems.

From this both philosophers draw the identical conclusion that entities

are more real to the extent that they are conscious. For Suhrawardī this means

replacing the continuum of the great chain of Being with a continuum of

Illumination or Self-Consciousness. In opposition to the Peripatetics, God is not

He who has most Being, rather God is He who is most self-aware. Similarly, for

Abhinavagupta no entity which is devoid of the Light of manifestation can

acquire existence at all, and the more each aspect of manifestation understands

itself to be identical with the Light of consciousness, the more real it is. It is the

nature of Light to be conscious: to illuminate itself. Entities are more or less real

to the extent that they are self-luminous, that is, sentient. It is the degree of

consciousness, rather than the degree of existence, that determines how real

something is. Since insentient entities are not self-luminous, they do not

manifest in and of themselves, but only through another can which is self-

luminous. According to Abhinavagupta, it is impossible for anything to arise, that

is, become manifest, apart from the light of consciousness. In order to exist, an

entity must be manifest, and in order to be manifest, it must be illuminated. But

it is the inherent nature of the Light of manifestation to be self-luminous, thus

Light formally precedes existence. The recognition of the illuminative nature of

consciousness precedes discursive reasoning concerning being.

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While insentient entities are themselves brought into manifestation, that

is, they are illuminated, they themselves cannot illuminate others, that is, they

cannot bring other entities into manifestation or appearance. It is only sentience

that can bring other entities into its own field of consciousness. This is an act or

power (śakti) which is at once that of knowing and of bringing into being. Both

of these activities, which are held in all of the philosophies of Being be separate

(where to know and to exist are not the same) are subsumed in both of these

philosophies of Light under the single category of illumination. To be manifest in

the field of consciousness is both to be manifest and to be manifest.97

For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, this means that the ultimate

ground, the supreme Light, was placed beyond both Being and not-Being. In

Suhrawardī’s case this is a recovery of a purer form of Platonism where the

ultimate ground, the One or the Good, had been so understood since the works

of the Master himself. In the case of Abhinavagupta, this move is more original

in terms of the Upaniṣadic tradition, where the question of ontic commitment

was less clear-cut. Nonetheless, both philosophers present this ultimate as

Light. For Suhrawardī it is nūr al-anwār, the Light of Lights, from which all

illumination proceeds. For Abhinavagupta it is anuttara, a transcendent

97 “It would not be wrong to say that the Pratyabhijña conceives the Ultimate Reality

not only as Universal Consciousness but also as Universal Energy” (Pandey 431). Also recall Parmenides: “It is the same thing to think and to be” (Parm 3).

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category (tattva) beyond all categories. In both cases it is the single supreme

Subject, whose self-illumination is the source and cause of all manifestation.

Although the categories, terminology and details of the process differ,

the way in which the universe is produced out of the supreme Light is

fundamentally the same in both systems. It results from emanation, understood

as the interplay between the Supreme Subject and the inherent objectification

that occurs when it regards Itself in the mirror of its own reflexivity. Thus, in the

illuminationist system, the Light of Lights emanates the Proximate Light which,

understanding itself as an object of emanation as such, to that extent loses the

pure subjectivity of the Supreme. In doing so, the Proximate Light in its turn

continues the outpouring of the Light into manifestation through the planetary

intelligences and Platonic forms in which the Light is progressively veiled. In the

same way, in Kashmiri Śaivism the reflexive interplay between pure subjectivity

and reflected objectivity (aham and idam) among the pure śivatattvas at the

level most proximate to the Unmanifest begins the progressive development of

the impure tattvas in which the veils of māyā obscure the Light from Itself in

manifestation.98

98 In keeping with the differing contexts of their respective traditions, both the

categories of manifestation and the details of how they are parsed in the emanating process differ. Thus, for example, in Suhrawardī, the Light of Lights as Supreme Subject is understood to be involved directly in the emanational process. In Abhinavagupta, anuttara stands above it, as it were. I contend that these differences, while significant, are primarily contextual and the essential insight of manifestation as the interplay of subjectivity and objectivity is the same in both systems. This idea is developed throughout succeeding chapters of this study.

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The differences between the two systems are best understood as

reflecting the differing philosophical contexts in which each historically emerged.

This can even be seen in the way that iconographic symbolism appears. In this

regard, this first thing to note is that it appears in both systems in a highly

abstract form. The Śiva that appears in the works of Abhinavagupta is not the

Śiva of the epics or purāṇas. His predominant iconography is that of Light, which

when it reaches the level of anuttara becomes completely abstract. Nor is the

Goddess much fleshed out beyond her pre-eminence as śakti. Similarly, in

Suhrawardī’s philosophical works the identification of the Zoroastrian amesha

spenta with the Platonic forms is essentially mentioned rather than used in any

substantive way.99 Yet insofar as iconography exists at all in their works, it

illustrates the traditional contexts in which each philosopher is working.

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, to reiterate the point yet once again, move from

a philosophy of Being to one of Light. The terms under which this shift is

undertaken will necessarily vary according to the conceptual structure of the

metaphysics that is being amended and reformed: Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq necessarily

differs from Anuttara trika kula because Peripateticism differs from Advaita

Vedānta and Sāṃkhya.100 Working within the inherited philosophical context of

a Peripatetic system that incorporated profoundly Aristotelian elements

resulting in a doctrine of the primacy of existence (asālat al-wujūd), Suhrawardī

99 Essentially Walbridge’s point (Wisdom 13). 100 The point of Chapter 2.

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framed his Science of Lights in terms of Platonic recovery that asserts (or

reasserts) the primacy of essence or quiddity (asālat al-māhiyyah).101 Thus

among the categories which receive the emanation of the Light of Lights are, as

discussed in Chapter 5, the Platonic Forms. As part of Suhrawardī’s project of

recovery, these are even framed in the primordial terms of al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah

as the Zoroastrian amesha spenta.

Abhinavagupta’s (or, finally, the Lord Śiva’s) project of recovery or

restoration takes place in reference to an entirely different problem of Being—

that of the incoherence of both the Sāṃkhya and Advaita Vedānta in positing the

active production of the principles of existence without any reference to the

dynamic activity of consciousness whereby manifestation actually occurs. Thus

the introduction of and emphasis upon the fundamental powers (śakti) of will,

knowledge and action expressed as forms of the primordial Goddess and infusing

the categories of being (tattvas)102 with the effulgent radiance of the Supreme

Subjectivity.103

101 Literally, “whatness” from Ar. māha, “what.” Cf. quidditas from L. quid. The Latins

learned their Aristotle at the feet of the Islamic Peripatetics. 102 Literally, “thatness” from Skt. tat, “that.” 103 There is no Goddess in Suhrawardī. However, it may be worth mentioning that the

emanative relationship that exists in his system between the Light of Lights and the Proximate Light was sometimes understood and expressed in the Platonic tradition in terms of the receptive activity of a Divine Feminine Principle, e.g as World Soul or Logos or Sophia or even the Receptacle (Dillon passim). This is analogous to the relationship of Śiva to the Goddess as Śakti at the level of the śivatattvas.

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The goal and purpose of both systems is identical. Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta both engage in philosophical discourse not for its own sake but in

support of mystical attainment. For Suhrawardī, discursive (baḥth) philosophy is

subordinate to intuitive (ta’alluh104). For Abhinavagupta the purpose of

reasoning (sattarka) is to support and in fact enable liberation (jīvanmuktiḥ).

These considerations all indicate that, with regard to the first element of

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light—the ontological—the answer to the

research question posed in this study is clearly in the affirmative. Both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta understand and affirm Light and Being in terms

that are completely in agreement with the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light

as it is understood in its original Western context, that is, that “Light, then is not

a mere metaphor for the unsayable, but a concept which names intelligible

reality properly and fittingly” (McVoy, “Light” 139).

104 Literally “God-becoming.”

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CHAPTER 4: LIGHT AND COGNITION

The research question of this study is whether or not the systems of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta fall within the extension of the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light, a category hitherto applied to primarily Hellenistic and

Neoplatonic context. The doctrine has three elements: ontology, epistemology,

and cosmogony and it is the task of the central chapters of this study to

investigate the research question for each of these elements. As Chapter 3

discloses, the extension of the ontological doctrine of the metaphysics of Light

from its traditional Western provenance to include not only the Neoplatonist

Suhrawardī but the Kashmiri Śaivite Abhinagupta is entirely justified. This

chapter shows that the same is true of the epistemological aspect of the doctrine

which, as discussed in Chapter 2, is known in the West as the doctrine of divine

illumination. The similarity between Suhrawardī and Abhinvagupta’s systems of

thought in this regard—a viewpoint which was, in Pasnau’s words, “an

assumption shared by most premodern philosophers,” is made by all the more

significant by its contrast with the modern Western view, in which the human

soul is understood to be cognitively self-sufficient.

In fact, an important first step in understanding the epistemologies of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta and their similarity is to view them in perspective

as standing in stark contrast to the theory of knowledge that has become

predominant in the West, beginning in the medieval period. Moreover, since the

Western intellectual tradition, insofar as it traces its lineage back to Platonism,

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was itself once pervaded by the theory of divine illumination, it will be useful to

review how it came to be that the West abandoned that theory.

Modern (and postmodern) cognitive theory in the West retains the

fundamental dualism most often identified with Descartes’s substantial division

of reality into res cogitans and res extensa: the things of the mind and the things

that are extended, that is, the knower and what is known. However, the decisive

step away from the theory of divine illumination was taken much earlier, in the

13th century. The most important name associated with this step is that of St.

Thomas Aquinas. It will be recalled from Chapter 2 that, in what I have called its

paradigmatic form, the theory of divine illumination understood cognition to be

not a dualism but tripartite. In addition to the human knower and the objective

known, there was a third factor, the Light of the active intellect, which caused

cognition to occur by illuminating the objects of cognition for the human

material or potential intellect. This active intellect was understood as, separate,

unitary, transcendent, eternal and an emanation of the Divine. Against this

theory, St. Thomas argued that each human being was created by God with an

individual active intellect of our own, which gave each of us sufficient capacity

for full cognition on our own, without need for any “new illumination added

onto their natural illumination” (ST 1a2ae 109.1c). Many scholars such as Corbin

(History 249) and Azadpur (107) as well as the present author (“Avicenna” 41–

42) have argued that St. Thomas refuted the theory. On consideration, it is

perhaps better to understand him as attempting to clarify it, and that this

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attempt led over time to the unintended consequence that the theory itself was

discarded. My major reason for now taking this view is that in both the Summa

Theologica (ST) and Summa Contra Gentiles (SCG) St. Thomas continues to

enunciate what I have called the illuminationist paradigm. In perfect keeping

with the paradigm, Aquinas refers to how Aristotle in De Anima 3 likens the

active intellect to Light and how it makes things intelligible, just as light makes

things actually visible.105 And, similarly to al-Ghazālī, Aquinas distinguishes

between a primary meaning of the word “light” in which it signifies that which

makes manifest to the sense of sight and an extended meaning in which it means

that which makes manifest to cognition of any kind.106 Therefore St. Thomas

understood cognition itself in terms of the same paradigm of divine illumination

that had informed philosophy over the preceding millennium and more.

Nonetheless, his move to particularize the Light of cognition to the individual led

ultimately to the refutation of the theory in favor of the current Western

doctrine of cognitive self-sufficiency. As Pasnau writes: “By the end of the

thirteenth century the next great Franciscan master, Duns Scotus, had dispensed

with illumination entirely.” By the 14th century, as Pasnau says, “illumination

105 Et quia corporalis visio non completur nisi per lucem, ea quibus intellectualis visio

pericitur, lucis nomen assumunt: unde et Aristoteles, in III de anima, intellectum agentum luci assimilat, ex eo quod intellectus agens facit intelligibilia in actu, sicut lux facit quodammodo visibilia actu (SCG lib 3 cap 53 n 6). 106 Nam primo quidem est institutum ad significandum id quod facit manifestationem in

sensu visus, posmodum autem extensum est ad significandum omne illud quod facit manitestationem secundum quamcumque cognitionem (ST I q 67 a 1 co).

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was no longer a topic of serious investigation.” Divine illumination had become

enlightenment.107

The importance of this for the present study is that it involved replacing a

model of cognition in which there were three elements with one in which there

are only two. As Yazdi frames it, with clear reference to the Qur’anic Light verse:

The human mind is like the niche of a light which due to conjunction with an eternal transcendent fire obtains illumination and reflects in itself whatever is given to it, and depending upon the degree to which it can approximate the fire, it becomes closer to the source of light that is intellectual knowledge. (16)

Thus, in contradistinction to the prevalent Western view, in which cognition

involves only a knower and the known, the illuminationist view, including the

systems of both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta,108 then understood cognition to

necessarily involved three coequal elements: the knower, the known, and means

of knowledge, this last understood as the Divine Light of illumination. Plato

himself says as much in, once more, Republic VI:

Have you considered how lavish the maker of our senses was in making the power to see and be seen?

I can’t say I have. Well, consider it this way. Do hearing and sound need another kind

of thing in order for the former to hear and the latter to be heard, a third thing in whose absence the one won’t hear and the other be heard?

107 The divergence of doctrine concerning the active intellect between the Latin and

Islamic traditions eventually becomes absolute. With Suhrawardī, the illumination of the active intellect becomes identical with the Light of Consciousness. For some 20th century Thomists, the individual active intellect is not sentient at all. Thus Ives Simon can write: “This active power by which the mind gives birth to the ideas is indeed a blind source of light. It works to produce intelligible forms without perceiving them itself; it is intellect improperly so called that causes thought by causing the idea in the intellect properly so called” (119). 108 And now in much of Islam as well as scattered enclaves of Śaivite learning.

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No, they need nothing else… You don’t realize that sight and the visible have such a need? How so? Sight may be present in the eyes, and the one who has it may try use

it, and colors may be present in things, but unless a third kind of thing is present, which is naturally adapted for this very purpose, you know that sight will see nothing, and the colors will remain unseen.

What kind of thing do you mean? I mean what you call light. (507c–507e)

Again, the “cause and controller” of this “third kind of thing,” that is, light, is the

sun, which is the “analogue” of the Good, which is “in the intelligible realm, in

relation to understanding and intelligible things, [what] the sun is in the visible

realm, in relation to sight in visible things” (508a). And so for all Platonists,

including Suhrawardī, there are three elements to cognition: ourselves as

subjective knowers, the objects of our knowledge, and the Light of

Consciousness that is our means of knowing that God is present in each one of

our cognitions as its enabling means.109

Abhinvagupta’s epistemology also had to deal with a dualism, but

historically it came before him rather than after and so, as we have already seen,

he could critique it. This was the predominant Sāṃkhya theory of cognition,

which divided the process of knowledge into the passive witnessing of the

passive subject or puruṣa and nature, which constituted the objects of it

109 It is, finally, for this reason that Azadpur writes: “As a result, modern naturalist

philosophy constructs rational knowledge based on the apparent effects of causal regularities and purports to give accounts of reason’s foundations in such brute patterns. On the other side, modern reason is confronted with spiritual irrationality; blind faith in dogma and superstition.…Between these two powerful currents, modern reason flounders precariously with vague hopes of rescue and dreams of autonomy” [emphasis added] (111–12).

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knowledge, prakṛti. It is important to recognize that these two dualisms, the

Cartesian and the Sāṃkhya, are radically different in the way that they parse

reality. As Whicher writes:

The Sāṃkhyan dualism…is quite distinct from the Cartesian dualism that bifurcates reality into mental and material aspects. Sāṃkhya’s dualistic perspective—comprised of pure consciousness (puruṣa) and prakṛti as everything else including the mental and the material—asserts that the psyche and the external world are not ultimately different. Both are forms of insentient or nonconscious prakṛti—termed the “seeable” (dṛśya) in Yoga. (90–91)

Yet the Kashmiri Śaivite response was the same as Platonism: to

recognize the Light as the means of cognition in addition to the knower and the

known. As Dyczkowski writes:

The one universal consciousness, therefore, has three aspects: it is the illuminator (prakāśaka), the illuminated universe (prakāśya) and the light of knowledge (prakāśa) which illumines it. The universe, Light and Self are one. Subject, object and means of knowledge necessarily attend each act of perception and make cognitive awareness (pramā) possible. Manifested by the creative power (sṛṣṭiśakti) of the Great Light, they are always present together whenever anything is perceived objectively, and so embrace, as it were, the entire universe in their nature. (Doctrine 63)

Moreover, in this threefold the means of knowledge is identified using exactly

the same symbol as in Plato: the sun.

For the Śaivite tradition, this congealing or freezing of the light of consciousness gives rise to the triadic nature of everyday awareness. This awareness is symbolized by the triad of fire, sun and moon. Here the knower (pramātŗ) is designated as the “fire” (agni, vahni); the process of knowing (pramāṇa) is designated as the sun (sūrya, arka); and that which is known (prameya), that is to say, the objective world that is perceived by the mind and senses, is designated as the “moon” (soma). (Muller-Ortega, “Luminous” 64)

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Beyond this purely symbolic similarity, this chapter shows a remarkable similarity

in what might be termed the transcendental arguments that both philosophers

employ for the ultimate Principle of Light as both the source of reality and the

means for Its own self-knowing.

