Sṛṣṭikālī : The Woman Who Created the Universe by Opening Her Eyes : Adaptation of and Commentary on Mark Dyczkowski‘sTranslation of and Commentary on Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka : Part 1

 

                                            Image from betterup.com

Abstract

 

This is the first part of my adaptation of and commentary on Mark Dyczkowski’s translation of and commentary on the Tantraloka by the 11^th century Kashmiri Hindu theologian, philosopher and poet Abhinavagupta. (1)

 

I open with a discussion of the section on the Twelve Kalis, expressions of the Goddess Kali, beginning with the first one, Sṛṣṭikālī, complemented by descriptions of the Twelve Kalis in general and of the primal Kali, from whom they emanate. (2)

 

 

Contents

Abstract   

Context     

Image         

The Opening Invocation   

Imagery of Concreteness and Abstraction 

 

Cosmic Emanation and Consciousness 

 

Between Faith, Fact and Truth  

 

Humanization, Divinization and Transformation in Kali 

 

Factual Truth, Imaginative Truth and Visionary Encounter in Relation to Mythic Cosmologies 

 

From Transcendence to Emanation and Reabsorption of Cosmos 

 

Imaginative Boldness and Metaphysical Power  

                                                                             

Divine and Cosmic Unity and Multiplicity 

 

Dynamic Emptiness   

 

Meditation Inspired by the Image of the Twelve Kalis as Embodying Consciousness in Relation to Cosmic Creation  

 

Concluding Invocation 

Context

 

Composing this work in my home in Lagos, Nigeria, from the 23^rd to the 28^th of May 2025, has been a delightful experience, taking my mind to Mark Dyczkowski, the person who inspires this project.

 

I recall our memorable 6^th August 2016 meeting in Cambridge,  England, before which I had been struck by his graciousness in our email communication, an impression reinforced at our meeting by his simplicity and fine interpersonality, an encounter  well before his departure from the world on February 2, 2025, in Varanasi, India, after completing and publishing in 2023 the monumental, forty five year project of translating Abhinavagupta’s Tantraloka and writing a commentary on it.

 

In composing my adaptation of and commentary on Dyczkoswki’s effort,  I place myself within the creative stream represented by the succession of students of Trika, Abhinavagupta’s school within Hinduism,  “the luminous row of the pearls of truth in Tamraparšī river, the spiritual lineage to which Tryambaka gave his name, the stainless helmsmen, the unfailing pilots of the boat crossing the ocean of the Masters' scriptures, heaving with the play of mighty waves”, as the Kashmiri master salutes his teachers in the Tantraloka.(3)

Tantra, a philosophical and spiritual orientation within Hinduism and Buddhism to which Trika belongs, is  one of the most ideationally and imaginatively penetrating of thought worlds, recreating reality in ways that remarkably spark the imagination even beyond the circles of adherents to its doctrines, qualities concentrated in Trika  and  compounded in Abhinavagupta's work which Dyczkowski superbly illuminates.

 

The universe of ideations and imaginative dynamism represented by Trika attracts a network of commentary across the centuries, a network so rich it could be challenging to appreciate the soaring imaginative force and ideational power of the school's  creativity amidst the framework of commentary, which may be quite specialized, implying that most people would require familiarity with the specificities of the tradition to appreciate such responses to the Trika texts.  

 

Indian and Hindu classics such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads are much better known, but Trika has created a scintillating textual universe of its own which the world would benefit from knowing more about, an example of such exposure being the fame of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, possibly globally unique in its idiosyncratic creativity to the intersection of human embodiment, space and time, bringing alive in daily life the most abstract conceptions on the immanence of ultimate reality.

