Śiva-stotrāvalī
Kashmir Valley · 950
U
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
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Utpaladeva’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Utpaladeva’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.