Light and Cognition in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq

The underlying purpose of Suhrawardī’s epistemology is the same as in

his ontology: to reframe the Peripatetic system he inherited—in this case the

doctrine of divine illumination expressed in terms of the active intellect—in such

a way as to re-center it on the primacy of Light, that is, consciousness, over

being. In doing so he enunciated two of the most fundamental philosophical

components of his ishrāqi system: knowledge by presence (al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī), and

the illuminative relation (al-iḍāfa al-ishrāqiyya). In a sense these serve to unite

being and becoming, knowledge and existence into a continuum through

emanation. As Ziai writes:

In the illuminationist cosmology, what is “emanated” or simply obtained, the Source of Light designated the Light of Lights (Nūr al-Anwār), is not separate from it, but is continuous with it….The Light of Lights and what emanates from it forms a continuum, and thus, unlike Peripatetic cosmology, non-corporeal, separate entities are not discrete. (Knowledge 153n7)

Since the continuum of incorporeal Lights is, by definition, one of self-

manifestation, that is, consciousness, in effect the great chain of being becomes

a chain of self-awareness.

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Thus Suhrawardī restates the illuminationist paradigm: just as the eye (al-

baṣar, or the seeing subject, al-bāṣir), sees an object (al-mubṣar) when the

object itself is illuminated (mustanīr) by the sun in the sky, so in the hierarchy of

Lights, every abstract (sentient) Light sees the Lights that are above it in the rank

of awareness when the higher Lights instantaneously, at the moment of vision,

illuminates it. In this continuum, it is of course the Light of Lights (Nūr al-anwār)

that in a final sense illuminates everything. It is the Heavenly Sun, the “Great

Hūrakhsh,” that enables all vision to take place (ḤI 159).110 This mutual activity

of vision and illumination is the illuminative relation (al-iḍāfa al-ishrāqiyya) and

the impetus underlying the operation of this principle is self-consciousness. Thus

every sentient entity’s self-knowledge induces a desire (shawq) to know the

being just above it in perfection, and this act of seeing triggers the process of

illumination.

By means of this process of illumination, Light is propagated from its

highest origin to the lowest elements. This process is an inherent aspect of the

illuminative relationship as it exists throughout the continuum of Lights from the

Light of Lights to the darkest substance, wherein the love of each lower Light for

itself is dominated by its love for the Lights above it (ḤI 148). All entities are

inherently possessed by passionate yearning, finally, for the Light of Lights or

God.

110 Identified by Suhrawardī with Shahrīr, who is the Zoroastrian Angel Xshathra Vairya

or “Good Dominion.”

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For the human soul, the most significant Light in this cosmology is the

Light called Isfahbad al-Nāsūt. This Light, which is referred to as the “managing

Light” (al-nūr al-mudabbir), is the Light that controls the sentient activity of

individual animal bodies and the faculties of their souls (ḤI 145–49).

This light, which in its activity resembles the Active Intellect of the Peripatetic cosmology, is so identified by Suhrawardī himself who refers to it as the Holy Spirit dator scientiæ (wāhib al-‘ilm) and dator spiritus (ravān bakhsh). This “light” is further equated with the dator formarum (wāhib al-‘ilm), and is the link between the human and the cosmic realms (i.e.between the corporeal and the non-corporeal). This light Isfahbad al-Nāsūt, is said to point to its self by its own self-consciousness. Thus the link between the cosmic and the human is the principle of self-consciousness and self-knowledge. The light Isfahbad al-Nāsūt is symbolized by multiple lights emanating from one source; these lights are called the Isfahbadiyya lights. The multiple lights act accordance to their “archetype” (arbāb al-ṣanam) at all levels, and since human self-consciousness itself is an “abstract light,” there is no discontinuity between the cosmic and the human realm; rather, they form a continuous whole. This theory is in marked contrast to the Peripatetic view of the Active Intellect, which is “one” and acts not in continuous multiple manifestations (as with the Isfahbbadiayya lights in relation to their “source”) but as the one ultimate perfection of the intellect. (Ziai, Knowledge 153)111

In the Peripatetic understanding of the doctrine of divine illumination,

the unitary active intellect illuminated the forms that the human material or

potential intellect had received through the senses and thus brought about

cognition. The problem for Suhrawardī was that in this version of the

111 This means that, insofar as the human managing lights are functionally equivalent to

the active intellect, Suharawardī is like St. Thomas (and unlike the Peripatetics) in holding that each human soul has its own illuminative source for knowledge. Suhrawardī uses the identical argument against the possibility of a single managing light as does St. Thomas in arguing against the single active intellect: “Thus, the human managing lights are not one, since otherwise that which was known to one would be known to all, which is not the case” (ḤI 211).

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illuminative process, the status of the human intellect as itself being an

immaterial Light was overlooked in favor of an abstractive (rather than

illuminative) process in which general and particular essentials (al-dhātī al-‘amm

wa’l-khāṣṣ) were illuminated and were considered to be most self-evident to the

human intellect as the essence of substantial being. As Ziai explains:

Illuminationist knowledge (in contrast to Peripatetic knowledge, which takes the form of conception, then later, assent) is non-predicative. It is based on the relation—obtained without a temporal extension—between the “present” object and the knowing subject, and it is held by Suhrawardī to be the most valid way to knowledge. This epistemological position is also the basis of Suhrawardī’s critique of the Peripatetic theory of definition. To repeat, it is a kind of knowledge by means of which the essences of things (i.e. things as they are) may be “obtained.” This kind of illuminationist knowledge is validated by the experience of the “presence” (ḥuḍūr) of the object, i.e. it does not require a conception and then (later in time) an assent, it is non-predicative, and it does not involve a temporal process. It is immediate; it occurs in a durationless instant (ān). (Knowledge 141)

Just as the self-evidence of Light underlies Suhrawardī’s critique of the

Peripatetic ontology of Being, so it also is fundamental to his critique of their

epistemology based upon essential definition. For the Peripatetics, to know

something was to know what it was, to know its quiddity or mahiyyah. The

essences or forms were what were illuminated by the active intellect, the Divine

means whereby the human soul was brought into a state of cognition. To know

a thing was to be able to define it in terms of its essence.

Suhrawardī argues that in order for a definition to be meaningful, that by

which it is defined must be more apparent (aẓhar) than the thing defined and it

must be known prior to it. In order for a thing to be known, by definition or

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otherwise, it cannot be known by something that is more obscure that it is, or

even by something that is known as well as it is. It can only be known by

something that is more apparent or evident than it is (HĪ 13).112 When the

Peripatetics define something in relation to its essentials, which they have

abstracted from it, they are saying that the essentials are more known than the

thing they wish to define; while Suhrawardī holds that, at the outset, the

essentials of a thing are as unknown as the thing itself.

Assume, he argues, that a thing has a specific essence. Now, this essence

is either known along with the thing or by means of something else besides the

thing or not at all. The third possibility is of no concern. But if the essence is

known by means of something else besides the perceived nature of the thing

itself, then those means cannot be essential to it. The essence must be known

with the thing, when it is perceived, so that when the thing is perceived, its

essence is known as part of the perception. But then it cannot be known prior to

the thing, because it is known along with it. So the essence cannot be a source

of definition, nor can it be the source of knowledge, since things must be known

and defined in terms of other things that are already known (ḤI 15).

Ultimately, there must be something that is most apparent and most

prior in respect to knowledge in relation to which everything else known. For

والتعرتف البده وان تكون باظهر من الشى ال بمثله او بما تكون اخفى منه او تكون ال تعرف الشى إاله بما 112

ف به ُعره

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Suhrawardī this most prior known thing (which is also necessarily the most

apparent) is, of course, Light (nūr).

From the basic condition required of the thing by means of which a definition is constructed, namely priority and intelligibility (the two most significant conditions according to Aristotle as well), we are lead to what is most prior and most intelligible. This “thing” turns out to be “light,” which is the fundamental basis of reality in illuminationist philosophy, and the very stuff of human self-consciousness. And light is its own definition; to “see” it is to know it. (Ziai, Knowledge 124)

For Suhrawardī, at the core of our philosophical understanding of this

illuminative reality is the doctrine of knowledge by presence (al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī).

He begins by asking, “How do we know ourselves?” In asking this he is really

inquiring whether or not we know ourselves in the same way that we know

other things. We have thoughts about things, and these thoughts are true just

to the extent that our thoughts correspond to the things. As the Latins were

fond of framing it, veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. But is this how we

know ourselves?

We cannot know ourselves in this way, Suhrawardī argues:

The self-subsistent, self-conscious thing does not apprehend its essence by an image of its essence in its essence. If its knowledge is by an image and if the image of its ego is not the ego itself, the image of the ego would be an “it” in relation to the ego. In that case, that which was apprehended would be the image. Thus, it follows that while the apprehension of its ego its precisely its apprehension of what it is itself,

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its apprehension of its essence would also be the apprehension of something else—which is absurd. (ḤI 115)113

What he means by this is that, in the case of self-knowledge, it is

impossible to convert “I-ness” into “it-ness.” I do not represent myself to myself,

I am immediately present to myself. Thus, knowledge by presence (al-‘ilm al-

ḥuḍūrī) is to be distinguished from knowledge by representation (al-‘ilm al-

rasmī), which is how we know the objects of our cognition. Suhrawardī is saying

that if my knowledge of myself were by means of a representation instead of the

presence of the reality of myself to myself, then my knowledge of myself would

be my knowledge of exactly what is not myself. As Yazdi explains:

If my acquaintance with myself were by a representation instead of the presence of my reality to myself, then my acquaintance with myself would be exactly my acquaintance with what is not myself, that is, with a representation, even though it be a representation of myself. This absurdity proceeds from the “epistemic” feature of the problem that can be clearly understood from Suhrawardī’s words “the apprehension of the reality of ‘I-ness’ would be, therefore, exactly the apprehension of what is not ‘I-ness’, namely ‘it-ness.’” (81)114

One can, of course, objectify oneself through reflection by saying, for

example: “‘it’ is ‘I’ who know myself,” but this is a construct that obscures the

م بذاته اللمدرك لذاته ال تعلم ذاته بمشال لذاته فى ذاته فانه علمه ان كان بمثال ٯ 113 هو انه الشى القاى

ل ية مثا ذ المثال ٯه المدرك ٯه اليها بالنسنة هى ليس االناى ية ادراك اال تكون ان فيلزم حينى هو باى

خيات الخار ف بخال محل هو و ها غير اك ادر بعيبه ذاتها اك ادر تكون واب هو هو ما اك ادر بعيبههو كال ذلك له وما المثال فانه

114 As discussed in Chapter 2 in the context of Hacker’s essay, this distinction is

anticipated in Plotinus where, in response to the dilemma of self-knowledge posed by Sextus Empiricus, Plotinus distinguishes between the discursive or dianoetic (διάνοια) and the noetic (νοια). Noetic knowledge corresponds to knowledge by presence for, as Ian Crystal writes: “The noetic intellect cannot intelligise without intelligising itslf. The content of its thought is itself” (270).

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actual nature of self-knowledge. Suhrawardī argues that if our apprehension of

ourselves were by a representation and that representation did not know that it

was representing, then it would not know itself. If it did know that it was a

representation of itself, it would already know itself separately from the

representation (ḤI 115). We are never unconscious of our essence of our

apprehension of our essence. Since this apprehension cannot be by a

representation or anything added to it, we need nothing to apprehend our

essence but that essence, which is self-evident (ḤI 116).115 Neither our own

internal states nor external objects and their attributes belong to any part of us

which apprehends, since otherwise we would know these as we know ourselves,

that is, as being in a state of self-awareness or “I-ness” (anā’īya). As Walbridge

summarizes:

In Illuminationist terms, self-consciousness is to be understood as a thing’s being manifest to itself. Now a body cannot be self-conscious because it is not manifest in its essence. Nor, obviously, can even a luminous accident know itself since it is not a light to itself. In other words, self-consciousness cannot be identified with the image of the self known to be an image of the self through some prior direct knowledge of the self. Suhrawardī distinguishes between this sort of discursive knowledge of the self, in which the self is known as one thing in the world among many, and direct awareness of one’s own existence and experience. The latter cannot be explained without some direct self-awareness, unmediated by any concept or material or spiritual organ. (Science 53)

وابت ال تغين عن ذاتك و عن ادر اكل لها واذ لتس تمكن االدر اك بصورة او زاُىد فال تحتاج فى ادر 115

بة الغتر لبفسها او الظاهرة ذاتك غتر الى لذاتك اكك بفسها عب الغاى

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This means that in self-knowledge the reality of awareness and that of

which the self is aware are existentially one and the same. As Yazdi writes:

In this prime example of presence-knowledge, the meaning of knowledge becomes absolutely equivalent with the meaning of the very ‘being’ of the self, such that within the territory of ‘I-ness,’ to know is to exist and to exist is to know. This is the meaning of the self-objectivity of knowledge by presence. (81)

Knowledge by presence unifies the continuum of Light that makes up reality

through the illuminative relation (al-iḍā fat al-ishrāyyah) “which can be regarded

as the basic term for the illuminative approaches to the problems of ontology,

cosmology, and human knowledge” (51).

Unlike the Aristotelian category of relation (and its descendents) the

illuminative relation does not bring individual discrete entities into a particular

correlation. Rather, it refers to the status of illuminative beings within the

continuum of reality. Like the reality of existence itself, the illuminative relation

varies in degrees of intensity depending upon proximity to the source of

illumination, finally to the Light of Lights Itself. The connection with knowledge

by presence lies in the fact that presential knowledge varies directly with the

purity and intensity of the Light of self-awareness: the closer any entity is in

proximity to the Light of Lights, the more there is that is directly present to it. To

the Light of Lights, that is, God, all things are present. To us humans, much less

is.116

116 “Cognitum est in congnoscente per modum cognoscentis” (ST 1 q 12 art 4).

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However, as immaterial Lights we are at least present to ourselves, and

any phenomenal event which we attribute to ourselves, such as our perceptions

of both external objects and our own internal states, must be, and is,

presupposed by our underlying awareness of self.

We can therefore understand from all this that knowledge by presence has creative priority over knowledge by correspondence. In fact, knowledge by correspondence always emerges from its rich and ever present source, which is knowledge by presence, and which is none other than the very being of the active and performative ‘I’.…A knowing ‘I’ is known to itself by presence and acts like an active intellect to provide in itself the form of its external object so that it can know it by correspondence. (Yazdi 54)

Our sense perceptions and internal states can never perceive themselves.

In terms of the illuminative relationship they stand in the mode of receptivity to

the illumination of our self-awareness. Suhrawardī argues that the non-sentient

is finally caused by Light because, as non-sentient, it is the opposite of being

manifest, and what is further from reality cannot bring what is closer to reality

into existence. The non-sentient can have neither an independent existence nor

can it be receive existence from anything of its own degree of manifestation or

from something that is less manifest (ḤI 110–11). So, to summarize Suhrawardī’s

transcendental argument for knowledge by presence, the self knows itself in an

immediate presential awareness that necessarily lacks the subject-object

dichotomy and representational character inherent to the normal operations of

the means of cognition.

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Suhrawradī’s doctrine of knowledge by presence allows in turn a

reconceptualization of the cognitive theory of divine illumination: Through the

extension of the illuminative relation throughout the continuum extending from

the Light of Lights to the depths of the unilluminated darkness of the insentient,

human cognition partakes of the illumination emanating throughout that

continuum, ultimately from the Light of Lights itself. Moreover, the continuum

of illumination is what in contemporary terms one would call self-similar, and

the ancients would describe in Hermetic terms as “as above, so below” (Shah

198).117 As Yazdi explains:

In view of the cosmological system under discussion, the issue that now comes to the fore is that the relation of the First Principle to the world, as His emanation, is very much analogous to the emanative relation of the self to its private states. Insofar as knowledge by presence is concerned, God’s knowledge of the universe as his emanative act belongs to the same kind of knowledge as that by which the self knows its sensations or imagination….The overall conclusion is that the One’s knowledge of His illuminative act of being is by His presence in that being in the sense of presence by emanation. Presence by emanation is in turn the immanent effectiveness and supremacy of one being over another, in exactly the same manner as is seen with the immanent supremacy of the self over its imagination and private states. (130)

The existential relation between an emanation and the source from

which it is emanated is nothing but the illuminative relation. This relationship, as

both illuminative and existential, relates Suhrawardī’s epistemology directly back

to his ontology. In Chapter 3 it is shown that for Suhrawardī, reality consists of

117 The Hermetic element in Suhrawardī’s awaits investigation. It is an intriguing and

important area, especially given his own reference to Hermes as “the father of philosophers” (ḤI 5).

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the self manifestation of the Light of consciousness. Now, with the doctrines of

knowledge by presence and the illuminative relation, Suhrawardī shows how the

ontology of Light manifests reality in terms of knowledge by presence and the

illuminative relationship. The illuminative relationship in turn is understood in

terms of emanation and it is the doctrine of emanation that provides the

philosophical ground for understanding the possibility of the individual human

soul’s return to the Light of Lights in the process of fanā or unitary mystical

absorption or annihilation. So knowledge by presence and the illuminative

relation lie as the heart of Suhrawardī’s entire metaphysics of Light in all of its

elements.

As Yazdi points out, the elucidation of the ishrāqi system turns on its

ability to meet the question of how it is that a continuum of Light which is

understood to be unitary can be understood in any relational terms whatsoever,

even in those of the illuminative relation:

The answer to this question must be as extremely ingenious as critical, for it is the nucleus of the truth of mysticism. The subtlety of the answer lies in the uniqueness of the emanative existence of the self as “I-ness.” The crux of the matter lies in the following argument: an emanative entity is neither separate from not absolutely identical with the essence of its principle. Let us take a mental entity such as an idea of a sense-perception as a case of something analogous to an emanative entity. It can never be said that the idea or sense perception accounts for a certain mental entity distinct from the mind. Our ideas cannot be supposed to have a reality independent of us. An idea without a mind would mean a mental idea without any mentality at all. It would also be false to suppose that our ideas are united with our minds in essence or with the whole factual reality of our minds. (153–54)

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Our internal mental states are present to us. Without us they would not exist.