 

Dyczkowski’s Tantraloka commentary, for example, is awesomely rich, drawing from a universe of texts, projecting acute sensitivity to the minutiae of Trika, its correlative systems and its broadest projections, dramatizing Dyczkowski’s unique critical and expressive force, analytically penetrating, majestically integrative across broad exploratory zones, ideationally explosive and poetically luminous, inviting the reader to fly in cognitive networks spanning vast thought words, across centuries of composition. This wonderful river of knowledge, however, may seem challenging to people unfamiliar with the discursive cosmos being so carefully and dazzlingly unfolded.

 

Hence this reworking and commentary I am writing seeks to present a lean projection of the complex text in a manner actualizing part of its poetic force and ideational ambition in a way that anyone can appreciate.

 

I emphasize my personal response to the text, my sensitivity to its imaginative force and philosophical and spiritual inspirations, contextualizing it from the perspectives of admiration and critical enquiry at the intersection of religious sensitivity, imaginative identification and critical engagement beyond religious frameworks.

 

I thereby develop a personal, intimate relationship with Dyczkowski’s engagement with Abhinavagupta’s masterpiece, sharing the outcome with others in case they could also find it beneficial.

My approach takes significant liberties with the text, on account of which I describe my method as an adaptation. I render both the selected prose text and originally poetic expressions in terms of the graphological structure of poetry, its visual structuring on a page, thereby emphasizing what I understand as the poetic character of the entire work, imaginative concretizations and speculative flight unified with intellectual analysis and empirical observation.

I reflect on these selections, responding to their imagistic power, spiritual sensitivity and intellectual acuteness, in relation to their significance for people even beyond the faith community from which the Tantraloka emerges as a dramatization of an approach to the human condition. Pictures from various sources help vivify its central verbal images.

Dyczkowski’s translation is a rich, complex symphony-Abhinavagupta’s primary text in dialogue with Jayaratha’s landmark commentary and commentary by other thinkers, subsumed by Dyczkowski’s observations. I arrange these voices as part of a seamless text while taking care to indicate in the references who is speaking at any point.

 

I could also quote from texts different from Dyczkowski’s translation and commentary on the Tantraoka. When I do that I credit the source.

 

I also take the liberty of removing  Dyczkowski’s brackets through which he signals his own clarifying additions to the text, to aid the smooth flow of the expressive sequence . At other times I remove his own interpolations and keep only the bare translation.

 

I am starting with the section on the Twelve Kalis out of curiosity. I am already familiar with the magnificent opening paragraphs of the Tantraloka, which would have been the logical place to begin the commentary but I needed the challenge of encounter with an unfamiliar and complex section  of the text to lead me on.

The idea of a sequence of Goddesses who, embodying states of consciousness, generate cosmic progression and reabsorption into its source has fascinated since I encountered in Arjit Mookerjee’s Kali: The Feminine Force. (4)

I will continue with the Twelve Kalis, in sequence, but will also commence a  linear progression from the first paragraph onward.

I am motivated by amazement at the sheer power of the human mind demonstrated by the Tantraloka and Dyczkowski’s engagement with it.  I want to participate in this stream, achieving enrichment of self through the intellectual, imaginative and perhaps spiritual enlargement  that will enable, sharing the adventure with others who may also be enriched, as I honour the efforts of the adepts who gave their lives to the creation of this great work, Abhinavagupta, Dyczkowski and the other thinkers they both draw upon, Sambunatha and others, for the Kashmiri master and Jayaratha, Lakshmanjoo  and Alexis Sanderson and more  whom Dyczkowski dialogues with.

I am not an expert in Tantraloka, or any subject intimately related to it nor can I read the older original texts in any language other than English into which they are translated.

 

I am simply a person who is sensitive to ideas and to good writing and who is enchanted by the book, by Abhinavagupta’s work, by Trika, Tantra and their Hindu contexts, fascinations focused  by  Dyczkowski’s work in general and his Tantraloka translation and commentary in particular. My study of the Tantraloka is  that of a seeker, a student sharing his journey with others, and open to various perspectives.

