The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā of Utpaladeva with the author's Vṛtti. Critical edition and annotated translation

The Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā (ĪPK ) of Utpaladeva (ca. 925-975 C.E.) is the foundation stone of the Pratyabhijñā school and constitutes the main theoretical framework of the Trika. It is the most important philosophical work of non-dual tantric Shaivism as a whole. Utpaladeva devoted two commentaries to his ĪPK, a vṛtti and a ṭīkā or vivṛti (now almost totally lost). According to Abhinavagupta, the ĪPK and the vṛtti thereon were composed by Utpaladeva at the same time. This makes the vṛtti an indispensable tool to grasp the original meaning of the difficult kārikās of the Īśvarapratyabhijñā. Unfortunately, all vṛtti manuscripts from Kashmir broke at the same point and, consequently, so did the edition (also faulty in many points) published in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies in 1918. The present book, originally published in the Serie Orientale Roma (IsMEO), contains the first critical edition of the ĪPK and, for the first time, the complete text of the vṛtti on the basis of a unique Malayalam manuscript discovered in Trivandrum Library by R. Torella, who has also made use of the other incomplete manuscripts from Kashmir. The edition is accompanied by an English translation with copious exegetical notes, which highlight the connections of Utpaladeva’s thought with the coeval schools of Indian philosophy and, first of all, with the Buddhist pramāṇa tradition. The book is completed by an elaborate Introduction, three Indexes and a Bibliography.