your bridge home
The Great Arguments
She has longed for him for years, and he has been standing in front of her the whole evening, and then somebody says his name.
Utpaladeva's teaching is that you are not going anywhere.
Not that the journey is long, or the path steep, or the goal distant. That there is no journey, because you are already what you are trying to become and have simply failed to notice.
The school is called Pratyabhijna, recognition, and Utpaladeva built it.
Utpaladeva lived around 900 to 950 CE, in Kashmir. In the closing verse of his own great work he names himself: Utpala, son of Udayakara. That is very nearly the sum of the biography.
He studied under Somananda (c. 875-925), who had argued that everything whatever is Shiva, and Utpaladeva took that claim and built the philosophical machinery to defend it.
His works are the Ishvarapratyabhijnakarika, the verses on the recognition of the Lord, and the Shivastotravali, a collection of devotional hymns.
Those two together are the whole man: the tightest argumentation in Kashmiri philosophy, and love poetry to a god.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.