 

                                      

                                                          

                                                                                             

I çoṉṣṭantly worship Sṛṣṭikālī, Who is the wave of dense, uninterrupted bliss of the Ocean of Energy, kaulārṇava,  and contains inwardly, within Herself, both the unfolding of the universe when She opens Her eyes, unmeṣa,  and its withdrawal, when She closes them,  meṣa — She Who merges and, at rest, dissolves away into the Abode of Energy that has merged into Śiva (5)

 

Imagery of Concreteness and Abstraction

 

A marvelous description of something glorious and puzzling, amazing in its convergence of opposites, yet fired by the passion of the writer, Abhinavagupta.  Dyczkowski quotes this from Abhinavagupta’s Karamastotra,  in explaining the nature of the first Kali, the first of a cycle of twelve Goddesses who are yet one Goddess, Kali,

 

As varied manifestations of one divine identity, the Twelve Kalis enable cosmic creation at the commencement  of a cosmic cycle and its reabsorption into the Goddess at  the conclusion of the cycle, embodying the successive  stages of this process.

Each Kali also personifies a state of consciousness, their sequence dramatizing the dynamism of consciousness as underlying the universe and as defining the essence of the human being.

 

The image of Sṛṣṭikālī bringing the cosmos into existence from within Herself by opening her eyes, and withdrawing it from existence by closing her eyes, is lovely, evoking something momentous through an action delicate and tender, suggesting the aesthetic sensitivities evoked by the human form, in this instance, a woman’s eyes, as the fire of individuality, the concentration of consciousness that is the person, is revealed through the eyes, inimitable even if not fully understandable by the watcher.

 

A sense of wonder is suggested by the image of an entity within whom the universe exists as unexpressed potential, and who only needs to open her eyes for this inward plenitude to come forth in terms of the multifarious dynamism and order of existence as humans know it.

What would the inward state of such an entity be like, what could be the self-understanding of such a being, embodying within Herself the totality of all that can be?

 

“What is God like?’’ an ant was asked, a story goes. “God is a big ant’’ was  the response.

 

Is the image of a woman creating and withdrawing the universe a human conceit along similar lines, visualizing ultimate reality in  human terms?

 

Whatever the case may be, and the Hindu tradition is deep in perceptions of the ultimate as beyond human conception, as also evident in the Abhinavagupta/Dyczkowski text on the Twelve Kalis and Sṛṣṭikālī, the mind needs to begin somewhere in conceiving of the ultimate, and the human form, most intimate to the human being, is thus a priceless starting point.

 

Abhinavagupta’s words evoking Sṛṣṭikālī boldly combine the concrete and the abstract, the anthropomorphic, imaging in terms of the human form, and the beyond-human.

 

Sṛṣṭikālī is depicted as having a form in which she opens and closes her eyes as a human being would, implying a spatial circumscription shaped by a body, but she is also described as a “wave of the dense, uninterrupted bliss of the Ocean of Energy’’.

 

Sṛṣṭikālī is therefore portrayed in both corporeal terms, as a physical form, and as an abstract, non-physical identity, an experience of intense pleasure, bliss, a concentrated experience related to an ocean,  not a liquid ocean, but an ocean of energy.

 

Something dramatic is going on here. Conventionally disparate forms of being are conjoined, both in metaphorical terms, as clearly signposted comparisons between identities, and as statements indicating the deity embodies all these possibilities, perhaps in a literal sense.

Is a radical ontology, an unusual conception of the possibilities of being, at play here, in which an experience, embodiment and abstraction-all cohere to project the character of an identity birthing the cosmos?

 

Cosmic Emanation and Consciousness

 

Who, exactly is Sṛṣṭikālī and why is she so called?

 

“Sṛṣṭi’’ is a Sanskrit word translated as “emanation”. (6)

 

Sṛṣṭikālī is described as the state of the emergence of the cosmos into objective existence, a state that is perceptible to an observer as external to  the person observing it.

 

Thus she is named-

 

Sṛṣṭikālī– The Kālī of Creation, The Emanation of Objectivity (7)

 

Her name identifies her as a form of the Goddess Kali, that aspect of the Goddess that initiates the emanation of the universe from Her own form.

