Welcome to the Tantrāloka Home Study Program course on Tantrāloka Chapter Three.

This course covers all 293 verses of the third chapter of Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka in fifty audio and video lessons.  This course is meant to follow the extensive Chapter One and shorter Chapter Two courses, but may be taken independently.  For the background on this text and its relationship to the larger topic of Kashmir Shaivism, please see the Program Overview on this site.  You may also like to listen to the free course on Locating Trika, which provides historical overview.

Overview of Chapter Three:

The title of Chapter Three is “The Supreme Means.” After having elucidated the path of direct realization with no means in Chapter Two, Abhinavagupta now lays out the highest means to enlightenment through entry into Lord Shiva’s supreme state. Also known as Śāmbhava Upāya, this method focuses on entering directly into Lord Shiva’s dynamic creative expression within Himself, through recognition of the process of creative emanation expressed in the phonemes of the Sanskrit alphabet. After a discussion of the philosophy of reflection in the first portion of the chapter, Abhinavagupta then proceeds to elucidate how the successive emanation of phonemes expresses different phases of the coeternal creation of Shiva and Shakti within a unified field of consciousness. The universe thus appears within this supreme field as a dynamic and ecstatic flow of bliss and sound. The chapter ends with discussion of deeper levels of sound and speech, music, and nāda, pure divine vibration.

Course materials:

• PDF of Chapter 3, translated by Dr. Mark Dyczkowski, printed in the original Sanskrit (both Devanagari script and transliterated to English), and English translation.

• Streaming videos of Dr. Dyczkowski teachings-not downloadable.

• Audio links—downloadable.

• Email support: If you have questions of a more personal or individualized nature, concerns about the course, or complex intellectual questions that go beyond the scope of the Facebook group, please email anuttaratrikakula3@gmail.com, and we will respond to your question confidentially and appropriately.  For more advanced intellectual or content-related matters, we will forward your question to Dr. Dyckzowski to respond to you directly.

We hope you will enjoy the course and that you will join us for more as we go forward.