They partake of our self-manifestation, but in a completely dependent way.

Now, as has been seen, there is nothing that is not present to the Light of Lights

in the manner in which our thoughts are present to our minds. In particular, this

is the manner in which our individual selves are present to the Light of Lights, the

Divine Consciousness of God. But, unlike our own particular thoughts, we

ourselves are Lights, having self-awareness. This means that God can also be

present to us, although not in the same sense that we are present to God. As

Yazdi writes:

Setting up these two presences, we can legitimately say that the self, as a substitute instance of emanation, enjoys knowledge of God by the presence of absorption. We can, for the same reason, say that the self is known by God through knowledge by presence in the sense of illumination. Because of the identity of these two senses of presence in reality, they are also identical in their proportionate degree of presence. That is to say, to the same degree that God has presence by illumination in the reality of the self, the self also, to the same degree, enjoys its presence in God in the sense of absorption. Thus, in that particular stage of being, God and the self are identical. (146)

In examining the classic doctrinal statement of the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light in Chapter 1 of this study, it was apparent that the

epistemological element of the doctrine was deeply involved with the

ontological. As McVoy wrote concerning what is identified in Chapter 2 and in

this chapter as the doctrine of divine illumination, it “cannot be understood as a

mere theory of knowledge, but only as the epistemological expression of a

metaphysical view of being and activity, participation and order—in short of the

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metaphysics of light” (“Light” 139). In this chapter it is shown how the ishrāqi

epistemological doctrine of knowledge by presence depends upon the ontic

commitment to Light as that which is most self-evident, identified as the

foundation of Suhrawardī’s theory of Light and Being in Chapter 3. The doctrine

of knowledge by presence in turn is what allows for the continuum of the Lights

to be connected in the existential identity of the illuminative relationship. In

Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq the characteristic deep interaction of the

ontological and cognitive aspects of the doctrine of the Light metaphysics of

Light is evident.

The two central elements of Suhrawardī’s epistemology are the

illuminative relationship and knowledge by presence. In discussing this with

regard to al-Fārābī and Avicenna, Mehdi Yazdi writes that “it has therefore been

understood that both of these medieval Muslim philosophers had gained some

sense of knowledge by presence, although neither of them ever managed to

present a thorough analysis of this fundamental concept” (17). As Dag Nikolaus

Hasse has pointed out, with reference to Avicenna’s suspended or flying man

gedankenexperiment, in which Avicenna imagined a man suspended in air in

such a way that he was deprived of all sensation, there is a fundamental problem

of interpretation with regard to Avicenna and self-consciousness:

Much depends upon the meaning of the words ḏat and annīya. In the case of ḏat, the crucial question is whether to translate it as “self” or “essence”; both meanings are possible. Annīya is even harder to understand. The term has been discussed by many scholars over the last two centuries. There is dispute on whether annīya means “being” or

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“essence” or “that-ness” or “I-ness” and whether it has any connotations like “individual” or “essential.” (82–83)

The question is important because depending upon which meaning is

affirmed, the suspended man is either taken to have “immediate access” to

himself (Druart, “Soul” 34), to be “conscious of his existence” (Davidson 83) or,

taking it in the other sense, to be merely affirming his soul as being independent

of his body (Hasse 86). Because of these issues of interpretation, it has not been

clear to what degree conscious self-awareness and knowledge by presence

appear as elements in Avicenna’s philosophy. However, in Chapter 3 I note how

the ontological tensions between Avicenna and Suhrawardī were creatively

resolved in the synthesis of Light with being in philolosophy of Mullā Sadrā.

Although it is beyond the scope of this study to examine this issue in any detail,

the ontological synthesis implies an epistemological one as well in which the

identity of Light and TBeing is used to posit self-conscious being as the highest

and most primary sense of being. In Mullā Sadrā’s school, as Nasr writes,

The views of both the Peripatetics and the Illuminationists are incorporated by him along with the Sufi doctrine of the “knowledge of the heart,” into a vast methodology of knowledge in which all the diverse faculties of knowledge are to be found in a hierarchy leading from the sensual to the spiritual. Each act of knowledge, according to Mullā Ṣadrā, involves the being of the knower, and the hierarchy of the faculties of knowledge correspond to the hierarchy of existence. (Islamic 100)

Light and Cognition in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

The underlying theory of cognition in Kashmir Śavisim is expressed in

terms of a triad of luminaries, the Fire, Sun and Moon. Just as in Platonic divine

illumination, the means of knowledge is identified with the Sun, illuminating

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objects for vision. The object, like the Moon, itself shines with the Sun’s

reflected light. The word that is used in this case for moon, soma, also has the

connotation of the elixir of immortality, which in the Vedas is described as being

consumed by Agni, fire (ṚV 1.93), in the same way that the knowing subject

“consumes” the object of knowledge, giving forth light in the process (TĀ 3.120–

21).118 Thus, in the triadic epistemology of Kashmir Śavisim the subject, object,

and means of knowledge are all represented in terms of physical light: the fire

represents the receiver of illumination (prakāśaka), the moon the illuminated

universe (prakāśya), and the sun the Light of consciousness (prakāśa) which

illumines it.119 In terms of the symbolism, in which physical light stands as a

lower mode of the true Light of Consciousness, this implies that subject, object

and means of knowledge are all forms of Consciousness.

This is precisely what is intended. The entire thrust of Kashmir Śaivite

epistemology is to provide a philosophical explanation of how it is that the

Absolute Light of Consciousness can appear before Itself as real objects of

cognition manifesting to equally real individual subjectivities. While the

118

प्रक िम त्रां सवु्यक्तां सयुा इत्यचु्यते स्फुटम ्।

प्रक श्यवस्तुस र ांिवचषा तत्सोम उच्यते ॥

सयुा प्रम णचमत्य हुाः सोमां मेयां प्रिक्षतो ।

अन्योन्यमचवयकु्तौ तौ स्वतन्त्र वप्यिुौ चस्थतौ ॥

िोकृ्तिोग्योियत्मतैदन्योन्योन्मखुत ां गतम ्।

योऽयां वहे्ाः परां तत्त्वां प्रम तरुरदमेव तत् ॥

119 In the richly multivalent symbolism of Kashmir Śavisim, this triad is congruent with

the three goddesses discussed in Chapter 3: parā, aparā, and parāpara and thence, transitively, to a broad range of other associations.

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effulgence of the first principle may appear as being either solar or lunar or fiery,

it remains the transcendent pure Light described, says Abhinavagupta, as the

Śivabindu, the singularity where all determinations assume infinite value (TĀ

3.133).120 This innate splendor that neither sun, nor moon, nor fire can

illuminate, but without which the light of the sun, moon, or fire would not exist,

is the supreme Consciousness (saṃvid) (TĀ 3.115b–116).121 As Padoux writes:

So the bindu [of pure Consciousness] brings together in its undifferentiated oneness all the triads that sūrya, soma and agni (equivalent to knower, knowledge, and known—pramātṛ, pramāṇa, and prameya) stand for, gathered in the supreme knower, totally autonomous and one, even though it holds within itself the entire universe. (275)

This Consciousness remains self existent and utterly self-dependent, even

while identifying itself, as a result [of that very] freedom, with the known (TĀ

3.122b–123a).122 Everything that is involved in cognition—the various subjects,

means and objects of knowledge (pramātṛvarga)—all of this is Consciousness

120

अत्र प्रक िम त्रां यचत्स्थते ध मत्रय ेसचत ।

उक्तां चवन्दतुय ि से्त्र चिवचवन्दरुसौ मताः ॥

121 यन्न सयूो न व सोमो न चग्नि ासतेऽचप ि ॥

न ि का सो मवह्ीन ां तत्प्रक ि िन महाः ।

चकमप्यचस्त चनजां चकां तु सांचवचदत्थां प्ररक िते ॥

122 सांचवदवे त ुचवजे्ञयत द त्भय दनपेचक्षणी ॥

स्वतन्त्रत्व त्प्रम तोक्त चवचित्रो जे्ञयिेदताः ।

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alone. The Supreme Goddess (parāparameśvarī) in Her absolute freedom as this

Consciousness assumes these various forms (TĀ 4.171–72).123

This evidently follows from what is shown in Chapter 2: that, for Kashmiri

Śaivism, it is not only the case that prakāśa is the source of all things, it actually

is all things. This luminosity (bhana) is reflective, identified with a “self-showing”

that is essentially seen as an emanation. What is most self-evident is the fact of

self-evidence. Appearance is only made possible by the Light of Consciousness.

Moreover, this appearance (avabhāsana) is itself this Light which bestows on all

things their evident, manifest nature. Although this manifest nature is manifold

and although the Light of Consciousness shines on all things as all things at all

times, making them manifest in their diversity manifest, It does not suffer any

division of its own essential unity. In terms of epistemology, this means that all

objects of knowledge are identical with the subjectivity that knows them in the

act of knowledge.

The logic of the Kashmir Śaivite position is to first argue that any other

explanation of the phenomenon of knowledge is impossible, because it will

encounter the insurmountable difficulty of bridging the gulf that otherwise

divides the knower from the known. As Utpaladeva explains in the

Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (ĪPK), the external manifestation of objects or entities

123

प्रम तवृगो म नौघाः प्रम श्च बहुध चस्थत ाः ।

मेयौघ इचत यत्सवामत्र चिन्स त्रमेव तत ्॥

इयतीं रूपवैचित्रम श्रयन्त्य ाः स्वसांचवदाः ।

स्व च्छन्द्यमनपेक्षां यत्स पर परमेश्वरी ॥

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that appear in the perceptual field actually becomes possible just because they

are already present in that field. In order for an object to be, it must be

manifest, and in order for it to be manifest, it must be illuminated by

Consciousness, for otherwise how could it be manifest at all? The object cannot

be different from Consciousness, because manifestation of objects by the Light

of Consciousness becomes possible only when prakāśa pervades them, assumes

their forms and shines. To assume that there are objects that are actually

separate from prakāśa would imply that in cognition two fundamentally

different types of entity, the sentience of consciousness and the insentience of

the object, would have to appear as somehow intermingled (saṃkara) in the

same simple act of cognition (ĪPK 1.5.1–3).124 As Dyczkowski explains:

This all-embracing inwardness is only possible if there is an essential identity between the universe and consciousness. The events which constitute the universe are always internal events happening within consciousness because their essential nature is consciousness itself. We can only account for the fact that things appear if there is an essential identity between consciousness and the object perceived. If a physical object were really totally material, that is part of reality independent of, and external to, consciousness, it could never be experienced. (Doctrine 47)

In a way similar to the one whereby Suhrawardī argues that self-

awareness must be by knowledge by presence rather than knowledge by

124

वताम न वि स न ां ि व न मवि सनम ्।

अन्ताः चस्थतवत मेव घटते बचहर त्मन ॥

प्र चगव योऽप्रक िाः स्य त्प्रक ि त्मतय चवन ।

न ि प्रक िो चिन्नाः स्य द त्म थास्यय प्रक ित ॥

चिन्न ेप्रक िे ि चिन्न ेसांकरो चवषयस्य तत ्।

प्रक ि त्म प्रक श्योऽथो न प्रक िश्च चसद्धयचत ॥

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representation, Utpaladeva argues that prakāśa cannot be a vikalpa or thought

form. He notes that while the thought-forms of two mutually contradictory

phenomena, for example a pitcher and non-pitcher, can both arise in the mind of

a knowing subject, this is not possible is the case of prakāśa, since non-prakāśa

would be, by definition, the very absence of sentience and so could not appear

at all (ĪPK 1.6.2).125 It is only the sentience of the knowing subject that is able,

having a glimpse of both “that” and “non-that,” to conclude in favor of “that”

and announce the object to be, for example, a water pot. It is this activity that

constitutes the formation of thought forms (vikalpa) (ĪPK 1.6.3).126 As B. N.

Pandit writes in his commentary on this verse:

However, since prakāśa does not have non-prakāśa as its counterpart, it cannot become an object of ideation itself. It shines independently, only as prakāśa, without even a faint glimpse of non-prakāśa, because non-prakāśa (non-light) could not shine and thus could never become manifest. Prakāśa alone might be able to assume the form of some so-called “non-prakāśa” and shine itself as that. (74)

Abhinavagupta follows up on this line of argumentation in the

Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī, offering refutations of the Saṃkhya, the

Mīmāṃsaka and the Naiyāyika theories of knowledge.127 When, Abhinavagupta

125

चिन्नयोरवि सो चह स्य दघट घटयोिायोाः ।

प्रक िस्येव न न्यस्य िेचदनस्त्ववि सनम ॥

126 तदतत्प्रचति ि ज म त्रैव तियपोहन त ्।

तचन्नश्चयनमकु्तो चह चवकल्पो घट इत्ययम ्॥

127 He also mounts attacks against the three major schools of Buddhist philosophy: the

Vijñānavāda, Bāhyārthānumeyavāda, and Bāthyārthavāda. However, due to limitations of space, this study will limit itself to consideration of Abhinavagupta’s relationship to the Upaniṣads and classical Darśanas only.

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says, we in the normal course of our affairs say, “I know this,” what such a

statement really means is “the object is manifest to me” (arthaḥ mama

avabhāsate). The Kashmir Śaivite position is that in this judgment there are the

three elements—the object, myself and being manifest—and that these are all

prakāśa. In one way or another the other systems which Abhinavagupta

criticizes deny this. By refuting their claims he establishes indirect support for

his own position.

First, according to the Sāṃkhya, the intellect or buddhi is made up of the

three qualities of sattva, rajas and tamas. Because in it sattva predominates,

buddhi possesses the natural capacity to receive reflection (nairmalya). In the

condition of bondage (normal human perception), this capacity is shrouded by

tamas, an effect that is, however, partially mitigated by rajas. But from this it

follows that buddhi is insentient because the three qualities of which it is made

up are all insentient. Still, being able to at least partly receive reflection, it does

so from the self-luminous light within, the puruṣa. Thus in the Sāṃkhya view a

person is said to be knowing when the light of puruṣa, falling upon the buddhi,

comes into contact with the reflection of an external object that also falls upon

it. The problem here, says Abhinavagupta, is that subject and object are of

fundamentally opposite nature. The former is self-luminous, the latter devoid of

all Light. The one is changeless, the other changing. But if a self-luminous

changeless puruṣa is supposed to be the illuminator of objects which are

themselves devoid of all Light is it difficult to understand why things are

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perceived in changing succession and why a jar shines (prakāśat) in a manner

distinct from a piece of cloth. Since the source of shining is undifferentiated, how

can it shine in diverse ways? Moreover, the Sāṃkhya cannot satisfactorily

answer the question that naturally arises as to whether buddhi, in consequence

of the reflection of the light of puruṣa, itself becomes Light or not. If it does not,

then it can no more illuminate the object than a mirror can be used to illuminate

a physical object without shining reflected light upon it: if buddhi is a mirror,

then in order to make objects shine, it has to have light, even if it is only

reflected light. So if it doesn’t become light, the object of knowledge will simply

not be illuminated (nārtha prakāśatā). But if on the other hand, buddhi does

become Light, then the postulate of an illuminating puruṣa becomes pointless

(ĪPv 1.71–77).

Secondly, the theory of the Mīmāṃsakas (the Prakaṭatāvāda) is also

fundamentally dualist. It holds that the relation between the knowing subject

and the known object is such that it is the action of the knowing subject that

produces the state of being known (jñātatā) or manifest (prakaṭatā) in the

object. However, this action of the knowing subject is not itself directly manifest

to the subject as such. It can only be inferred by the subject from the quality of

being known which it produces in the object. The Mīmāṃsaka thus in effect

denies self-luminosity to the subject of knowledge. This is done because the

Mīmāṃsaka thinks that if knowing were directly knowable, then it would require

another knowing to know it and so on in an infinite regress. She holds therefore,

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that objects are known through the cognition which manifests them, but the

cognition itself is not directly known by the subject and can only be inferred.

Abhinavagupta argues that if manifestation is produced in the object by

the subject, then it belongs to the object as a quality exactly as blackness, for

example, might belong to a jar. But if being manifest is then a quality that

belongs to the object as such, it is difficult to explain why it would not be

manifest to everyone all the time. If the Mīmāṃsaka replies that mere

manifestation in an object does not imply that it exists in the relationship of

being manifest to everyone, then Abhinavagupta argues as follows: You are

saying that the quality of manifestation exists in the object but not in the

subject, and it does so in a limited way, that it, it is limited to only certain

subjects. That means it must be self-limited by the object itself. But if this the

case, then the object will not even be known to the person whose cognition

produced the manifestation, because the manifestation should be limited to her

just as much as anyone else. This is because since the state of manifestation is

brought about in the object by the subject, there is nothing in the object that

allows it to shine only for the subject that produced it. In other words, if the

object shines but the subject doesn’t, then the object shines for either

everybody or nobody, since it is only the self-illumination of the subject that can

differentiate it as “this (now) shines for me.” Nor can it argued that the fact that

a specific individual subject is the cause of the manifestation will determine it as

being known only to that subject, that is to say, that the object will have

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manifestation, will shine, only to she whose cognitive activity gives it

manifestation. This is because our experience shows us that an effect, once it

has come into being, need not depend for its existence, or shine, for the one

who was instrumental for bringing it into existence. If this were so, then, for

example, a jar made by a potter would not exist independently of the potter

(ĪPv 1.155).