 

Hence-emanation- “Sṛṣṭi” - is conjoined with “Kali”, both coming together to create one name- Sṛṣṭikālī.

 

Before any other existents came into being, the cosmos was aware of itself.

 

How?

 

The One who created it was the first awareness of the cosmos she  created from Herself.

 

The human experience of awareness of oneself and of the world external to oneself as the primary character of consciousness is being described here as a fundamental quality of the universe.

 

Between Faith, Fact and Truth

 

What do I think of the factuality of this account of an ultimate reality birthing the universe?

 

Do I believe in the existence of Sṛṣṭikāli?

 

Yes.

 

Why?

 

I expect the universe was created by an ultimate intelligence, Kālī, of whom Sṛṣṭikālī is an expression being one name for that supreme consciousness and power.

 

The characterizations of such an identity, however, its naming, visual depiction and stories relating to it, are accommodations to the character of the human mind, in my view.

These attributions of the divine reflect the human being’s   need for sensory understanding and for narrative characterization as a creature operating within the framework of time.

 

Humanization, Divinization and Transformation in Kali

 

Humanly related structuring of the divine is particularly striking in Hinduism, represented here by the Goddess Kali, and her consort Shiva, in which richly colorful histories of a deity figure, ripe with adventures and vicissitudes, are coupled with lofty interpretations of that same deity as transcendent of the multifarious possibilities of existence which those narratives reflect.

 

The deity is also understood as immanent in the universe as a cosmic presence unifying the totality of particulars, grounding them  in an ultimate reality that transcends those particulars.

 

In the journey of Indian thought, practically nothing is left behind. The concrete and the abstract, the mythic and the philosophical, the narrative and the conceptual, images and image transcendence, the ritualistic and the contemplative, the crude and the sublime, are integrated.

 

This amalgamation of seeming contraries is particularly striking in  Kali. From the terrible creature unleashed by the Goddess Durga from her forehead to vanquish the demonic host in the Devi Mahatmya, Kali’s iconography over the centuries emphasizing her fearsome demeanor, a garland of severed humanoid heads her necklace, her red tongue lolling in battle frenzy as she wields weapons in her many hands, at home in dispatching foes as well as in sex with Shiva, later adopted by the criminal Thugees, who killed by strangling, as  their patron,  she has become an embodiment of cosmic creativity and consummation, of contemplative withdrawal and  blossoming, her music soulful and profound.

 

David Kinsley’s The Sword and the Flute-Kali and Krsna: Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology, charts this process superbly, reflecting on relationships between what Kali stands for and the human experience even beyond the contexts of faith directed at her. Ajit Mookerjee’s Kali: The Feminine Force presents Abhinavagupta’s majestic mapping of the Twelve Kalis, an awesome convergence of the mythic, the psychological, the contemplative  and the cosmological.

 

Joseph Campbell and Bill  Moyers’ The Power of Myth narrates Ramakrishna Paramhansa’s vision of Her by the river Ganges as a woman who gives birth to and devours her own child, a revelation of cosmic birthing and absorption at the end of a cosmic cycle.  Dyczkowski provides an imagistically rich and ideationally expansive summation of the immediate inspirational background to Abhinavsgupta’s exposition of the Twelve Kalis in note 367 (page 152) of his Tantraloka translation.

 

Co-inherence of magnificent creativities is evident in the selections of Kali centred text in this essay, as imaginative daring meets speculative leap.

 

 

Goddess of Consciousness

Kālasaṁkarṣiṇī

in her Indescribable (anākhyā) transcendental form

(‘beyond the universe’)

‘contracted’, withdrawn into Herself.

Those who attain this state are totally freed of all duality.

 

 Her immanent, cosmic form

( ‘made of the universe’).

