Today we continue our exploration of the philosophical theology called Kashmir Shaivism. This is the last post in this philosophy series (for now at least). Next week I’ll give you a short history of this Tantric movement and then do a couple of weeks taking a more critical stance - problems, gaps, conundrums that I see with this tradition.
But for today, we continue the deep dive. And we’re going really deep: we’re looking for something that can crystallise all the elements that we’ve been trying to understand for the last month or so.1 And that thing, I think, is what the philosopher-saint Abhinavagupta called Principle Zero.
First and Second Principles
Over the last few weeks we’ve looked at the Tantric conception of reality as 36 principles, arranged in a loose hierarchy. At the top we have principles 1 and 2. These are abstract principles that form the ground zero, the ultimate basis, for everything that follows.
