– Gavin D. Flood
While texts of primary revelation, the Tantras, are mostly concerned with cosmology and ritual and not explicitly with philosophical argument, Tantric theology, such as the recognition school (pratyabhijñā), tried to maintain the universality of supreme consciousness and to refute schools such as the Nyāya which maintained a form of dualism in which the body and self can exist without each other. Yet while wishing to maintain the universality and superiority of their doctrines over the Vedic schools and so identifying universality with truth, this identification is not matched at the level of ritual and its textual instantiation. Here, rather than truth being identified with universality, it is identified with particularity; with the particularity of revelation (viṣeśa-śāstra) in contrast with the general revelation (samāya-śāstra) of the Veda and lower scriptures. On the one hand, in doctrine and argument, we have the refutation of other schools and the maintaining of the universality of consciousness; on the other, we have the refutation of other schools by the disparaging of universality and the emphasizing of the particular, esoteric revelation of the Tantras in a graded hierarchy, revealed through an initiatory structure through a master (Guru, ācārya). For the monistic Shaivas, the higher up the scale the more particular the revelation and the closer to the truth of pure consciousness; the lower down the scale, the more general the revelation and the further from the truth of pure consciousness. This is not so much a contradiction, because the claims operate at different levels, as an attempt to bring together the universal and the particular, which can be seen, above all, in the tantric ideas of the power, vision, and levels of awakening located within the body.
If we can speak of a Tantric theology of revelation, then we might say it is characterized by a belief in a hierarchy of revealed truths and that this hierarchy is liturgically expressed in a hierarchy of initiation. Thus for Abhinavagupta, Shaiva-Siddhānta initiation revealed in the dualist Tantras is the expression of, and gives access to, the cosmic level from which its revelation originates (namely Sadāśiva). By contrast, Trika initiation revealed in the non-dualist Tantras is an expression of and gives access to a higher revelation from the supreme Shiva or from the Goddess (Kālasaṅkarṣiṇī). In all cases, we see that the Tantric traditions generally regard their scriptures as transcending those of the Vedic tradition. One should, perhaps, speak of Tantric theologies of revelation in so far as monistic traditions such as Abhinavagupta’s Pratyabhijñā school must ultimately undermine the very notion of revelation as coming from a source distinct from the self, whereas theistic or dualist theologies, such as the Shaiva Siddhānta and Pāñcarātra, maintain a stronger notion of revelation because it is truly the divine word expressed to beings who are ontologically distinct from its source. But while the issue of dualism and non-dualism is important, there are general features of tantric revelation and its interpretation that distinguish it from the Veda and Vedic schools of interpretation, particularly the Mīmāmsā, although there is some overlap between Pratyabhijñā epistemology and Mīmāmsā. We can express this first in terms of a rejection of Mīmāmsak doctrines, and second in a particular understanding of language that draws heavily on the Grammarian school.
The tantric theology rejects the Mīmāmsaka proposition that scripture is without authorship. The Tantras are composed and revealed by a transcendent theistic reality for the sake of suffering souls. They give an account of the path to liberation and an account of how the world came to be as it is. Rāmakaṇṭha, the Shaiva Siddhānta commentator on the Kiraṇa Tantra, says that a teaching (śāstra) is authoritative ‘only because it is the creation of the Lord, not because it is unauthored (as the Mīmāmsakas assert in the case of the Veda) since that is impossible.’ The Kiraṇa Tantra is taught by the Lord, Hara, to Garuḍa and records their conversation, Garuḍa having received the requisite initiation to hear the scripture, which is only opened to the initiated. In his commentary of the Sārdhatriśatikālottara, Rāmakaṇṭha says that āgamas are revealed by Sadāśiva to Vidyeśvaras and thence to the sages, becoming more and more abridged in their descent due to the limited span of human life, their limited energy, limited intellect, limited wealth and possessing greed and delusion. The Mātaṅgaparameśvara Tantra describes the transmission of the treatise from the mouth of Parameśvara as a subtle sound to the lineage of the various masters. Sadāśiva announces it in 10 million verses, Ananta condenses it in 100,000 verses to the sage ṣrīkaṇṭha, who recites its 3,500 verses to the sage Matanga. Again, the Sārdhatriśatikālottarāgama declares that it is a condensed version in 35 verses of a version of 100,000 verses revealed by Shiva to his son Kārtikeya, not a small book Rāmakaṇṭha dryly observes (na hyalpagrantham), which itself was a condensation of the Vātulāgama of 10 million verses. In its opening verses, the Mālinī describes its descent to the world from the mouth of the Supreme Lord, who communicates the text to the Goddess Umā, saying that he himself had obtained it from the Supreme Self Aghora. Kumāra, who heard the exposition, told the text to the sages, who in turn conveyed it to humanity. The Jayākhya Samhitā of Pāñcarātra was originally taught, it says, by the Lord to the sage Nārada, but in the current age, due to the absence of Dharma, must be rendered in a shorter and simplified form. This is a standard pattern in the Tantras: they perceive themselves to be smaller, simpler versions of texts which are lost or which are too long and complex to be understood by modern humans and so a more limited version is required. As the text descends we might say that it becomes more diluted. Unlike the Mīmāmsaka position, meaning lies in the intention of the author, namely a transcendent theistic reality, to communicate a message to those with the qualification to hear it.
Extending this idea we might even say that as the voice of Shiva is expressed in the texts of revelation, in the Tantras, it is also expressed in the cosmos itself. As in the texts, there is an inherence of word (śabda) and denotation or meaning (artha), so in the hierarchical cosmos, there is an inherence of sound with cosmic structure. The course of cosmic unfolding involves a relation between language, the signifier (vācaka), and that to which it points, the signified (vācya). According to the monistic Shaivas, this relation is one of inherence; word and meaning are united whose meaning explodes upon consciousness (sphoṭa).
Behind this more philosophical formulation is the idea of divine sound, that absolute power is primarily manifested as sound (nāda). This cosmic sound manifests and resonates in all the levels of the cosmos, through supreme and subtle to gross levels where it is expressed as a mantra. The Siddhānta text the Sārdhatriśatikālottara āgama says that this sound or nāda is the supreme seed within all beings whose form, says the commentator Rāmakaṇṭha, is an inner sound which moves up through the body to the mouth and takes the quality of formulated sound (varṇatva) as a word (śabda). Without nāda, a sentence could not be heard nor words denote; it is the basis of conversation. Thus even transactional speech has its root in the hierarchical cosmos pervaded by the Power of the Lord as sound. This cosmic sound emanates from Shakti and from it the Bindu which generates the lower universe.
The tantric revelation is primarily concerned with rituals closely linked to cosmology. Sometimes the metaphysics of the texts are explicitly dualistic, as in the Shaivāgamas of the Siddhānta, and sometimes the metaphysics are not, in which case the texts are open to monistic interpretations by the Shaiva idealists. This lack of a developed concern with philosophy and argument in the Tantras suggests that doctrine is subordinate to the practical concerns of ritual and, in some cases, yoga and meditation. It is not to the epistemological discourse in Indian thinking that we should look to make sense of these texts but rather to the cosmological discourse of Sāmkhya and its implied yogic dimensions along with ritual procedures whose origins like in Brahminical Vedic ritualism. The Mīmāmsakas maintained that the most important thing about the Veda was the injunction to act, to perform ritually. We might say that in a parallel way the most important thing about the Tantras is their injunctive force, that they impel their adherents to ritual action as being more important than philosophical speculation, and that this ritual action is the internalization of the text, the internalization of tradition, and the forming of the self in text-specific ways.