In this state, although the one essential, transcendental nature of all things continues to be perceived

 even so, duality in all its forms arises continuously. (8)

 

When you desire to contract your form

you wish not to be phenomenally manifest

you wish to remain beyond the formation (kalanā)

 of name and form.

Your eṣsential transcendental nature

cannot be an object of speech or mind

it constantly recedes far from them. (9)

 

When you assume the state

in which your nature unfolds and expands out

 as all things

your devotees can easily attain you.

 

Could  all these things have really occured?

 

Factual Truth, Imaginative Truth and Visionary Encounter in Relation to Mythic Cosmologies

 

I wonder whether  all non-scientific accounts of the creation of the universe  are not works of fiction, imaginative exercises, the human being trying to fill gaps in his knowledge through inventing a history he has no way of gaining access to,
Such non-factuality, however, does not imply that such imaginative creativity does not have value, even truth value.

 

Faced with reality beyond its comprehension, the human mind refuses to be defeated. It manufactures its own answer to the cosmic silence. It creates  stories to make sense of the awesome complexity in which it finds itself, since the idea of causation, of temporality, of temporal origins and progression, is vital to the human being.

 

Why then do people hold so fervently onto fictions they take as fact?

 

Those fictions contain truth, not a literal truth but an imaginative truth, a value that does not need empirical validation. They imaginatively situate the human being in the cosmos.

 

Beyond issues of linear logic as I present here, cosmologies may also  demonstrate  relationships with visionary experiences that give them credence, that amplify their value.

 

I once had a spontaneous, near mystical experience simply by glancing at a Kamakala yantra, a geometric expression of the cosmos possibly from the Hindu Srividiya, Sakta Goddess centred school, indicating the divine identities the male Shiva and the feminine Shakti in union, a meaning I did not even know about the yantra before the experience, having placed it on my wall simply because of its beauty, an experience in  which far flown horizons of cosmological knowledge centred in my reading about Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity seemed to be converging in my brain within a rush of the most concentrated pleasure, a stream of the purest, thickest honey flowing into my mind,  a mental orgasm correlative with what I later understood is the erotic theme of the yantra which depicts the sexual union of Shiva and Shakti as generating the universe, (10)

 

Does that experience imply an intimation of Shiva and Shakti as entities or does it indicate intuiting the cosmic harmonies, the metaphysical dynamisms, of which they are symbols?

 

The experience was not consummated because it broke off when I wondered if I deserved such fulfilment amidst my shortcomings, so I  can’t say what insights it could have been leading me to.

 

 In spite of my skepticism, however, I am inspired by the human mind projecting itself into the very beginnings of the universe and visualizing how it may have been.

 

 I also think the universe rewards belief, even when the focus of belief cannot be empirically or  even subjectively validated. Belief might be a crucible enabling outcomes beyond human understanding of their causative factors.

 

From Transcendence to Emanation and Reabsorption of Cosmos

 

In this your immanent state

 Kālī, the Goddess of Consciousness,

 is divided, as it were, into twelve forms

 which make all your  countless forms manifest. (11)

 

I find the idea of twelve forms of the primal deity exciting, even more so in that the deity is identified with consciousness, thereby correlating the characterization of deity as an entity with the abstract value represented by consciousness-awareness, of oneself and of the universe beyond oneself.

 

The recurrent emphasis on consciousness asa primary value in some streams of  Indian thought is here fused with the human need for deities that look like humans and who have lives,  histories, reminiscent of those of  humans, even though more grand.

 

The twelve Kālīs

 aspects of the one Kālī

Kālasaṁkarṣiṇī (the Attractress of Time)

the Goddess of Time

the Goddess of Consciousness

 

Time – kāla – ‘death’

the relentless march of time

the progressive decay of things

and ultimately, their end.

 

 As the Goddess Time

 Kālī consumes

 ‘eats’

 ‘gobbles’

everything up

portrayed with Her tongue extending from Her mouth, engaged in ‘licking upʼ the worlds.

