Knowing Oneself – Bringing together Kashmir Shaivism and Bhoja’s guṇas-based Aesthetics

Abstract

Kashmir Shaivism strives to answer two fundamental, inter-related questions: firstly, who am ‘I’? and secondly, how to attain the True ‘I’? In Kashmir Shaivism, ‘I’ is synonymous with Pure Consciousness (Śiva-hood). The school propounds a theistic, idealistic, and monistic philosophy within the Śaiva tradition. In this paper, we not only explicate the answers to these questions by resorting to the metaphysics of Kashmir Shaivism but employ textual analysis and interpretation to examine how an aesthetic model proposed by Bhoja and based on the three guṇas can help us to place this metaphysics in the context of the second question.