Third, the Naiyāyika theory of knowledge holds that the relationship

between knowledge and its object is that of the illuminator and illuminated, as

between a lamp and the object upon which it sheds its light. In this theory the

object of knowledge is taken to be different in nature from the Light of

knowledge that illuminates it, and that Light is the common and uniform

element in all of the individual cognitions, such as those of the red, the blue and

the black. Since the object does not participate in the act of cognition, it cannot

be the source of these differing qualities. If, however, they are taken to exist

separately, the question arises: If it is through the Light of knowledge that we

know the difference between the black and the blue, and if the Light of

knowledge is one and uniform in its nature, how can the blue be known as blue

and the black be known as black by means of the same Light? The Naiyāyika

cannot say that the difference in knowledge is caused by the objects, because

that is the very point under discussion. As the objects have no luminosity of

their own, they cannot manifest differently from each other on their own. While

knowledge is luminous, it is uniform. Whence then can difference arise?

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Moreover, casual action on the part of an agent presupposes the capacity to

receive that action on the part of its object. For example, a driver can only cause

a horse to run because it has the capacity to run. Similarly, the object of

knowledge must have some luminosity of its own in order to be illuminated

(ĪPv 1.156).

Thus, the Sāṃkhya denies luminosity to the means of knowledge while

affirming it of the subject of knowledge. The Mīmāṃsaka denies luminosity to

the subject of knowledge while affirming it of the object of knowledge. The

Naiyāyika denies luminosity to the object of knowledge while affirming it of the

means of knowledge. By showing that each of these positions is impossible,

Abhinavagupta establishes that the only alternative is to affirm luminosity—that

is, Consciousness—of all three: the subject, object, and means of knowledge.

But Kashmir Śaivism must achieve more than this purely negative

demonstration. There are still problems to be addressed. In particular,

Abhinavagupta must also answer objections similar to those he himself has

raised, that, for example, “If the object is essentially of the nature of

consciousness, why is it not equally manifest to all subjects?” (Pandey 417). The

point is that in the act of our everyday cognition, Consciousness appears to

apprehend itself in a way that is contrary to its inherent nature, that is, we as

sentient beings appear in the act of knowledge to stand in a relationship of

identity to non-sentient beings. We apprehend them and in the process become

unified with them. But how can this be possible? How can things of

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fundamentally different nature, the sentient and the non-sentient, enter into a

relationship of unification in the act of knowledge? Abhinavagupta replies in

effect that obviously they cannot. Therefore in fact they do not, because they

are not really of a fundamentally different nature: all are Consciousness. The

task of Kashmir Śaivite epistemology is then to explain how it is that they appear

to do so.

The explanation is articulated through the doctrines of ābhāsavāda and

spanda. Essentially, it is the inherent nature of the consciousness to reflect itself

to itself (viṃarśa). But in reflecting itself to itself, Consciousness must manifests

itself to itself in objective forms (ābhāsa). Thus, the process of manifestation

takes on both subjective and objective aspects for and in Consciousness. The

alteration of these two aspects can be regarded as a pulsation of the Light of

Consciousness within what is, finally, Itself. This pulsation is what is called

spanda. As K. C. Pandey explains:

Everything is essentially of the nature of consciousness, object being no less so than subject, and [the] phenomenon of knowledge is due to the momentary rise of the subjective and objective waves, in the sea of Universal Consciousness. (417)

It is Consciousness alone that manifests all objects in the world and in doing so,

assumes their objective forms. This is all-inclusive:

All that appears; all that forms the object of perception or conception; all that is within the reach of the external senses or the internal mind; all that we are conscious of when the senses and mind cease to work, as in the state of trance or deep sleep; all that human consciousness, limited as it is, cannot ordinarily be conscious of and, therefore, is simply an object of self-realization; in short all that is, i.e. all that can be said to

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exist in any way and with regard to which the use of any kind of language is possible, be it the subject, the object, the means of knowledge or the knowledge itself, is Ābhāsa. (320)

Just as in Suhrawardī’s illuminative relationship, this is a process of

emanation which is self-similar on the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels:

Emanation is nothing but manifestation of what is identical with the Universal Mind as separate from itself. But the manifested, even in the state of separateness from the Mind, is no less within the Mind that in the state of identity, exactly as our thoughts are within ourselves even when they are objectified. The universe has no existence independently of the Mind exactly as the dream has no being independently of the dreaming subject. The world process is the process within the Mind. The phenomena of knowledge, related to the individual subject, are the phenomena in the Universal Mind, exactly as thoughts, feelings and cognitions of different types which the individuals, figuring in a dream, have, are in the dreaming subject. Just as it is the dreaming subject that knows, remembers and differentiates in the persons, which appear to do so in dream, so it is the Universal Mind that does so in all individual minds (K. C. Pandey 631)

This is fundamentally a reflexive, reflective, process. As Muller-Ortega writes:

Consciousness is not just a clear crystal which, mirror-like, reflects all things that fall upon it. It has an intrinsic capacity for self-referral which makes it alive and powerful rather than inert and powerless. This self-referential capacity is the śakti, the power of consciousness. The śakti is responsible for the process of manifestation of all finite appearances within the infinite light. This capacity to manifest has at its basis the notion of vimarśa, the capacity of consciousness to be conscious of itself. (Triadic 96)

Consciousness thus objectifies Itself through its power of reflection,

understood as an expression of the power of its absolute freedom and autonomy

(svātantrya). Effectively, Consciousness creates the varieties of cognitive

experience by creating and freely imposing on Itself the countless limiting

conditions (upādhi) through which It becomes manifest in limited forms. This

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Consciousness is finally paramaśiva or anuttara which, paradoxically, expresses

the limitless possibilities of its nature by a process of self-limitation (saṃkoca),

all the while continuing to exist as the undifferentiated unity of pure

Consciousness: “Cognition, in other words, is the reflected awareness of ‘I’

limited by the affections imposed upon it by the variety of external

manifestations generated by this ‘I’ consciousness itself” (Dyczkowski “Self-

Awareness” 71). The form of the intellect (dhī) that ascertains (adhyavāsayanī)

is generated from the reflection of the Light of the Self in the mirror of the

intellect of the individual soul (aṇu), which is obscured six obscuring coverings

(kañcukā) (TĀ 1.39–40a).128

One consequence of this is that, while Kashmiri Śaivite argues that the

world is pure Consciousness alone, she also maintains that it is a real world. This

follows immediately from the two claims that the world is Consciousness and

Consciousness Itself is self-evidently real. The entities of the material universe

are real as “congealed” (styāna) or “contracted” (saṃkucita) forms of

consciousness. This condensation takes not only the form of insentient

objectivity, but also the limited subjectivity found in ordinary human

consciousness. The Infinite I-Consciousness having pushed into oblivion its real

nature under the effect of māyā, then appears to be identical with the physical

128

अहचमत्थचमदां वेद्मीत्मध्यवम चयनी ।

षट्कञ्िकु चबल णतू्थप्रचतचबभबनतो यद ॥

धीज ायते तद त दृग्ज्ञ निचददतम ्।

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human body (deha) or the animating life force (prāņa) or with the ordinary

individual human consciousness. Then, it is taken to be that form of individual

subjectivity which in turn understands itself as a representation or thought form

(vikalpa) because it shines as an entity cut off from all others taken to be

different from it (ĪPK 1.6.4–5).129 It is this śūnya that is known as jīva, the

individual I-consciousness. Because it represents itself to itself as a vikalpa or

definite thought form, it manifests itself to itself as different from all other jīvas,

or individual beings moving within the field of vikalpa.

Now, the way that Kashmir Śaivism came to experience and understand

this arising of objectivity out of subjectivity through the capacity of self-referral

was through the arising of a spontaneous vibration or sound (dhvani).130 This

vibration of the Light of Consciousness was called spanda, or more precisely, the

universal vibration (sāmānyaspanda). It is a wave in the ocean of Consciousness,

without which, in fact, there could be no Consciousness for it is in the inherent

nature of consciousness reflect itself in precisely this way. This reflection results

in a movement, a pulsation in which Consciousness moves outward from itself

into manifestation and then withdraws itself into Itself. This activity informs and

underlies every act of cognition (TĀ 4.181–86). As Muller-Ortega explains:

129

चित्तत्त्वां म यय चहत्व चिन्न एव वि चत याः ।

दहे ेबदु्ध वथ प्र ण ेकचल्पत ेनिसीव व ॥

प्रम ततृ्वेन हचमचत चवमिोऽन्यव्यपोहन त ।

चवकल्प एव स परप्रचतयोरयवि सजाः ॥

130 Related to the doctrine of phonematic emanation, discussed in Chapter 5.

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This doubling back of consciousness on itself does not represent a separate moment in consciousness, but is rather a continuous and inescapable component of consciousness, intrinsic to the sheer appearance of consciousness (prakāśa). This self-referring capacity of consciousness causes a spontaneous sound.…The silence of the Supreme is shot through with a creative tension, a primordial urge, an impelling force. This force is the Śakti, the power of the Ultimate, which sets up an agitation (ghūrṇana), even a disturbance (kṣobha), which is responsible for the wave motion within the absolute. Thus, the absolute is continually arising into waves which create the slight and imperceptible movement or vibration that characterizes consciousness, and which allows consciousness to be the foundation and essence of all manifest reality. (Triadic 119–20)

Every individual cognition in the field of awareness is a specific pulsation

of Consciousness, in which there is an expansion (unmeṣa) toward the

perception of an individual object followed by a contraction (nimeṣa) back into

subjectivity. At the higher level, these two phases are experienced as the two

reflections of Absolute Consciousness discussed in Chapter 3: the categories of

Īśvara (“this universe is me”) and Sadāśiva (“I am this universe”) (Dyczkowski,

Doctrine 183). At this level, they are placed effectively beyond the categories of

space and time, so thus in reality the movement or reflection (viṃarśa) of Divine

Consciousness is only movement or vibration (spanda) “as it were.” As

Abhinavagupta explains:

Spandana means a somewhat of movement. The characteristic of “somewhat” consists in the fact that even immovable appears “as if moving,” because though the light of consciousness does not change in the least, yet it appears to be changing as it were. The immovable appears as if having a variety of manifestation. (ĪPv 1.5.14)131

131

स्पन्दनां ि चकचञ्ित ्िलनम ्। एषैव चकचञ्िदू्रपत यद ्अिलमचप िलम ्आि मते इचत प्रक िस्वरूपां चह

मन गचप न चतरच्यते अचतररच्यते इवव इचत अििलमेव आि सिेदयकू्तमेव ि ि चत इचत ।

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This seems paradoxical, yet in Kashmir Śaivism the goal of the yogini is

precisely to encompass this seeming contradiction by coming to experience and

understand her own nature as assuming the forms of all the planes of existence

from the subtlest to the most gross, both turning in upon itself and moving out

to experience its own outer manifestations:

The mainstay of the Doctrine of Vibration is the contemplation the awakened yogi has of his true nature as the universal perceiving and acting consciousness. Every activity in the universe, as well as every perception, notion, sensation, or emotion in the microcosm, ebbs and flows as part of the universal rhythm of the one reality, which is Śiva, the one God Who is the pure conscious agent and perceiver. According to the doctrine of Vibration, man can realize his true nature to be Śiva by experiencing Spanda, the dynamic recurrent and creative activity of the absolute. (Dyczkowski, Doctrine 20–21)

In this way, the yogini full of concentration, can unite within her heart the

sun, moon and fire—the means, object and subject of cognition—and know

them to be mahabhairava, the Great Lord Himself (TĀ 5.22–24a).132 In doing so,

she will find them to be identical with the three Śaktis of parā, aparā and para,

which create, maintain and withdraw the entire Universe (TĀ 5.25).133

Thus the Kashmir Śaivite theory of knowledge based upon its

fundamental metaphysics that all is Light, provides both an explanation for the

132

सोमसयु ाचग्नसांघट्टां तत्र ध्य येदनन्यधीाः ।

तद्धय न रचणसांक्षोि न्मह िरैवहव्यिक्ु ॥

हृदय ख्ये मह कुण्डे ज ज्वलन ्स्फीतत ां व्रजेत ्। तस्य िचक्तमताः स्फीतिके्तिरैवतेजसाः ॥

म तमृ नप्रमेय ख्यां ध म िेदने ि वये ।

133 पर पर पर िेयमपर ि सदोचदत ।

सषृ्टसांचस्थचतसांह रैस्त स ां प्रत्येकतचस्त्रध ॥

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way in which the phenomenal Universe appears to us in our cognitions, but a

means whereby that explanation can serve as a means to higher levels of

attainment.

Comparing Light and Cognition in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and

Abhinavaguta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, the theory of knowledge

follows immediately upon the fundamental insight of the metaphysics of Light:

that the ground of reality is the self-evidence and self-manifestation of the Light

of Consciousness. In consequence, the meaning of knowledge becomes

absolutely equivalent to the meaning of the very “being” of the self, such that,

within the field of Consciousness, to know is to exist and to exist is to know. All

things are Light, and what this must mean is that all cognition must be in some

sense the Light of Consciousness regarding aspects of Itself. Both philosophers

readily affirm this implication and develop it along similar lines. However, there

are significant and interesting differences in the specific doctrines through which

the fundamental insight is articulated and expressed. For Suhrawardī these are

the doctrines of knowledge by presence (al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī) and the illuminative

relation (al-iḍāfa al-āqiyya); for Abhinavagupta they are the doctrines of

manifold appearance (ābhāsavāda) and vibration (spanda).

The first indication of a different modality of doctrine appears in the way

each system handles the symbolism of what the West calls Doctrine of Divine

illumination. This doctrine can certainly be extended to include Abhinavagupta,

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for he enunciates—indeed, insists upon—its basic tenet that human cognition

depends for its functioning upon the activity of the Light of higher

Consciousness. Now, the doctrine of Divine illumination enunciates a triadic

rather than a dualistic epistemology wherever it appears, with three covalent

aspects participating in cognition—the subject, object and means of knowledge.

Abhinavagupta and Kashmir Śaivism use precisely the same symbolism of the sun

for the means of knowledge as do Suhrawardī and the Platonic tradition going

back to the Republic. However, Kashmir Śaivism goes the Platonists one better

by identifying the other two components of cognition with sources of physical

light as well: the object of knowledge with the moon, and its subject with fire.

This expresses, perhaps, a much more complete emphasis in Kashmir Śaivism on

all the aspects of cognition being Light. To be sure, in the ishrāqi theory of

knowledge the Light of Lights is the source of both lesser immaterial Lights and

the material lights, dark substances and accidents, but the illuminative relation

by which these are identified in existential unity seems to involve more of an

emphasis of the unity (tawḥīd) and uniqueness (wāhīd) of the One Absolute

Light. In the doctrine of spanda, Śiva seems somewhat more willing to lose

Himself in his manifestations and become them than does the Light of Lights.

Spanda is a pulsation; the illuminative relation seems more strictly an emanation

from a single source. In the illuminative relation, there is an absolute distinction

in the way in which knowledge by presence occurs: presence by illumination in

the entity more proximate to the Light of Lights; presence by absorption in the

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entity less proximate. In the spanda doctrine, on the other hand, there is more

of a symmetry between the processes of expansion (unmeṣa) and contraction

(unmeṣa) that characterize the pulsation of Consciousness—more of a sense of a

Principle that freely imposes upon Itself the limiting conditions of manifestation.

Nonetheless, the similarities between the two systems are many and

impressive. Most striking is the fact that self-consciousness, both as a cosmic

principle and the basis of individual acts of cognition, constitutes the foundation

of the theory of knowledge in both systems. In the same way that Suhrawardī

argues that self-awareness must be by knowledge by presence rather than

knowledge by representation, Abhinavagupta argues that prakāśa cannot be a

vikalpa or thought form. Both systems understand the partial knowledge

available to lower manifestations of Consciousness in terms of a progressive

veiling that has its source in the objectification which is an inherent aspect of the

self-reflection of Consciousness. Suhrawardī’s illuminative relation is based upon

the existential unity of objects manifesting in Consciousness as emanation;

similarly, for Abhinavagupta the external manifestation of objects appearing in

Consciousness actually becomes possible just because they are already present

there. In both cases the emanation of the manifest universe from and within the

Absolute Consciousness is seen as self-similar to the appearance of mental states

within human consciousness.

In Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq, the illuminative relation describes a

continuum of Consciousness in which the ultimate Principle, the Light of Lights, is

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able to know all that manifests through knowledge by presence in the sense of

illumination. The same illuminative relation implies that the individual self can

enjoy knowledge of that ultimate Principle in the sense of ‘fana or absorption.

Although manifest in the different senses of illumination and absorption, the

relation is one of identity. Thus the illuminationist theory of cognition serves as

the theoretical framework to explain mystical unification with God.

Similarly in Abhinavagupta’s anuttara trika kula, the understanding of the

manifestation of the Absolute Light of Consciousness as all that appears (ābhāsa)

in the pulsation of expansion and withdrawal serves the yogini as the theoretical

underpinning for her mystical journey in which she comes to experience herself

as subject, object and means of knowledge. In this way she will come to realize

that it is her own nature that is everywhere present in all she perceives and that

all things thus reside within her.

From all this it is abundantly clear that both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta express fully and completely the doctrine of divine illumination

which is the cognitive component of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light.

Thus, as far as Light and cognition is concerned, the answer to the research

question is affirmative.

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CHAPTER 5: LIGHT AND EMANATION

There are three elements to the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light as it

is identified in studies of the history of philosophy in the Western academy: an

ontological element, an epistemological element, and a cosmological element.

The task of this study is to examine each of these elements in the systems of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta in order to determine whether or not they can

justifiably be identified as metaphysics of Light. Included within the scope of this

investigation is the possibility that the examination of the systems of these two

philosophers could justifiably require a re-consideration of the understanding of

the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light itself.