Kālī,  Lelihānā, She Who Destroys by Licking.(12)

 

She also destroys Time and Death.

She is said to eat up Bhairava,

Her consort, Who is Time. (13)

 

Delightfully youthful Kumārī

Old Hag Kṛśodarī

Are one and the same

The beginning and the end of time

The Goddess of Time

pliable

inscrutable (14)

 

Imaginative Boldness and Metaphysical Power

 

What could be more remarkable than such a stark conjunction of contraries as the correlation of the abstractions represented by consciousness and time, in the context of cosmic progression, with an image that may be seen as animal in its ferocity,  as indicating the physically voracious if related to the human being, focused through the image of Kali’s tongue extending from her mouth, like a ravenous animal, eating its food and licking the remains, yet this most earthy of images is of a Goddess ‘’licking up” the worlds constituting the cosmos, destroying them by “licking” them?

The image escalates into the grotesque in her further being depicted as eating up her consort, Bhairava, a form of Shiva, who is Time, an image supremely demonstrating the pliability of the Indian religious imagination, in which concreteness and abstraction enjoy  unfettered unity.

 

The imaginative boldness of Hinduism, is at play here. The creative force of this image, its combination of the grotesque and the comic, is amplified by its contrast with the supremely elegant picture of Shiva Nataraja, Shiva as the cosmic dancer,  its delicate balance of multiplicity a supreme triumph of Indian art, depicting Shiva in the act of dancing the cosmos into existence at the commencement of a cosmic cycle and dancing it out of existence at the consummation of that cycle,

 

The exquisite posing of his body, the positioning of his feet and hands, the balance between the various instruments he holds in his many hands, the symbolic ornaments on his body, an ultimate dramatization of the ability to fix concepts, abstractions, in terms of concrete forms generating the most far reaching associations.

 

 The visual greatness of this image, its aesthetic force and its convergence of visual specificity and symbolic breadth  make it perhaps the best globally known example of Indian art after the image of the Buddha in meditation, and, after that one, the image most adapted to various ends.

 

It inspires classical Indian dance representing  Shiva’s dance of creation and his dance of destruction. These adaptations penetrate even into the sciences,  exemplified by  Fritjof Capra’s famous adaptation in The Tao of Physics of the image in demonstrating connections between Asian mysticism and modern science, in honor of which   associations a state of Shiva Nataraja is placed in the grounds of CERN, the European Institute for Nuclear Research,  a gift from the Indian government.

 

Divine and Cosmic Unity and Multiplicity

 

She is Kālasaṁkarṣiṇī

        the Goddess of the Krama.

Every Kālī is Kālasaṁkarṣiṇī. (15)

 

The Twelve Kālīs

in their individual identities

and  their universal nature.

 

 

        Twelve phases of consciousness

         worshipped as Twelve Kaālīs (16)

 

The Goddess

the Sun of consciousness

 who assumes twelve forms as her rays.

The thirteen Kālīs

The thirteenth is Mahābhairavacaṇḍograghorakālī

 in the middle of the other twelve

 who originate from her. (17)

 

         Pure transcendental consciousness

         the source of its dynamic, immanent form as all of them.

 

I praise the absolutely transcendent Goddess

within that ground that lies within the Inexplicable

 in which withdrawal itself is withdrawal

who is untouched by the prolixities of the existent

 and the nonexistent that she projects

manifest in everything at every moment. (18)

 

        I  sing the praise of the sequence-transcending circle of  

        powers animated by the supreme Goddess

       that resembles a  single face appearing in contact with a series

       of mirrors.

 

        Supreme are you, O Kali who, after dividing the body of Time 

         into twelve

         make that same nature shine forth within yourself

        as    one. (19)

 

 

Dynamic Emptiness

 

 The shining brilliance of the luminous deity in the centre

Her essential nature and activity:

 withdrawing  the world of death and decay

back into the Void

 the eternal plenitude

 of her pure divine consciousness —

 the Absence in the centre.

