The Essence of the Tantra

तन्त्रसार

Tantrasāra

by Abhinavagupta

The Tantrasāra ("Essence of the Tantra") by Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975-1025 CE) is his own condensed prose redaction of the much larger verse Tantrāloka, distilling the doctrine and ritual of non-dual Trika (Kashmir) Śaivism into twenty-two āhnikas (chapters). It is a PROSE work: every editorial unit below carries section_type: 'prose' and a prose_block_ref; there are no verse meters (the embedded framing/summary ślokas are not separately metered out — they stay inside the prose flow exactly as the source numbers them). SOURCE: GRETIL Devanagari e-text (input by Oliver Hellwig), itself based verbatim on the editio princeps — Mukund Rām Śāstrī (ed.), The Tantrasāra of Abhinava Gupta, Bombay: Nirnaya Sagara Press, 1918 (Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 17), which is public domain. Every Devanagari character below is verbatim from that GRETIL file; the IAST is a mechanical Sanscript devanagari->iast transliteration of it (no emendation). Upstream quirks are preserved un-emended — e.g. āhnika 16's heading spells the ordinal "षोदशम्" (sic, for षोडशम्), and āhnika 22 skips block number 46 (the source's numbering jumps 22.45 -> 22.47); both are kept as-is. BLOCK-SEGMENTATION RULE: the GRETIL source already segments the text into numbered units, each closed by the marker "॥ अभ्त्स्_<āhnika>। <unit>" (Abhinavagupta Tantrasāra). Each such source-numbered unit is exactly one prose block here. prose_block_ref is "ah<A>.b<N>" where A is the āhnika and N is the source's own unit number for that āhnika (so refs inherit the source's gaps, e.g. ah22 has no b46), while verse_num is a contiguous 1.. counter per āhnika for stable URLs. These boundaries are editorial-but-source-derived and become permanent. Chapter titles are the source's bare ordinal headings ("तन्त्रसार, <ordinal> आह्निकम्") verbatim; topical āhnika names are NOT in this source and are deliberately omitted rather than composed. LICENSE: GRETIL redistributes under its reference-use terms tracking the public-domain 1918 KSTS print; pending_miri is set so the Muktabodha/critical-edition cross-check can be completed before deploy.