In the prior two chapters of this study, it was determined that the answer

to this question is affirmative with regard to the first two elements of the

doctrine: Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta both assert that reality is Light and

they both enunciate similar versions of the doctrine of divine illumination that is

the epistemological component of the Light metaphysic. This chapter

investigates the third, cosmological element.

Both the philosophies of Being and of Light must inevitably confront the

fundamental question of metaphysics: If the ultimate Principle is One, how is it

that we and the world are many—or at least seem to be—and in that case even

the appearance begs explanation? For it seems self-evident that from unity only

unity can come into being: ex uno non fit nisi unum.

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This question is especially urgent for both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta, because for them the diversity and multiplicity of the world is

not a seeming, but real. So they must reconcile it with the unity of a single

ultimate Light that in their systems pervades a diverse reality yet at the same

time is identical with it.

Throughout the premodern philosophical traditions, in classical Greek

philosophy, in Hellenism, in the Islamic tradition, and in Western Platonism well

into the Renaissance, the predominant solution given to this problem was the

doctrine of emanation. This is particularly true for systems that embrace the

metaphysics of Light, and it is true for both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta.

Aspects of this doctrine have already figured prominently in the investigation of

their ontology and epistemology in the last two chapters of this study. It is now

time to attend to it specifically and in somewhat greater detail.

In investigating the ontological and epistemological aspects of

Suhrawardī’s and Abhinavagupta’s system there emerged an underlying

similarity of philosophical doctrine. However, with the doctrine of emanation,

really significant differences in the two systems begin to emerge. This is not to

say that Suhrawardī and Abhinagupta do not both incorporate the general

features of the doctrine: it is already apparent that they do. But in each of their

systems the principles that make up the rays of emanation, as it were, are

radically different. In these terms, the differences between Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta as far as emanation is concerned are much greater than the ones

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between Suhrawardī and Ibn Sinā, for example, whereas as far as ontology and

epistemology is concerned the reverse is true: Suhrawardī is much closer to

Abhinavagupta. It is with the doctrine of emanation that Suhrawardī’s and

Abhinavagupta’s systems really begin to diverge.

Just as the sun is used to symbolize the means of knowledge in the

doctrine of divine illumination, in the doctrine of emanation it is used to

illustrate the solution to the problem of being and becoming that the doctrine

claims to provide. For just as the sun remains one and unchanged while

illuminating all things for physical vision, so too does the ultimate Principle, the

Absolute Light, manifest things for Itself out of Itself while remaining unchanged,

and since what it manifests is, finally, Itself, it retains its non-duality. For

example, in Ibn Sinā’s Peripatetic system:

Accent is placed upon the relation of generated beings to Being and their effusion (faiḍ) from the source of all things. The Universe in this perspective is compared to the rays of the Sun, and God to the Sun itself. The rays of the Sun are not the Sun but also they are nothing other than the Sun….The Ṣūfīs join Ibn Sinā on this point to say that there cannot be two independent orders of reality so that the being of the Universe cannot be other than Pure Being. The Plotinian cosmology which Ibn Sinā follows in a similar manner derives the hierarchy of creatures from Pure Being itself without in any way destroying the absolute transcendence of Being with respect to the Universe that it manifests. (Nasr, Cosmological 202)

As Yazdi writes:

We see that in this system of emanation it is possible for the whole universe, with all its characteristic multiplicity, to have emanated from and be reduced to God as the First Principle of existence. This is made possible without the intermediary role of matter, space, time or any

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other element of disruption and discontinuation in the unitary system of emanation. (117)

Similar conceptions appear in the Indian philosophical tradition,

especially in the Tantric traditions:

Thus Bhairava, the Light, is self-evident (svatahsiddha); without beginning. He is the first and the last of all things, the Eternal Present. And so what else can be said of Him? The unfolding of the categories of existence (tattva) and creation, which are the expansion of His own Self, He illuminates, luminous with His own Light, in identity with Himself, and because He illumines Himself, so too He reflects on his own nature, without his wonder (camatkāra) being in any way diminished. (PTv 134)

As Dupuche writes, framing it in terms of the epistemology which we

investigated in Chapter 4, “Before the world is emanated, the Light knows its

Light by means of its own Light. Since Śiva is identical with his emanation, when

he contemplates the world he contemplates his own self…He is his revelation”

(35).

It is in the inherent nature of physical light to radiate outward from its

source, to shine and illuminate. In the same way, the doctrine of emanation

holds that it is in the inherent nature of the ultimate Principle to flow out from

Itself.134 This superabundance is seen as evidence of its perfection. In Plotinus,

for example, one finds: “The One is perfect because it seeks for nothing, and

possesses nothing, and has need of nothing; and being perfect, it overflows, and

thus its superabundance produces an Other” (Enn 5.2.1). He also writes:

Whenever anything reaches its own perfection, we see that it cannot endure to remain in itself, but generates and produces some other thing.

134 L. emanare, “to flow from” or “to pour forth of out of.”

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Not only beings having the power of choice, but also those which are by nature incapable of choice, and even inanimate things, send forth as much of themselves as they can: thus fire emits heat and snow cold and drugs act upon other things….How then should the Most Perfect Being and the First Good remain shut up in itself, as though it were jealous or impotent—itself the potency of all things?...Something must therefore be begotten of it. (Enn 5.4.1)

These passages express a fundamental component of the doctrine of

emantion, often articulated in terms of the inherent nature of Light as

represented in the sun. Just as it is the inherent nature of the sun to radiate

outward, pouring forth its light, so it is in the inherent nature of any entity to

express its perfection by flowing out of itself. This is eminently true of the first

Principle, and this illustrates the fundamental difference between the doctrines

of emantion and creation. According to the doctrine of emanation, the world is

not brought into being ex nihilo either in time or space; there is no “maker” or

demiurgus who gives order to a primordial chaos or gives form to matter.

Moreover, the relationship between the Principle and its emanations is strictly

non-temporal. The world is conceived to be not so much eternal as beyond the

categories of space and time. It is held to be infinite, not in the sense of an

actual ordered infinity—Suhrawardī, for example (along with the Peripatetics),

held this to be impossible (ḤI 55)—but in the sense of anuttara, of being

unsurpassable. Thus Suhrawardī will also say the Light of Lights is “infinitely

beyond the infinite” (ḤI 174).

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Light and Emanation in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmāt al-Ishrāq

In terms of both ontology and epistemology, what has emerged in the

course of this study is that Suhrawardī’s philosophical project involved a

fundamental re-centering of the Islamic philosophical tradition on a much less

Aristotelian form of Neo-platonism than that of the Peripatetics. This was

accomplished through the replacement of a philosophy of Being with a

philosophy of Light. Suhrawardī’s treatment of the doctrine of emantion is along

the same lines, only in this case his procedure is even more radical and

innovative. He not only reframes the received Peripatetic system of emanation

in illuminationist terms, but he also introduces an entirely new dimension of

emanation in which he sets the intelligible Forms of Platonism into

correspondence with elements drawn from Zoroastrian sources. He thus

formulates the doctrine in terms of the ancient wisdom tradition (al-ḥikmat al-

‘atīqah) which he understands his own system to be carrying forward. His

reformulation also has the effect of relocating the locus of the Forms within the

emanative hierarchy.

The system of emanation that Suhrawardī received was the Peripatetic

synthesis of Neoplatonic ideas concerning the emanative activity of the One with

Hellenistic cosmology.135 In Ibn Sinā’s formulation of the doctrine, the process of

135 It is important to remember that all of the doctrines of divine illumination,

emanation and the metaphysics of Light itself were seamlessly integrated with the astronomy and physics of the time.

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emanation is the result of the self-intellection of God, the Necessary Being (wājib

al-wujūd). This produces the First Intellect (al-‘aql al-awwal) which is contingent

in essence and necessary by virtue of the Necessary Being Itself. But because the

First Intellect is contingent, it generates multiplicity. Reflecting on the necessity

of the Divine Essence that produced it, the First gives rise to a Second Intellect.

By its reflection upon its own nature as contingent, it gives rise to both the Soul

of the first heaven and to its body, which is the first or highest celestial sphere of

the Ptolemaic Universe, the heaven of heavens (falak al-aflāk) or sphere of the

fixed stars. In the same manner the Second Intellect through intellection

generates the Third Intellect along with the Soul of the second heaven and its

body, which is the sphere of the Zodiac (falak al-burūj). This process continues in

recursive fashion through the intellects and spheres of the planets (Saturn,

Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury) until the sphere of the moon is reached. At

this point the purity of the Divine Essence has been so attenuated that the body

of the celestial sphere can no longer support a sufficient degree of perfection

and so the processes of generation and corruption begin to occur in the sublunar

realm, which is where human beings dwell in the world of time, form and

matter.

The intellect that rules the lowest sphere and the sublunary world within

it is the active intellect, which through its illumination manifests the matter and

Forms of this lowest sphere. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the Peripatetic

formulation of the doctrine of divine illumination the active intellect also brings

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the human rational soul into a state of cognition by illuminating its potential

intellect with the Forms after sense perception and imagination have prepared

the human intellect to receive the active intellect’s Light for a particular act of

cognition.

Suhrawardī retains the cosmological structure of this scheme, but recasts

it in illuminationist terms. This involves not only replacing the descending series

of intellects with Lights, but supplementing the vertical (tūlī) descending series of

supernal intellects and planetary spheres with a completely new horizontal

(‘araḍi) order of Lights that intersects with it.

Suhrawardī tells us that he was guided to construct this new emanative

system as the direct result of an illuminative experience of his own:

The author of these lines was once zealous in defense of the Peripatetic path in denying these things. He was indeed nearly resolved upon that view, “until he say his Lord’s demonstration” [Qur’an 12.24]. Whoso questions the truth of this—whosoever is unconvinced by the proof—let him engage in mystical disciplines and service to those visionaries, that perchance he will, as one dazzled by the thunderbolt, see the Light blazing in the Kingdom of Power and will witness the heavenly essences and Lights that Hermes and Plato beheld. He will see the spiritual luminaries, the wellsprings of kingly splendor and wisdom that Zoroaster told of, and that which the good and blessed king Kay-Khusraw thus unexpectedly beheld in a flash. (ḤI 166)

The elements of the vertical system have already been discussed in

Chapter 3, for they are the essential constituents of Suhrawardī’s ontology. But

in keeping with Suhrawardī’s turn away from the Aristotelian influence on the

Peripatetic philosophy of being, the reflective action of the Lights is no longer

cast in terms of necessity and contingency. Rather, it is framed in terms of the

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illuminative relationship investigated in Chapter 4. While Light always remains

identical, its proximity or distance from the Light of Lights is what determines its

degree of Reality. Thus the first emanate, the Proximate Light, is simply

obtained (yaḥṣul). The only difference between this Light and the Light of Lights

is in their relative degree of intensity (shadda). The way this takes form is that

the Proximate Light loves (yuḥibbu) and sees (yushāhidu) the Light of Lights

above it, while the Light of Light controls (yaqharu) and illuminates (yushāhidu)

the Proximate Light (ḤI 143–44). The Proximate Light also sees its own relative

lack of intensity. This is the first barrier (barzakh) which leads toward lack of

sentience. This relationship continues recursively through the entire vertical

series of emanation, with each lower Light having an intrinsic yearning

(maḥabbah) toward the higher ones that in its turn calls forth an illuminative act

of dominance (qahr) (ḤI 97–98).

However, this vertical hierarchy of Lights interacts with a horizontal

hierarchy of Lights. Although Suhrawardī first came to know the horizontal

hierarchy through visionary intuition, he also offers arguments in support of its

necessity. He points out that in the vertical emanation of the planetary spheres

and sublunar world there is no way to explain the vast numbers of fixed stars.

Let us not, then linger over this series that the Peripatetics talk of. Each star in the sphere of fixed stars has a particularity, requiring it be necessitated and requiring something to necessitate it, by which it is particularized. Therefore, the dominating lights—that is, the incorporeal lights free of connections with barriers—are more in number than ten, or twenty, or one hundred, or two hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand, or a hundred thousand….Each of these beholds the Light of

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Lights and is shone upon by Its rays. Moreover, light is reflected from one to another of the dominating lights. Thus, a great number of dominating lights result, rank on rank, one from another.…Then other individual lights result from these fundamental lights by the combinations of aspects, interactions and correspondences…By the interactions of the rays with the aspects of independence, dominance and love and the extraordinary correspondences between the perfect, intense rays and the others, the dominating lights bring into being the celestial archetypes of species and the talismans of the simples, the elemental compounds, and all that is beneath the sphere of the stars. (ḤI 150–52)

Thus, in Suhrawardī’s emanative system, Reality proceeds from the Light of

Lights and unfolds through the first Proximate Light and all the subsequent Lights

whose interactions bring about the existence of all entities, including all the

categories of illuminationist ontology: the immaterial and substantial lights, the

barriers or dark bodies, and both the luminous and dark accidents.

The number of possible Lights and the complexity of their composite

forms have multiplied enormously by the time the entities of the lowest intensity

and least proximity have been reached. Part of the rationale for this much more

complex system is that, as Suhrawardī tells us, the ten Lights of the Peripatetic

system are just not enough to explain all this “wondrous complexity” (ḤI 165).

Although the horizontal Lights cannot be systematically ordered they are

finite in number, although very numerous (ḤI 129). Among their multitudinous

ranks are included those transcendent spiritual Intelligences independent of any

material body who serve as “masters of the species” (arbab al-anwa) and are the

celestial archetypes of all the entities, both material and immaterial, in the

universe. In Suhrawardī’s illuminationist system, and in keeping with his ideas of

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al-ḥikmat al-‘atīqah, these archetypes, the lords of species, are identified with

both the Platonic Forms and the Zoroastrian angelic orders, including the

amesha spenta. As Aminrazavi writes:

Suhrawardī’s angelology represents an intricate web of lights, elements and symbols, a great number of which are drawn from the Zoroastrian tradition. His view of the function and role of angels is radically different from Ibn Sinā’s which attributed rotations and many other functions to the heavenly bodies and astronomical issues. For Suhrawardī, angels are means through which his metaphysical doctrine as well as esoteric views can be expressed and therefore the language with which he puts forward his angelology is sometimes philosophical and sometimes symbolic. (School 81)

In philosophical terms, the angels of the horizontal order represent

another example of how Suhrawardī turns back to a more strictly Platonic rather

than Aristotelian formulation, in the case of the doctrine of divine illumination.

In the Peripatetic version of divine illumination, the Forms are generated (along

with prime matter) by the illumination of the active intellect which radiates them

into the sublunar realm. Suhrawardī locates the Forms not merely above the

sphere of the moon but in another dimension entirely, the horizontal as opposed

to the vertical order. In addition, they do not inform matter to create individual

substance in the way Aristotle teaches, rather individual entities receive the

influence of the forms through illumination from the horizontal order as part of

the way in which the complex and composite interplay of the higher Lights acts

to bring a particular existent entity, Light or light or dark, into existence.

The relationship between the two orders of emanation, the horizontal

and the vertical, can be visualized as a pyramid with the Light of Lights at the

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apex (Yazdi 126). The body of the pyramid represents the emanated universe.

Thus, in the image there will be an unbroken vertical line connecting every point

in the pyramid with the Light of Lights. These lines, the vertical order, represent

the illuminative relationship of existential unity that joins every element of the

manifest universe to the Light of Lights. If the vertical order thus represents

unity or identity, the horizontal represents diversity, whereby through the

complex intermingling of the rays emanating from the Light of Lights, the

elements of the manifest universe are distinguished from one another in rank,

essence, species, attribute and individuation. As Yazdi explains:

There are two distinct kinds of diversity here which are to be noted. These rays or shadows of existence can be divided by the mind of a philosopher into different fragmentary emanations according to the degree of proximity to the Highest Principle. Yet this sort of division, being a mere intellectual reflection of the gradation of a simple thing, does not jeopardize the simple unit of the emanation with its First Principle. They are also actually separated and diversified in essence as well as in individuation, etc.; but since this separation and diversity (which occur in the horizontal order) do not happen in the vertical order—the order of unity—they do not drive them asunder and have no impact on the inner system of the continuity of the rays and their unity with the One. In other words, the multitude of the horizontal order has no bearing on the unity connection of the vertical order. (127)

The vertical order also constitutes the path of ascent, of the return to the

Light which is the final apotheosis characteristic of philosophical systems which

include the doctrine of emanation. In the ishrāqi system this is in terms of the

illuminative relationship and knowledge by presence. As Yazdi writes:

While emanation and absorption are linguistically asymmetric, in that the former stands for the descending light of existence from the First Principle and the latter for the ascending light to the Principle, they are in

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reality one and the same….That is, if God knows man as His emanation by presence, man as an absorptive being should know God by presence as well. (142–43)

For the Peripatetics, the ascent up the ladder of Lights culminated in the

soul’s conjunction (ittiṣal) with the active intellect. For Suhrawardī the ascent is

a similar expansion of vision and intellective breadth such as described by Plato

in the Symposium: a journey to the pure Light of the world of intellect where

when freed from his body he beheld the luminous spheres (ḤI 171). But

Suhrawardī also taught that the fully illuminated soul could rise even higher than

this:

These are the numberless angels in their classes—rank upon rank in accordance with the levels of the spheres. But the sanctified godly sages may rise higher than the world of the angels (ḤI 248).

It is evident from these considerations that, despite the significant differences

that Suhrawardī brought to the doctrine of emantion with his articulation of the

ishrāqi philosophy, in its general outlines and structure it is a continuation of the

doctrine of emanation that the Peripatetic philosophers received and developed

from Hellenistic Platonism and quite possibly from Zoroastrian sources as well.

