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

This course covers all 279 verses of the fourth chapter of Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka .

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 Four: 

The Empowered Means (Śāktopāya)

• The Purification and Empowerment of Thought (vikalpasaṁskāra) – verse 2-12
• The True Nature of Sound Reasoning (tarkatattva) – verse 13-32cd
• The Nature of a True Teacher (gurusatattvaka) – verse 33-40ab
• The Types of Teachers – verse 40cd-78ab
• The Sources and Means of Knowledge – verse 78cd-85
• The Uselessness of the Auxiliaries of Yoga (yogāṅgānupayogitva) – verse 86-109ab
• The Irrelevance of Conceived Forms of Worship (kalpitārcādyanādara) – verse 109cd-122ab
• The Arising of the Cycles of Consciousness (saṁviccakrodaya) – verse -122cd-126
• A Yoga from the Yogasaṁcara – verse 127-146ab
• The Twelve Kālīs – verse 146cd-173ab
• Conclusion concerning the goddess Kālī – verse 173cd-181ab
• The Vitality of Mantra (mantravīrya) – verse 181cd-193
• The True Repetition of Mantra (japyādivāstavam) – verse 194-203
• Conclusion – verse 204-211
• The Relativity of Prohibitions and Injunctions (niṣedhavidhitulyatva) – verse 212-279ab 

Course materials:

• PDF of Chapter 4, 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.