 

imageless images of Voids

flowing into emptiness

generating emptiness

consuming emptiness

 

contemplated by astonished yogis

 who with the awesome audacity

 of the devastating power of the Void

witness the destruction of all phenomena

all mortal existence

 in an immensely powerful implosion

that gobbles everything up

 in a flash of Light that shines with dazzling brilliance.

 

A vision ever intensifying

ever deepening and expanding planes of wonder.

 The yogi thus rushes along this road of negation

this most secret and internal process

the  apocalyptic power of transformation.

 

Mystery upon mystery

speech mysterious

 reality mysterious

 experience mysterious.

 

The seeker  mystified

grasping for meaning

approaching the horror of Kāla

Death and its power

the End of all endings

the beginningless Eternity

 that engulfs time – kāla – and its power – Kālī,

even as it is its source.

 

Unconfined

Space (ākāśa)

the Sky (gagana, kha, vyoman)

 the Place (sthāna) without location

 plane (pada) beyond Being and Nonbeing

 Void (sūnya)

Emptiness (śūnyatā)

the Womb

(garbha) of the One Who is pregnant

with the Void (garbhiṇī).

 

The Supreme Sun (paramārka)

unfolding  like a lotus

the expansion of Emptiness

into Emptiness of the Year of the Twelve Suns

 the Eternity of the perpetual recurrence of timeless Time.

 

Existence severed from this

the Void of  true nature

is recurrent death.

      For those who are true yogis

Skyfarers in the Void of their

pure consciousness nature

 it is eternal life (20)

 

O Mother!

the wave of Śiva’s ocean

       Sṛṣṭikālī, who having cast the universe

       into the outer plane of existence

        quickly lays hold of it and withdraws it again. (21)    

 

This section is particularly wonderful, all of it, except the last stanza, being Dyczkowski’s description of a Kali text centred in the image of Kali in relation to the idea of Voidness, emptiness, which, paradoxically, is also fullness and infinite potential.

Kali, the “Licker of Worlds’’ of the previous image sequence, gives way to Kali as the Void of death and rebirth,

 

Kali, seen in this way, constitutes a path to an ultimate awareness in which death and the absorption of time opens out into eternity.

 

The sequence of images, projected as a journey into wonder, evokes classics of the metaphysics of creative emptiness, from the Christian mysticism of St. John of the Cross to the Buddhist sunyata, particularly in relation to the dakini, the Traveller in Space.

 

The last stanza is chosen to anchor the soaring abstractions of the previous stanzas in this section, focusing the text again on Sṛṣṭikālī, the beginning of the process of cosmic emanation and absorption, as the stanza indicates.

 

Meditation Inspired by the Image of the Twelve Kalis as Embodying Consciousness in Relation to Cosmic Creation

 

Close your eyes.

 

Focus on your sense of awareness of yourself.

 

Focus your awareness of your body and your thoughts.

 

Then focus on the centre of this circle of awareness, the sense of “I’’.

 

After some time, open your eyes, and look around you, taking note of the difference between yourself what you can see outside yourself.

 

On doing this, you dramatize the idea of Sṛṣṭikālī– The Kālī of Creation, The Emanation of Objectivity,  the pure Goddess, who, “eager to manifest, ideates emanation.” (22)

 

Now close your eyes again and repeat the process.

 

You have thereby dramatized the sequence embodied by the  Twelve Kalis, from emanation to absorption and emanation again, in a continuous cycle.

 

I expect that subsequent discussions of the twelve Kalis by Abhinavagupta/Dyczkowski will describe further phases between cosmic emanation and absorption in terms of the Goddess as consciousness, phases which may be related to practical human experience and used as a guide  for contemplation.

 

Concluding Invocation

In the beginning, creativity (sṛṣṭi) is latent. It consists of subtle dancing fire… Becoming eager to manifest ‘objectivity’, it is made beautiful by its contact with the ‘moon’. O omnipresent Bhairava, possessing the glorious powers of the expansion of both Fire and Moon, may your goddess called Sṛṣṭi always play in my mind!