This doctrine was an essential component of the metaphysics of Light in its

Neoplatonic and Peripatetic formulations, and Suhrawardī’s doctrinal

employment of it in illuminationist philosophy is completely consistent with

these earlier articulations in terms of the role that emanation plays in its

philosophical cosmology. Despite his innovations, for Suhrawardī as for these

earlier systems, the ultimate Principle, the Light of Lights, manifests all things for

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itself out of Itself while remaining unchanged, thus retaining its non-duality. Yet,

in so manifesting Itself, the Light of Light also diversifies itself through its

manifold emanations whose constituting agency is understood in terms of the

Platonic Forms. Suhrawardī’s formulation of the doctrine of emanation is

completely consistent with that found in the Neoplatonic formulations that

define the metaphysics of Light.

Light and Emanation in Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

Like Suhrawardī, Abhinavagupta worked within a context in which the

doctrine of emanation was already a part of the received tradition. Also like

Suhrawardī, Abhinavagupta radically reworked the doctrine to bring it into

accord with the rest of his philosophical conceptions.

In Kashmir Śaivism, emanation (sṛṣṭi) is a process that can be viewed from

a number of different perspectives, all of which are nonetheless correlated

through a complex system of correspondences. As Abhinavagupta writes:

The great extension of diversity along the path of manifestation consist of the forces of cosmic activity (kalā) the metaphysical principles (tattva), and the world-orders (bhuvana) along with their phonematic equivalents, which are letters (varṇas) syllables (pada) and mantras. These manifest in consonance with the processes of creation, maintenance and dissolution, veiling, and grace. Together with the fourth, transcendental state, all this is the unfolding of the Lord’s manifold power. Waking, dreaming, sleeping and those beyond them are nothing more than the Lord’s creative freedom. (TĀ 78–81)

In this study I will focus on the two aspects of this manifold system that

are the most prevalent in Abhinavagupta’s own texts: the system of

metaphysical categories (tattva), and the system of phonematic emanation.

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Another reason for this particular focus is that these two systems of emanation

have the greatest connection with important and prevalent parts of the Indian

tradition as a whole.

The source of the emanative structure of tattvas in Kashmir Śaivism is the

Sāṃkhya, one of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy and which has

already been seen in this study to be the subject of extensive criticism by

Abhinavagupta. The basis of this system is the exhaustive analytical

enumeration (parisaṇkhyāna) of the “principles or categories” (tattva:

“thatnesses”) of the universe. These are understood to have been evolved or

emanated in unceasing development and combinations under the influence of

two irreducible, innate and independent Principles. Thus the system is radically

dualist. The first Principle is puruṣa, the pure and passive subjectivity of

consciousness or the self. Unlike Advaita Vedānta and, for that matter, Kashmir

Śaivism itself, Sāṃkhya holds there to be a plurality of selves or puruṣas. The

other Principle is prakṛti or nature, which is the cause of both the mental and

material aspects of the universe. Prakṛti is composed of the three gunas or

qualities of sattva, rajas and tamas. As long as the three gunas are in a state of

equilibrium, nothing occurs, but when they are disturbed, the manifest world

(vyakta) emerges. This is exactly what happens under the influence of puruṣa’s

“seeing.” This not a matter of will on the part of puruṣa but, as Zimmer writes,

more like the action of a magnet on iron filings (326). As a result of this

influence, the tattvas emerge from each other in a gradual process of

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unfoldment. Given the fundamental dualism, there remains the difficulty of

explaining the interaction between the two Principles—one which we have seen

Abhinavagupta exploit. But as Larson writes, for Sāṃkhya itself this is quite

beside the point: “The task is not to explain how prakṛti and puruṣa came

together. The task, rather, is to describe the nature of human existence and

suffering in view of the fact that prakṛti and puruṣa are together, and then to

offer a solution” (SK 172).

There are twenty-five tattvas enumerated in the Sāṃkhya system and

Kashmir Śaivism retains them all in its own system of categorical emanation and,

except for the relationship between prakṛti and puruṣa, their functionality and

the order in which they are produced remains completely unchanged. What

does change is that the entire sequence is seen as an emanation of Absolute

Consciousness or prākaśa and so it becomes non-dual: the tattvas along with

everything else that is or can be conceived are ābhāsa, the appearances of

Consciousness. This is not completely untoward in terms of the Sāṃkhya, for as

Larson writes: “Although the classical Sāṃkhya refuses to reduce the world to

consciousness, nevertheless, the world is understood in terms of

consciousness—in other words, puruṣārthatā—the world is understood in terms

of how puruṣa witnesses it” (SK 177).

Nonetheless, Kashmir Śaivism is committed to reducing—if that is the

correct word—the world to Consciousness, and so it incorporates the 25 tattvas

of the Sāṃkhya into a greater structure of 36 (or 37 if, following Abhinavagupta,

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anuttara is included). The expanded sequence is essentially divided into three

domains (adhvas): the pure domain (śuddha adhva), the pure-impure domain

(śuddhāśuddha adhva), and the impure domain (aśuddha adhva). The pure

domain consists of the process whereby the Absolute Consciousness regards

itself in a mode of pure subjectivity. This is the realm of the śivattatvas, already

discussed at some length in Chapter 3, in which the Supreme Subject as aham

experiences Itself as the totality of the universe, idam, defined as a sequence of

states of reflexivity: śiva tattva, śakti tattva, sadāśiva tattva, īsvara tattva, and

śuddha vidyā tattva. This level is called “pure” because it is reality conceived in

terms of the Light of Consciousness, prakāśavimarśa, which is in fact self-

identical with the rest of the emanated universe:

He displays His Light identically (svaprakāśam prakāsayati) in the expansion of all the categories of existence (the 36 tattvas), all the objective phenomena (bhāvas), and views them all as Himself (tathaiva ca vimarśati) in His self-delight (camatkāratve) which never vanishes (anapeta). (PTv 112)

The next stage of emanation occurs when Consciousness, in order to project

itself into shining or manifestation, constructs or construes the self-imposed

limitations or veils which will allow it to experience Itself in objective, limited

forms:

This consciousness veils itself and, having done so, resides on the plane of insentience. Half-veiled and half-revealed, it assumes the form (of living beings) starting from the gods right down to plants. Each of these two forms (of consciousness), sentient and insentient, is wonderfully diverse. (TĀ 1.134c–135)

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In the order of emanation, the means whereby Consciousness veils itself

constitute the pure-impure (śuddhāśuddha) domain. Here Consciousness is, as

Abhinavagupta says, half-veiled and half-revealed to Itself. In this realm are then

found the six kañcukas: the creative self-limitation of māyā, and her specific

forms. These are: kalā kañcuka, which veils the innate omnipotence of

Consciousness with the illusion of limited powers of creativity; vidyā kañcuka,

which veils Its omniscience with the illusion of limited powers of knowledge;

rāga kañcuka, which veils Its self-perfection and creates a desire for external

objects; kāla kañcuka, which veils Its eternal, immutable and immortal nature,

making It seemingly subject to time and change; and niyati kañcuka, which veils

Its omnipresence making it appear restricted in space.

These eleven tattvas of the pure and pure-impure domains then emanate

puruṣa and prakṛti. Rather than being the ultimate subjectivity as is in the

Sāṃkhya system, puruṣa is now subjectivity that has already been subject to the

kañcukas and so already exists in a state of self-limitation. The reflex of this

limited state is prakṛti, who manifests in terms of the three qualities of sattva,

raja, and tamas.136 Just as in Sāṃkhya, through the interaction of these two,

manifestation occurs. Thus they stand at the head of the impure (aśuddha)

domain made up of the twenty-five tattvas that in the Sāṃkhya made up the

entire emanative sequence. These, in “descending” order, are first the

136 Just as in the Sāṃkhya, in Kashmir Śaivism the qualities or gunas are not themselves

tattvas: they are qualities rather than categories.

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antaḥkaranas, the three internal organs: buddhi, intellect; ahaṁkara, the ego

sense; and manas, mind. There then follow the pañca jñanendriyas, the five

organs of cognition (ear, skin, eye, tongue, and nose); the pañca karmendriyas,

the organs of action (voice, hand, feet, and organs of elimination and

procreation); the pañca tanmātras, the five subtle elements (sound, touch, form,

taste, and smell); and the pañca mahābhūtas, the five great elements (ether, air,

fire, water, and earth).

Abhinavagupta furthers elaborates this system in the Paramārthasāra.

This is a very interesting adaption of an earlier text by Ādiśeṣa. It was often

taken to be Vaiṣṇavite text because the first verse is an adoration of Viṣṇu and

the final verse declares that the main purpose of the text is to present the

essence of Śaṇkarācārya’s Vedānta philosophy. Actually it is more of an

exposition of Sāṃkhya. Abhinavagupta has completely reworked it into a Śaivite

text, enlarging it from 85 to 105 verses, retaining some verses unchanged and

altering others. Yogarāja, commenting on the last verse, observes that

Abhinavagupta, the great follower of the supreme Lord, Paramaśiva, reproduced the description of the supreme truth, given in the past by Lord Śeṣa, by enlarging and refashioning the text to conform with the monistic spiritual experiences of the Āgamic teachings. (xxi)

The importance of this exposition of the tattva system by Abhinavagupta lies in

the grouping of the tattvas into four eggs, nested within each other like Russian

dolls: “The supreme Lord creates this universe consisting of four eggs (aṇḍa), the

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śakti egg, the māyā egg, the prakṛti egg, and the pṛthvī egg, out of the glory of

his own divine Śakti” (4).137 In his commentary, Yogarāja says that

The divine Śakti of the supreme Lord, which negates his transcendent nature and is therefore named akhyāti (self-negating), and which underlies the universe composed of an infinite number of subjects and objects of experience, all having I-nature (ahaṃtā) as their essence, is called the śakti egg, as it veils the transcendent nature of the supreme Lord, thereby binding him. (4)

Within this first śakti egg are the śivatattvas: the sadāśiva tattva, the īsvara

tattva, and the śuddha vidyā tattva. The śiva and śakti tattvas are its presiding

deities. The next egg comprises the tattvas from māyā down to puruṣa. Its

presiding deity is a rudra named Gahana. The third egg begins with prakṛti and

includes the three internal organs and five organs of cognition. The presiding

deity is Viṣṇu. The last egg is comprised of the rest of the tattvas and if presided

over by Brahma.

This sorting of the tattvas into eggs does not appear in any other text.

We can speculate that perhaps that is why Abhinavagupta chose it. Because the

most unique and significant feature of this arrangement is that the eggs are

nested one with the other, and that the material world of sensory experience is

in the innermost egg. Thus the meaning of the arrangement is clear: all of the

manifest universe resides within Śiva’s Consciousness. And of course that is

exactly what anuttara trika kula Trika teaches.

137

चनजिचक्तवौिविर द ्अण्डितुष्टयचमदां चवि गेन ।

िचक्तम ा प्रकृचताः पथृ्वी िेचत प्रि चवतां प्रिणु ॥

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Turning now to the system of phonematic emanation, the first thing to

note is that in articulating a system of the emergence of the manifest universe

from sound and language, Abhinavagupta and the Kashmir Śaivite tradition were

expressing in their own unique terms a profound current of thought within

Indian culture. As Ostler writes: “Indian culture is unique in the world for its

rigorous analysis of its own language which it furthermore made the central

discipline of its own culture” (180).

Speech in India was well-formed (saṁskṛita) to the extent that it was the

reproduction in sound of the very structure of reality. As Thomas Hopkins

writes:

Sanskrit words were not just arbitrary labels assigned to phenomena; they were the sound forms of objects, actions and attributes, related to the corresponding reality in the same way as visual forms and different only in being perceived by the ear and not by the eye. The fact that thought can be considered as internalized speech further emphasized the importance of speech, leading to the conclusion that examining the speech used it the sacrificial ritual world reveal the underlying structure of reality. (20)

Thus, going back to Vedic times there were traditions that would, as

Padoux writes, “reappear later on, with identical or very close meanings, in

Kashmirian Śaiva scriptures or, more generally, in Tantric works” (5). As early as

the Ṛg Veda the word for the Supreme Absolute, brahman, is also used to refer

to the supreme word. The Goddess Vāc is glorified as a supreme power (ṚV

10.71, 10.125) and in Yajur Veda She is spoken of as consort of Prajāpati in way

anticipates the relationship of Śakti to Śiva (Padoux 12). In the Bŗhadāraņyaka

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Upaniṣad there is a dialogue between the sage Yājñavalkya and King Janaka

wherein the King asks, “What serves as the light for man?” When pressed,

Yājñavalkya names in succession the sun, moon, fire, speech and finally the self

(4.3.1–5). Here the reader will doubtless recognize the means, object and

subject of knowledge from Chapter 3 of this study, associated with speech and

the self and all identified with light. Bhatṛhari (fl. c. 5th century CE) of the

Grammarian school also anticipated elements of the Kashmir Śaivite doctrine of

phonematic emanation. In the Vākyapadīya (VP) he wrote:

The power which is based on words controls this universe. This universe which has a single Intelligence as its soul is perceived as manifold through the word…Those who are versed in the Vedas know that this Universe is the transformation of speech. It was out of the Vedas that this universe was first evolved. (VP 1.118–20)

In the same way that Kashmir Śaivism placed the emanation of the

tattvas within its own context of the self-illumination of a primordial absolute

Consciousness, so the power of speech to manifest meaning is seen as

emanating from the same Source. The highest level of speech is parāvāc, the

highest, primordial and uncreated level of speech, understood as being identical

with the Consciousness of Śiva and Śakti:

Like this consciousness, she is conceived of as luminous throbbing (sphurattā), which is not only the throb of pure consciousness itself, but also that of the whole cosmic manifestation shining—that is, existing—within her, undifferentiatedly. (Padoux 172)

Parāvāc is also identified with prakāśavimarśamaya that is both undifferentiated

light or pure consciousness (prakāśa), and awareness, realization of this pure

light (vimarśa). At this level the vibration or spanda is hardly perceptible. But it

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does begin to produce a tendency toward manifestation nonetheless, which

then emanates the next level of speech, paśyantī. This remains a pure

subjectivity, but as its name indicates it is a kind of desire to see which begins to

manifest as a first vibratory movement. In terms of the tattvas, this manifests at

the level of sadāśiva tattva and is also identified with icchāśakti, the power of

will or desire. This desire begins to coalesce into an intermediate form of

speech, or Madhyamā. At this level of emanation, phonemes, words and

sentences begin to take actual form in Consciousness, although not at the level

of actual and uttered speech. In terms of the śivatattvas, this level of speech is

correlated with īśvara tattva. Finally, with the vaikharī level, physically

articulated speech appears (Padoux 166–223 passim).138

Just as the highest level of Consciousness pervades even to the level of

the lowest tattvas in the scheme of the emanation of the categories, so too does

parāvāc, the highest level of sound, identified with Light, pervade the universe as

speech to the level of the individual phonemes. Moreover, these two systems of

emanation continue to be correlated. As Dyczkowski writes:

Thought (vikalpa) is a form of speech (vāc) uttered internally by the mind (citta) which is itself an outpouring of consciousness. Consciousness also, in its turn, resounds with the silent, supreme form of speech (parā vāc) which is the reflective awareness through which it experiences itself to itself. Consequently, the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, which are

138 This structure, with four levels of speech and physical sound and words appearing

only at the lowest level of emanation, is reminiscent of Ṛg Veda 1.164, where the ultimate power of vāc, declared to be the supreme principle of the universe, is said to be three quarters hidden, with only one quarter manifested in physically articulated speech.

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the smallest phonemic units into which speech can be analyzed, are symbolic of the principle elements of the activity of consciousness. (Doctrine 185)

And as Padoux says: “Together with the phonemes arise also their corresponding

tattvas; this is the ‘great emanation’ (mahāsṛṣṭi)” (231).

At the most undifferentiated level of Consciousness, that of Śiva, both

the phonemes and the tattvas are all contained, yet themselves in

undifferentiated form. This is called the mass of totality of sounds (śabdarāśi)

contained in parāvāc. Then under the influence of the movement toward

manifestation, the whole collection of phonemes and tattvas will then be

projected by Śiva into paśyanti, giving rise to the emanation of the phonemes

(and of the tattvas) on the level of still unmanifest yet now differentiated

energy. Finally, the phonemes and tattvas actually emerge into full

manifestation at the level of the most condensed energy: the level of vaikharī,

physically articulated speech, and of the most fully differentiated forms of

manifestation.

The letters from ‘a’ to visarga denote Śiva tattva; those from ka to ṅa denote the five elements from the earth up to the ether; those from ca up to ña denote the five tanmātras from smell up to sound; those from ṭa to ṇa denote the five karmendriyas (organs of action) from the feet up to the tongue; those from ta to na denote five jñanendriyas from the nose up to the ears; those from pa to ma denote the group of five i.e., manas, ahaṃkāra, buddhi, prakṛti, and puruṣa; those from ya to va denote through raga, vidyā, kalā and māyā tattvas.…The letters from ‘śa’ to ‘kṣa’ denote the group of five categories, viz. Mahāmāyā, Śuddhavidya, Īśvara, Sadāśiva and Śakti. (PTv 98–101)

Yet as always in anuttara trika kula, the entire emanative hierarchy is finally

understood in terms of Light and Consciousness:

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To be self aware is the very essence of Consciousness. It is the supreme speech (parā vāk) self manifest in its freedom (svātantrya) and the supreme power of the highest self. This consciousness is vibratory Light (sphurattā). It is supreme existence (mahāsattā) beyond special and temporal distinctions. It is the universal essence, the very heart of the supreme. (ĪPK 13–14)139

Kashmir Śaivism certainly articulates in general terms a doctrine of

emanation in that the ultimate Principle manifests all things for itself out of Itself

while remaining unchanged, retaining its non-duality. In this process of

effulgence, the Principle also diversifies itself while all of its manifestations retain

their existential unity with the ultimate just as the rays of the sun retain their

essential connection with it as their source. Yet also seems clear that the

particulars of the structure and content of the Kashmir Śaivite doctrine of

emantion diverge significantly from those of the Neoplatonist version. This

divergence raises the potential of doubt for the research question for

Abhinavagupta’s system in a way that simply does not occur in the case of

Suhrawardī.

