THE following pages were not intended to appear in a book form. This essay was written about four years back as a "Foreword" to a work which for some reasons could not see light of the day. Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria, who was originally instrumental in prevailing upon the publisher (as I came to know of late) in getting this "Foreword" from me, was somewhat upset on withdrawal of the book from publication. Himself a scholar of great substance and repute, he did not want the enormous labour and time that was invested in writing this piece (an exhaustive one for a "foreword") to go waste. Later in one of his meetings he urged Susheel ji, my esteemed publisher, to persuade me to convert this essay into a book form in order to make it available for the scholars at large having interest in the subject. Hence this monograph.
The Krama school of the Trika Saivism of Kashmir, more familiar as Kalikrama to the present day scholarship, would turn out to be the most crucial among the monistic Saiva traditions of Kashmir after the Pratyabhijna school - a scenario people could hardly imagine six-seven decades back, when it came to the notice of modern scholarship for the first time. Since then this school has caught the fancy of an ever widening number of scholars. The present work proposes to deal with the intrinsic ethos of this Kalikula/Kalikrama within the umbrella framework of the monistic Saivism of Kashmir.
The main thrust of this work revolves round three important areas for exploring the doctrine of Kalikrama: (a) the role of cognitivization in ultimate realization, (b) the absence of a theoretical background of the mystical experience built around the consciousness energy, and (c) the inconclusiveness of the hidden meaning posing an epistemological problem in the study of an esoteric Tantric tradition. I propose to do some loud thinking in these areas with special focus on the role of Abhinavagupta and also to draw attention to some areas of contemporary contribution, which has not received the attention it deserves from modern academia. I have a personal reason to be fascinated by the system. My postgraduate studies as well as research publications began with Krama, hence my desire to carry forward the incomplete task even though I am not actively engaged in it at this point of time.
As such, the learned reader will find out that there are three major directions in which this monograph is headed: (a) a short genealogy of modern Krama studies, (b) the epistemology of the esoteric internalization embodied in the doctrine of Kalikrama, and (c) the role played by Abhinavagupta as its main architect.
In the circumstances stated at the very outset, the present work needs be construed as a brief note on the core problematic of the doctrinal discourse. In doing so I have proceeded with the presumption that the reader has some previous background in Kashmir Saivism and Krama. As such a detailed and systemic treatment of all the Kalis individually and related issues has not been attempted. The primary motivation was to investigate their metaphysical essence. If the Tantras offer a life-world, to use Edmund Husserl's expression, how could it be that they did not have epistemological insights to buttress it? Indeed, they had.
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