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Wellsprings
Utpaladeva

Utpaladeva

950 CE · Kashmir Valley

c. 925–975 CE

Utpaladeva (c. 925–975 CE) was the disciple of Somānanda and the thinker who transformed the Pratyabhijñā insight into a fully argued philosophical system. His Īśvara-pratyabhijñā-kārikā ('Verses on the Recognition of the Lord'), with his own commentaries, became the central philosophical text of the school, working out a sophisticated idealism in which all reality is the self-luminous consciousness of Śiva and bondage is mere non-recognition of this. He was also a devotional poet of great power; his Śivastotrāvalī expresses the same non-dual vision as ecstatic longing for union with Śiva. His work was the direct basis for Abhinavagupta's later great commentaries.

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Kashmir Valley

What they did here

Traditional birthplace of Utpaladeva.

About Kashmir Valley

The Kashmir Valley, in the present-day Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, is a Himalayan basin drained by the Jhelum River and centred on Srinagar. From roughly the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the homeland of the non-dual Shaiva tradition known as Kashmir Shaivism, whose exegetes—among them Somanānda, Utpaladeva, Kṣemarāja, and the commentator Jayaratha—were active here.

In Kashmir Valley at the same time

Somānanda

See other sages who lived in Kashmir Valley→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Utpaladeva’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

In the same tradition

Somānanda

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Utpaladeva’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)