Comparing Light and Emanation in Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and

Abhinavagupta’s Anuttara Trika Kula

Perhaps the most impressive similarity in Suhrawardī’s and

Abhinavagupta’s use of emantion is the way in which they both attribute the

139 चिचताः प्रत्यवमि ात्म पर िव क्सस्वरसोचदत ।

स्व तन््यमतेन्मखु्यां तदशै्वयं परम त्मनाः ॥

स स्फुरत्त मह सत्त दिेक ल चविचेषणी ।

सैष स रतय प्र क्त हृदयां परमेचष्टनाः ॥

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original formal impetus to the emanative hierarchy to the self-contemplation of

the ultimate Principle in their respective ontologies. In Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-

ishrāq the Light of Lights illuminates the Proximate Light which is its first

emantion in a reflection of the Proximate Light’s own beholding of the Light of

Lights. This illuminative relationship occurs recursively throughout the

continuum of the hierarchy of emanation. Similarly in anuttara trika kula, at the

level of the śivatattvas, it is the Self’s contemplation of Itself as the universe that

generates all the manifold forms of its own appearances that make up the

worlds. In each case, the multiplicity of the world is the Self-reflection of an

absolute Consciousness. In Suhrawardī’s case, this view has antecedents not

only in Peripatetic philosophers such as Ibn Sina, but also in Plotinus and Philo

certainly and possibly going back even Plato and even Parmenides.

In the case of Abhinavagupta, however, this particular element of

doctrine does not seem to be as prevalent within the Indian context prior to

Kashmir Śaivism. As I discuss in Chapter 2, Light is prevalent within the various

currents of Indian thought going back to the Vedas and it is true that in the

Sāṃkhya system, puruṣa finds itself reflected in buddhi. But as Abhinavagupta

himself points out, these two are of a fundamentally different nature. The

doctrinal similarity that occurs between Abhinavagupta and Suhrawardī involves

not only the self-reflection of the Ultimate Principle but its self-Identity with its

manifestation. For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, all things are Light.

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It is all the more intriguing, then, that their emanative categories—their

descriptions of what actually makes up the Light’s rays—seem to bear little or no

relationship to each other whatsoever.

Perhaps the most obvious difference is that in Suhrawardī the emanative

hierarchy includes actual celestial objects. In Suhrawardī’s vertical order of

emantion, just as for the emanative hierarchies of the Peripatetics before him,

the contemplation of the higher Lights results in the emergence of the celestial

spheres along with the fixed stars and planets. In the system of the tattvas and

phonetic emanation there is nothing remotely resembling this. As Larson says

(speaking of the Sāṃkhya system but it holds for Kashmir Śaivism as well), the

system of the tattvas is completely expressed “in terms of psychological rather

than cosmological categories” (SK 178). There are no worlds, celestial or

otherwise, among the tattvas. Kashmir Śaivism does recognize an order of

worlds, the bhuvanas, but even these are more spiritual rather than celestial.

But an even more fundamental doctrinal difference is that for Suhrawardī

what gets emanated are forms or essences or mahiyya, quiddities or

“whatnesses” and for Abhinavagupta it is tattvas, or thatnesses. This is a crucial

difference that strikes deeply to the core of how each system actually views the

way in which Light illuminates. For Suhrawardī, knowledge consists in the Light

illuminating what a thing is, for Abhinavagupta it consists in the Light illuminating

that it is.

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The source of this difference lies in the fact that Suhrawardī is a Platonist.

For the Platonist, concrete entities acquire their essence through their

relationship with the Forms, abstract universal logically and ontologically

separate from the objects of sense perception. These are the angelic Lords of

Species (arbab al-anwa) in Suhrawardī’s horizontal order. The Forms are the

models or paradigms of which sensible things are “copies.” Although Aristotle

moved the locus of the Forms from their own separate realm to the individual

thing (and the Islamic Peripatetics followed him in this to a certain extent, hence

Suhrawardī’s criticisms), he remained an essentialist, that is, he like Plato held

that the fundamental reality of an entity both in terms of what it actually is and

how it is understood is determined by the universal attributes which define its

nature rather than by its individual existence. For Suhrawardī as much as Ibn

Sinā, what is illuminated in the human intellect are the intelligibles or Forms: we

know essentially.

Now, essentialism in general and the doctrine of the Forms in particular is

fundamentally foreign to Indian thought. This is of course not to say that

abstract universals are completely foreign to the Indian philosophical tradition.

In the Nyāyavaiśeṣika, for example, abstract universals (jāti) are real objects

existing independently of the cognizing mind and are one of the valid means of

knowledge (pramāṇa).140 However, no Indian system of thought is essentialist,

140 The Mīmāmsā held not dissimilar views. The Advaita view was that universals do not

exist (only Brahman does).

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holding that abstract universals are the primary and most evident means of both

existence and knowledge. Nor is any Indian system remotely Platonist, holding

that here is a realm of rational intelligible Forms: separately existing abstract

universals that are both separate from the realm of experience and of a greater

value and reality than it is.141 As Larson writes:

There is no separate realm of reason, no pure rationalism, no pure realm of ideas, no pure possibilities and no transcendent “mind of God”….In the classical Indian systems there is no privileged realm of knowing of a purely rational kind or of a purely experiential kind that guarantees reliable knowledge. (“Conceptions” 250)

This distinction is not an unimportant one. Since for both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta, all of reality is finally and fundamentally Light, the categories of

manifestation are Light emanating Itself to itself and so in a sense everything

may be said to be Light. But both philosophies also teach that it is in the

inherent nature of Light to differentiate Itself in its effulgence—more, to veil

Itself from Itself. So the manner in which this formal process occurs is

significant, especially if two or more accounts of it are substantially different.

Recall once again Suhrawardī’s analogy of the science of Light with astronomy: if

spiritual sciences are to be based upon spiritual experience in the same way that

physical sciences are based upon sensory experience, then it is to be expected

that if Suhrawardī, Abhinavagupta, and others are experiencing the Light that

fundamentally constitutes all of Reality, then their accounts of It should be

141 Brahman is not an abstract universal. Neither is Śiva.

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similar, in the same way that a Persian and an Indian astronomer would see the

same celestial objects (even if they gave them different names). And in fact,

with regard to ontology and epistemology, this expectation is fulfilled, as

Chapters 3 and 4 of this study show. But when it comes to emanation,

Suhrawardī along with other Platonists holds that the effulgence of the

fundamental Principle manifests Itself in terms of angelic essences that are

mirrored within the individual consciousness as abstract universals, and it is in

terms of these essences that the subjective consciousness is brought to a state

of knowledge. It is by means of abstract universals that the individual

subjectivity is illuminated. Our minds are illuminated by the Light of the Forms,

and this illumination constitutes knowledge. Moreover, since the Forms

themselves are Lights, they are also sentient. This is the reason why Suhrawardī

identifies them with the angelic Ameshta Spenta of Zoroastrianism.

Kashmir Śaivism has none of this. The categories of emanation are not

intelligible essences, but the organs and elements of sensibility. They are

tattvas. Now, like the Forms of Neoplatonism, they are the radiance of the

effulgent Principle expressed in emanation. They are, finally, Light. But the

manner in which these elements illuminate the sentient subject and so bring

about knowledge is fundamentally different from what it is in Neoplatonism,

including Suhrawardī’s illuminationist version. Illumination of human

consciousness in Kashmir Śaivism by higher forms of radiance does not occur in

terms of predication, the recognition of what an entity is—the identification of

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its essence: “I know that this entity is an X.” Rather, it occurs as the illumination

of its appearance as a separately existing entity: “This entity appears to me”

(arthaḥ mama avabhāsate).

It seems reasonably clear that a good explanation for the greatly

divergent categorical systems of emanation of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta

can be found in their respective historical contexts. Both Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta articulated their emanative doctrines in terms of hierarchical

categories that already were well established in their respective intellectual

cultures: the Peripatetic system of emantion in the case of Suhrawardī, the

Sāṁkhya in the case of Abhinavagupta. They both changed the systems they

received to bring them to be in accordance with their own positions (as Yogarāja

said in the case of Abhinavagupta, to bring them to “conform with the monistic

spiritual experiences of the Āgamic teachings” (xxi)). Since the underlying

sources from which each of their systems were derived were fundamentally

different, so were the derivative systems. This is a reasonably satisfying

explanation as far as it goes, but it leaves another question unanswered: If

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta expressed a fundamentally similar doctrine of

emantion in radically different ways and the difference was due to context,

where did the similarity come from in the first place?

The considerations of historical context examined in Chapter 2 provide a

possible answer. Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta both worked within intellectual

and spiritual traditions whose interaction dates at least to the Indo-Iranian

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substratum at the close of the second millennium BCE. Ever since this time,

Iranians and Indians have experienced a continuous history of mutual interaction

and rediscovery. Moreover, from the time of the Indo-Iranian substratum, light

and sun imagery have been pervasive in many, if not most, of the various

intellectual and spiritual traditions that have arisen within this interactive

cultural matrix. The example of the profound influence of Suhrawardī’s ishrāqi

doctrine in the court of Akbar is only one example of how a specific

illuminationist tradition from one area of this cultural complex could find easy

and ready acceptance in another. Given similar mystical insight, it is perhaps not

surprising that within this matrix of mutual influence descended from a common

primordial source, even traditions that had not been in direct contact might

assume similar forms. This alone might explain the similarities in the doctrines

of emanation in the systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta.

The discussion of context in Chapter 2 of this study also provides a

possible explanation for the differences in the categories of emanation in the

respective systems of these two philosophers. Suhrawardī’s s identification of

the Zoroastrian Amesha Spenta with the Platonic forms is highly suggestive

within the context of the doctrine of emanation, since in all Neoplatonic

formulations of emanation doctrine, it is the forms that are emanated. On the

other hand, both Amesha Spenta and the doctrine of Forms are absent from all

traditions of Indian philosophy, as they are from both the Saṃkhya and Kashmir

Śaivite formulations of the doctrine of emanation. As I discuss in Chapter 2, the

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nature of the Zoroastrian religious reformation of the older Indo-Iranian

tradition reflects a turn toward abstract universals—a turn that was never made

by the Vedic branch of the tradition. This could provide an explanation of how it

is that whereas in Suhrawardī’s illuminationist system the categories of

emanation are understood as Forms or Essences, in Abhinavagupta’s they are

not. Moreover, when viewed in contrast to the Vedic tradition, the move toward

abstraction explicit in the nature of the Zoroastrian reform suggests that there

might be Persian influence on the development of Platonism, in particular on the

development of the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation as part of the

metaphysics of Light. Thus, considerations of historical context in general and

the Indo-Iranian substratum and Zoroastrian reforms in particular provide a

possible explanation for both the similarities and differences in the treatment of

the doctrine of emantion in the systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta.

However, these considerations also have ramifications for the research

question of this study. In terms of the first two elements of the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light, the answer to the research question is definitely in the

affirmative. But with the cosmological element of the doctrine, complications

emerge which render a decision more difficult to determine. While emantion is

present in the systems of both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, in the case of the

latter it takes a decisively non-Neoplatonic form. This indicates that it is not just

Neoplatonism that can occasion a Light metaphysics, for if that were so,

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Abhinavagupta would not have been able to develop one which is so

representative of its essential ontological and epistemological doctrines.

In formulating the research question of this study, I noted that because

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta were not, strictly speaking, part of the western

history of philosophy, it might be necessary to modify how the doctrine of the

Light metaphysics is understood in order to be able to accommodate their

systems, providing that the results of the investigation seemed to call for it.

Abhinavagupta’s version of the doctrine of emantion, with its non-Platonic

categories, raises this possibility. Unlike the other two elements of the doctrine

of the metaphysics of Light—the ontological and epistemological—the answer to

the basic research question for the doctrine of emantion is not clear-cut and

unambiguous.

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CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION

I began this investigation of the philosophies of Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta with a question of whether or not their systems of thought could

be included under the rubric of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light. As far

as Suhrawardī is concerned, his status as a Platonist indicated an affirmative

answer, and this was confirmed by the investigation of his historical context,

which showed his thought standing firmly in the tradition of Islamic philosophy

which is one of the principle currents of the tradition.

The same investigation of context also demonstrated that there was no

evidence of any direct connection between Abhinavagupta and this Platonic

stream of the tradition, although there did exist a kind of general context

throughout Central Eurasia in which a wide variety of spiritual traditions

employed the idea of light as an important symbol or soteriological idea. This

had the result of shifting the discussion of context eastward to focus on the

complex matrix of cross-cultural influence which has characterized Central

Eurasia in general and which has involved Iran and India in particular. From the

close of the second millennium BCE, the history of Iran and India has been one of

continuous interaction. Suhrawardī’s own understanding of the sources of his

system invokes a primordial tradition common to Egypt, Babylonia, Greece,

Persia and India. In any comparison with an Indian philosopher such as

Abhinavagupta this fact will inevitably suggest the Indo-Iranian substratum

underlying both the Zoroastrian and Vedic traditions, which has the advantage of

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suggesting a possible explanation of both the similarities and differences in

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta as inheritances from their common, if distant,

Indo-Iranian ancestry. In addition, although there is no attested relationship

between Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta in their own lifetimes, Suhrawardī’s

illuminationist philosophy had a profound influence upon and interaction with

Indian systems of thought five centuries later during the reign of Akbar, the

greatest of the Mughal emperors. This example points to a pervasive

commonality of intellectual and spiritual understanding that made it possible for

a specific illuminationist tradition from one area of this cultural complex to find

easy and ready acceptance in another.

But the metaphysics of Light is even more specific than that. It is a

philosophical doctrine with a certain logical structure that proclaims a set of very

particular and interrelated concepts concerning what reality is and how we know

both it and ourselves. Therefore I find it remarkable to what extent Suhrawardī

and Abhinavagupta not only each hold the doctrine as the foundation of their

respective systems, but do so in remarkably similar ways. For the first two

elements of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light, the ontological and the

epistemological, it seems to me evident that the answer to the research question

is affirmative: both Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq and Abhinavagupta’s anuttara

trika kula are quintessential examples of the metaphysics of Light.

To my mind, one of the most striking and significant indications of this is

to be found in their use of the sun as a symbol for the means of knowledge. This

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is a much more specific conception than the seemingly universal human

reverence for the sun as the giver of life. It the use of the physical sun as a

symbol to ground a theory of human knowledge, the doctrine of divine

illumination, and its use in this way is identical in Kashmir Śaivism and Platonism.

In both systems, the sun as a symbol for the means of knowledge is employed in

a triadic theory of cognition in which an ultimate Principle brings individual

human awareness to a state of cognition by illuminating its relationship with the

objects of its knowledge. This goes beyond the mythology, ritual or poetry of

sun worship into the realm of speculative thought, of philosophy. In both

systems, both the symbol and the theory are the same.

This similarity of theory is also reflected in the way that both

philosophers use the same overall form of argumentation to establish their

claims. When Suhrawardī argues that self-knowledge must be by presence or

constructs arguments against the Peripatetics and when Abhinavagupta argues

against the epistemologies of the classical darśanas, in both cases their

arguments are always indirect and they always turn on the same idea. This is

that to regard myself as an object is impossible because if I regard myself as an

object I am regarding myself as insentient, and so I am not regarding myself at

all, because I am always present to myself as self-aware. This is how Suhrawardī

establishes the general principle of knowledge by presence and it is how

Abhinavagupta refutes the Saṃkhya dualism. Both the similarity and

sophistication of these forms of argumentation is, I think, remarkable.

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What I also tend to believe that this investigation shows is that both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta not only express the core doctrines of the

metaphysics of Light in similar ways, but that the particular ways in which they

do it is itself a remarkable advance in clarity, insight and philosophical

sophistication on other prior formulations of the doctrine. Contextually, they do

this in parallel, at about the same time, thousands of miles apart, and without

any contact.

The best example I can think of to illustrate this is what I believe I can

reasonably call the fundamentally phenomenological orientation that pervades

both of their systems.142 Although there is some difference in detail, for both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta reality consists of objects and events that appear

within the field of Consciousness, and there is nothing independent of that

Consciousness. For Suhrawardī, the essential nature of the anwār mujarrada,

the immaterial Lights is anā’iya, “I”-ness, or ‘ilm bi-dhātihi, self-awareness. For

Abhinavagupta, the essential nature of prakāśa is vimarśa: reflexive awareness.

For both philosophers, Consciousness is what brings things into manifestation

through its own self-evidence. If it is not too anachronistic to employ a

142 “Phenomenology” is a reasonable translation of ābhāsavāda.

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contemporary paraphrase, for both philosophers all human beings stand im Sein

der Lichtung, or even better, im Sein des Lichts.143

I find that in the prior development of the metaphysics of Light we simply

do not find the same sophisticated analysis of self-awareness as we do in both

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. Avicenna’s suspended man hypothesis144 serves

as a precursor to Suhrawardī’s arguments to show that knowledge of the self

must be by al-‘ilm al-ḥuḍūrī, but Suhrawardī’ goes on to use the illuminative

relation to make consciousness the basis of his whole system in a way that is

unprecedented in degree or scope either by the Peripatetics or the Neo-

Platonists before them. While both prakāśa and vimarśa are anticipated in

Indian thought before Kashmir Śaivism, there is perhaps no prior system whose

phenomenology posits consciousness not only as a witnessing subjectivity, but

also as constituting in and of itself a real world which it itself makes to appear.