I conclude on those magnificent lines from Abhinavagupta in Christopher Wallis’ translation of the section on  Sṛṣṭikālī in the Tantraloka(23). In lines of poetic fervor, Abhinavagupta invokes the image of  Sṛṣṭikālī in the process of bringing the objective universe into being.

 

He calls on Bhairava, a form of the God Shiva, of whom the goddess is an aspect, for the “goddess called Sṛṣṭi [to] always play in my mind”.

 

 Images of fire, of sun and moon, amplify the passionate force of those lines, in which the celestial bodies likely represent creative potencies or perhaps the masculine and feminine identities, Shiva and Shakti, intertwined in cosmic creation and sustenance.

 

They are explained by Dyczkowski as representing the subject and object of consciousness, “mutually conjoined, expanding and contracting in relation to one another” (24) suggesting the immediacies of the human experience of consciousness pressed into service in describing cosmic creativity.

 

The image of play or dance in evoking divine and cosmic dynamism, particularly in connection with the relationship between the masculine identity, Shiva, and the feminine represented by Shakti, of whom all female divinities are an expression, is one of Abhinavagupta’s more striking forms of expression.

 

It combines imaginative delight and gravitas, creative play and profound signification.

 

 In this case the zone of play of the goddess is his mind, thereby suggesting an aspiration to abide in the cosmic depths in which the goddess’ dynamic being unfolds.

 

 References

1. Dyczkowski’s translation and commentary is titled Tantrāloka: The Light on and of the Tantras: With the Commentary called Viveka by Jayaratha. Privately published. 2023. Eleven volumes.

 

2. The section on the Twelve Kalis is numbered in the list of contents of  Volume Three, Chapter Four as running from pages 195-252 but expositions relevant to the subject begin before that and continue after it, even into the appendices where it is further robustly developed, in terms of a fantastic wealth of images.

 

3. A composite depiction of Dyczkoswki’s rendition and Orphy Jeanty’s English translation, of Lilian Silburn’s French presentation, of  stanza 8 of Book 1 of the Tantraloka.

 

4. Arjit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force, 1988.

 

5. Abhinavagupta, quoted by from Jayaratha from the Kramastotra on page 203.

 

6. Stanza 148 of the Tantraloka on page 200; Stanza 195, page 299;  Dyczkoswki, in  appendix, page 391.

 

7. Page 199.

 

8. Note 473 by Dyczkoswki on page 199, quoting Swami   Lakshmanjoo’s Kramanayapradīpikā.

 

9. Note 473 by Dyczkoswki on page 199, quoting Swami Lakshmanjoo’s  Kramanayapradīpikā.

 

10. An image by Frank Mahood from the cover of David Gordon White’s edited Tantra in Practice, 2000.

11. In note 473 by Dyczkoswki on page 199, quoting swami Lakshmanjoo’s Kramanayapradīpikā.

12. Dyczkoswki, note 479, page 201.

 

13. Dyczkoswki,  note 479,  page 201.

 

14. Dyczkoswki,  page 418,  referencing the CMSS.

 

15. Dyczkoswki, note 479, page 201.

 

16. Dyczkoswki , note 397, page 161; note 479, page 201.

 

17. Dyczkoswki , note 397,  page 161; note 479, page 201.

 

18. Jñānanetra’s  Kālikāṣtotra   verse 18,    translated  by Alexis

Sanderson, quoted by Dyczkoswki on page 459.

 

19. Jñānanetra’s  Kālikāṣtotra,    verse five,   translated  by Alexis

Sanderson, quoted by Dyczkoswki on page 459.

 

20. Dyczkowski,  page 418-419 APPENDIX B

 

21. Page 201.

 

22. Page 201.

 23.The Twelve Kalis: Part One”. hareesh.org

24. Dyczkoswki Dyczkoswki, note 486,  page 203.