No system which makes the self reflective pure Consciousness (ahaṁbhāva) the

fundamental basis of reality to the extent it does. As Dyczkowski writes: “It is

with Utpaladeva that this subtle and complex intuition of the absolute first

143 As Mohammed Azadpur records, Seyyed Hossein Nasr once asked Henry Corbin

“about the Perso-Arabic equivalent to ‘phenomenology.’ Corbin replied that ‘phenomenology’ means ‘kashf al-maḥjūb,’ ‘the casting aside of the veil’” (35). Perhaps the reader will be reminded of the kañcukas. The relationships between phenomenology, hermeneutics (ta’wil) and the metaphysics of Light ramify in a complex yet meaningful way which, as I note in Chapter 1, are beyond the scope of the present study. To repeat what I said there, I can do no more here than recognize their importance. 144 Avicenna imagined a man with his eyes covered and suspended in the air with his

limbs separated in such a way that they could not touch (similar to a modern sensory deprivation tank). He argued that such a man would still know himself as conscious.

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appears in the history of Indian philosophical thought” (“Self-Awareness” 29).

For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta the central structure of our experience

is what Abhinavagupta would call its “shining” and Suhrawardī its “presence”—

its manifestation in self-awareness.

But unlike the phenomenologists of our era, for Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta the structures of first-person experience are not understood as

occurring in isolation. This is because the doctrine of divine illumination is part

of both of their systems. For both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta, our first-

person experience is enabled by the illumination of the ultimate Principle of

reality.145 This is because in both systems the individual human consciousness

enjoys a state of existential identity with the ultimate Principle of reality, which

is Itself supremely self-aware.

This implies that the Light of Consciousness forms a continuum. Although

everything is finally present to Consciousness, it appears before Itself in qualified

forms. In the particular case of human beings, its luminosity is partially veiled,

and in the case of non-living and insentient objects, it is completely veiled. Since

insentient entities are not self-luminous, they do not manifest in and of

145 And this, as discussed in Chapter 3, is in consequence of the repudiation of the

doctrine of divine illumination starting in the 13th century. It may be why (as again Azadpur records) Corbin finds that Heidegger in his understanding of hermeneutics as “the unveiling of what is happening within us” draws limits that are “too narrow” (36). Indeed, for according to Kashmir Śaivism, “what is happening within us” is nothing less than Śiva and Śakti. For Suhrawardī it is the Light of Lights.

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themselves and they are that which is most distant from the Principle which

manifests most completely to Itself and from which all illumination proceeds.

There is another aspect of the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light in

which both Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta both show themselves to be in

accord with the Neoplatonic articulation of the doctrine. In all Neoplatonic

systems, the formal cause of the generation of the manifest universe is always to

be found in the relation that exists between the Ultimate Principle and its First

Emantion. In all cases, this relationship is presented as an interplay146 between

the Principle and its First Emanation in which the First Emanation manifests its

own relationship to the Principle in a mode of objectivity rather than

subjectivity. The First Emanation represents itself to itself as being in a state of

relationship to its Principle. The Principle, on the other hand, does not represent

Itself to Itself at all. Its knowledge is entirely by presence and all of Reality is

present to it in the same way that our thoughts and dreams and imaginations are

present to us.147 As Suhrawardī argues in his doctrine of knowledge by presence,

to the extent that any entity attempts to represent itself to itself it is not present

to itself. This is what distinguishes the First Emanation from the Principle, for it

146 Always understood as occurring formally, that is, not within the confines of space

and time. 147 We do not represent out thoughts to ourselves; we have them. We are in a state of

existential identity with them. As Wittgenstein pointed out in the Philosophical Investigations, to say that “I am in pain” is not to represent myself to myself as being in pain, but to be in pain (247). This is, essentially, the difference between the Consciousness of the Principle and all of its emanations, including ourselves.

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is the essence of the Principle to remain in a mode of pure subjectivity, that is,

absolute knowledge by presence. It is the essence of the First Emanation to

objectify itself in a formal act of self-representation. But this objectification is

not total, only in regard to its relationship with the Principle. The First

Emanation is also essentially a Light, and so it too emanates. And so like mirrors

placed before mirrors, the self-objectification through self-representation

recursively ramifies throughout the entire continuum of emanation, until it

reaches its ultimate degree in absolute insentience.

Now, in Plotinus the Principle is known as the One or the Good (ena,

agathon), and the First Emanation is known as the Intellect (nous) and it is the

self-contemplation of the Intellect that leads to duality and manifestation: “Once

you have uttered ‘the Good’, add no further thought: by any addition, and in

proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency” (Enn 3.8.11). In the first

emanation, the Intellect sees objectivity within itself (as the Forms which

distinguish things by their essence) and so distinguishes itself from the One:

“they are separated only by otherness” (Enn 5.3.12). But out of this

contemplation there arises, through another reflection, a further degree of

objectification when the next emanate, Soul (psyche) cognizes the forms as

external to itself. The emanation is recursive: Plotinus tells us that the Soul is

related to Intellect as Intellect is related to the One (Enn 6.1.7). And so in the

same recursive way the process continues, manifesting the phenomenal world.

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In Avicenna, the Principle is called the Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd).

The First Emanation is called First Intellect (al-‘aql al-awwal). It is the inherent

essence of the First Intellect to contemplate its own contingency in relation to

the Necessary Being’s necessity.148 This self contemplation also emanates the

Second Intellect, whose own self-contemplation continues the emanative

continuum.

In Suhrawardī the Principle is called the Light of Lights (nur al-anwar);

the First Emanation is called the Proximate Light (nūr aqrab) and, as Suhrawardī

himself explains: “By the manifestation to itself of its own dependence and the

darkening of its own essence in its contemplation of the glory of the Light of

Lights in relation to itself, a shadow results” (ḤI 142). A re-iteration of the same

process produces a Second Light and then the process continues.

In Abhinavagupta the Principle is called śivaśakti, wherein śiva and śakti

are considered as being united as one in a state of pure sentient subjectivity

(upalabdhṛtā). The First Emanation is called śadāśiva. As Dyczkowski writes:

“Here faint traces of objectivity appear in the pervasive, undivided consciousness

of Śiva and Śakti” (Doctrine 166). This consciousness, in which subjectivity still

predominates over objectivity, that is, presence over representation, takes the

form of “I am this” (aham idam) but then it in its turn emanates into a next

148 Note how “contingency” and “necessity” stand in the place of Suhrawardī’s

“representation” and “presence.” This exemplifies the difference between the Peripatetic and Illuminationist systems.

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Category in which objectivity begins to predominate: “this is I” (idam aham).

The process continues through the continuum of all thirty-six tattvas.

In my view, this is perhaps the strongest justification of all in support of

an affirmative response to the research question with regard to Suhrawardī’s

and Abhinavagupta’s philosophical systems. Although the details and

nomenclature differ, the parallel formulation of what is an undeniably complex

and sophisticated doctrine involving manifestation in terms of a re-iterated and

recursive structure of self-awareness and self-representation is unmistakable.

However, this impressive similarity in structure derives from the doctrine

of emanation. To invoke the doctrine of emanation in support of the claim that

Abhinavagupta’s system can justly be considered to be a metaphysics of Light is

to bring in train the issues raised in Chapter 5—issues that may call that very

claim into question.

In Chapter 5, examination of Suhrawardī’s and Abhinavagupta’s systems

revealed that, while they were both emantionist in the thoroughgoing and

consistent way that I have just summarized, there is a nonetheless a

fundamentally important difference. While both systems agree that the

universe is manifested by an outpouring of the Ultimate Principle from Itself and

that the outpouring is Light, they diverge entirely in the categorical form that

they understand Light to take.

Suhrawardī is a Platonist. In his system, when the Light of Lights pours

itself forth in illumination, the resulting continuum is constituted in terms of a

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manifold of entities that both exist and are known as intelligible Forms. What

diversifies the aspects of reality are those common and universal characteristics

whereby the essences of things are determined intelligibly. It is an emanational

structure consisting of essences, of quiddities, of mahaiyya, of “whatnesses.”

Light is that which makes things manifest, and quiddities make things manifest to

the intellect, and so illuminate it. In Suhrawardī’s system the Platonic Forms are

the lords of the species (arbab al-anwa) which illuminate all things, giving them

their essential forms, which are fundamentally what they are and how they are

known.

In Abhinavagupta and Indian thought in general, there is none of this.

The paradigm of cognition, of knowledge, is not “I know what this is” but “I know

this thus” (ahamittamidaṁ). This is the form, Abhinavagupta says, that

determines (adhyavāsayanī dhī) the nature that an entity assumes in the field of

awareness. That nature is generated by the reflection of the Light of

Consciousness in the mirror of the individual intellect which has been limited by

the six obscuring coverings (TĀ 1.39–40). These coverings, as the reader will

recall from Chapter 5, are the self-imposed limitations whereby the Light of

Consciousness manifests in objective form through the twenty-five tattvas of the

original Sāṁkhya system of emanation. The entire accent of the emanational

system is existential rather than essential. Entities “shine” existentially in

Kashmiri Śaivism. They are manifest to cognition in their individuality as filtered

through the differentiating categories of Consciousness as it flows outward

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toward the experience of Itself as appearance (ābhāsa). There is no intervening

realm of abstract intellectual essences that mediate the emanative flow of the

Light into intelligible universal categories that have a separate existence in the

continuum of illumination and manifestation.

Now, as I discuss in Chapter 5, there is ready to hand a perfectly good

contextual explanation of this difference between the emanative categories of

Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta. Neither philosopher was working in a historical

Vācuum: both were associated with great philosophical traditions that had

informed their respective cultures over millennia. Both of their systems were

innovative and radical, it is true, but there were so still within the context of

those traditions. Suhrawardī’s emanative system incorporated Platonic forms

because it was a system developed within the context of Neo-Platonism.

Abhinavagupta’s system incorporated tattvas because he worked within the

context of Indian intellectual culture in which the Sāṁkhya system still set the

philosophical agenda in terms of the underlying nature of the categories of

reality—even when it was being refuted by the other Darśanas.

But what are the implications of this for the research question of this

study? Identifying Suhrawardī’s and in particular Abhinavagupta’s systems to be

examples of the metaphysic of Light obviously implies that while they may differ

in some details (even two thinkers trained completely in the same tradition will

have some differences) that they should be the same in fundamental ways. Here

is an important difference between Abhinavagupta’s version of the doctrine of

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emanation and Suhrawardī’s. Is it an important enough difference to determine

the answer to the research question? Does the absence of the Forms from

Abhinavagupta’s doctrine of emantion mean that his system is not to be

regarded as a metaphysics of Light?

One reasonable answer, if perhaps an unsatisfying one, is to say that it

will depend on who is asking (or answering) the question. Scharfstein points out

that it is very different to view philosophies from two (or more) different cultural

contexts from within one of the contexts, as opposed to attempting to take a

view that looks at them from outside, as it were:

As the person within a certain tradition sees it, to try to compare its philosophy with that of another tradition is like trying to play two discordant games at the same time. However, the comparatist is not the practitioner of any one philosophy but a theme-and-variation philosopher, whose interest is in the varieties of philosophies….My conclusion is that the philosophical traditions are either unique or alike depending upon one’s position in relation to them—inside or outside—and the standard of judgment one adopts, that is, the kind and degree of abstraction one allows oneself in order to deny or justify comparison. Both sides are quite right, if one wishes, or neither, if one insists. (39)

The theme-and-variations analogy is a good one: it would cause one to say,

perhaps, that the theme is the metaphysics of Light and Suhrawardī’s and

Abhinvagupta’s systems are two variations played upon it, and the differences in

their categories of emanation are one of the things that make the two variations

different. But this still begs the question: At what point do the variations

become so different from the theme that they destroy its thematic integrity as

such?

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There is even more to be considered. Because if one can ask how

essential is the theory of Platonic Forms to the doctrine of emanation, one may

with equal justice ask how essential is emanation to the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light. In my brief review of the history of the doctrine in

Chapter 1, I note that the doctrine of emanation, so pervasive a part of the

metaphysics of Light in its Neoplatonic forms, was absent from medieval

scholasticism entirely because it could not be accommodated in terms of the

theological doctrine of the Roman Church and so it was condemned. Yet in the

scholarship of the Western history of philosophy, the term “metaphysics of

Light” is regularly applied to elements of medieval scholasticism. And whether in

its Platonic or Aristotelian versions, all these medieval systems embrace

essentialism. So on the one hand, we have systems that affirm essentialism and

deny emanation, and on the other, a system—Abhinavagupta’s—that affirms

emanation but does not recognize essentialism. If one would wish to debar

Abhinavagupta from the metaphysics of Light because he is not an essentialist,

should or should not one also debar medieval systems that have been

recognized as expressing the doctrine because they deny emanation? Which is

more important, essentialism or emantion?

These are not simply questions of taxonomy. To recall again Staal’s

dictum, comparative philosophy is still philosophy. The answers given to these

questions by different intellectual and spiritual cultures may have significant

consequences. At least it is possible to think so. In looking at the repudiation of

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the doctrine of divine illumination by the Latin West in the 13th century, for

example, Henry Corbin wrote that it determined the “different spiritual destinies

which awaited the East and West, respectively” (History 249).

In initially posing the research question of this study, I noted that the

eastward shift of the historical context of this study might necessitate a

reconsideration of what constitutes the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light

itself. Suhrawardī himself understood his tradition to be rooted in an ancient

wisdom tradition that was common to Egypt, Greece, Persia, Babylon, and India.

His identification of the Zoroastrian Amesha Spenta or bounteous immortals

with the Platonic forms suggests that Iran may have been not only a bridge

between Eastern and Western currents of thought that contributed to the

metaphysics of Light but an important source of them as well. The existence of

an Indo-Iranian linguistic, mythological and spiritual substratum existing prior to

the earliest Vedic and Zoroastrian scriptures be a potential source of a common

heritage that eventually flowered into various forms of Light-based spiritual

practice and intellectual speculation. This includes possible Persian influence on

Platonism itself, something which the Neoplatonists themselves consistently

affirmed. In terms of this study, this has the advantage of suggesting a possible

explanation of both the similarities and differences in Suhrawardī and

Abhinavagupta as inheritances from their common, if distant, Indo-Iranian

ancestry.

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Shifting the focus of investigation eastward shows that it is not just

Neoplatonism that occasions a Light metaphysics, for if that were so,

Abhinavagupta would not have developed such a nuanced and comprehensive

Light based system. That he did so without recourse to specifically Neoplatonic

doctrinal formulations may in fact give credence to Suhrawardī’s affirmation of a

primordial illuminationist tradition, perhaps rooted in an Indo-Iranian (or even a

Indo-European) substratum, of mythic and proto-philosophical beliefs and

practices concerning Light. But all this can be seen to, in effect, turn the

research question of this study on its head. Rather than asking whether the

systems of Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta fit within the doctrine of the

metaphysics of Light as defined in the western history of philosophy, perhaps we

should ask whether or not the doctrine of metaphysics of Light itself should be

recontextualized to reflect the eastward shift of focus to Iran and India that this

study inevitably involves. Perhaps a view more appropriate to a truly adequate

comparative philosophy would be one in which the doctrine of the metaphysics

of Light would no longer be defined in terms of western intellectual history and

Neoplatonism, but more broadly and comprehensively, so that the western

formulations of the Light metaphysics would not be seen as the defining

paradigm, but only one example. It might be even better to advance a view in

which the doctrine of the metaphysics of Light is not a fixed category to which

different systems like those of Plotinus and Augustine, Avicenna and

Bonaventure, Suhrawardī and Abhinavagupta do or do not belong, but rather

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that the doctrine delimits a realm of discourse in which conversations between

different systems of thought may take place. What defines this realm of

discourse is McVoy’s notion of “a single concept possessed of a richness or

magnetic force sufficient to ground a whole system of ideas” (“Light” 126). The

single concept is that of Light, and it is not just one system of ideas that gather

around its radiance, but many. In this sense I submit that the answer to the

question of whether Suhrawardī’s ḥikmat al-ishrāq and Abhinavagupta’s

anuttara trika kula are systems of the metaphysics of Light is certainly in the

affirmative.

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APPENDIX A: ABBREVIATION KEY

Conf Augustine, Confessions

DeAn Aristotle, De Anima

DeAn(Al) Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Anima

Enn Plotinus, Enneads

FMā Avicenna, Fī Maqāmāt al-‘ārifīn

ḤI Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-Ishraq

ĪPK Utpaladeva, Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā

ĪPv Abhinavagupta, Īsvarapratyabhijñāvimarśini

KN Avicenna, Kitab al-Nafs

KSTS Kashmiri Series of Texts and Studies

MA Al-Ghazālī, Mishkāt al-Anwar

MFā Al-Fārabi, Mābadi’ ārā Ahl-Madina al-Fādila

MMq Avicenna, Manṭiq al-mashriqīyīn

PTv Parātrīśikā Vivaraṇa

Rep Plato, Republic

ṚV ṚgVeda

SCG Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles

Shifā Avicenna, Kitab al-Shifā

SK Iśvarakṛṣṇa, Sāmkhya Kārikā

ST Aquinas, Summa Theologica

TĀ Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka

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TS Abhinvagupta, Tantrasāra

VP Bhatṛhari, Vākyapadīya

Yas Zoroaster, Yasna

YB Vyasa, Yoga Bhāṣya

YS Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra