The Śivasūtra — a short, cryptic text of Kashmiri Śaivism — opens with three words: caitanyam ātmā, 'consciousness is the Self.' The Śivasūtravimarśinī, Kṣemarāja's commentary on those sūtras preserved in this manuscript, spends its pages unpacking what those three words mean, and why everything in the tradition follows from them — beginning with a story about how the sūtras themselves were found.
A stone slab and a king's dream
What the shorter draft of this article left out entirely is the origin story the commentary itself tells. At Devagiri, the manuscript recounts, King Vasugupta received a dream from Lord Śrīkaṇṭha instructing him to preserve the teaching, and was directed to a great stone slab on a mountain, on the new moon night of Āṣāḍha.
Going to that stone slab as directed, touching it, when it was revealed at night, that very great stone turned, became facing the north, the mouth of the fire of Shiva. In that, having obtained the Shiva Sutras, arranged in a manner equal to the mother, the lineage was revealed by Bhatta Sri Sambhu to Kallata and others.
This is the tradition's own account of its founding text as a revelation rather than a composition — the sūtras discovered, carved already into stone, not authored. Whatever actually happened on that mountain, the story tells you how the lineage wanted the Śivasūtra to be received: as something found, not written.
The first sūtra
The commentary announces its subject with an invocation that already contains the whole philosophy — a Śiva who expands the universe within himself, filled with the non-dual bliss of consciousness.
I bow to Śiva, the all-pervading one, who, through the pervasion of the Self by Śakti, expands the universe within himself, filled with the non-dual bliss of consciousness.
Then comes the sūtra itself, and the commentary's account of why it is placed first.
Consciousness is the Self. In the first sūtra, to reveal the unmediated sovereignty of Śiva, it is said — 'It perceives, knows all, and acts' — these are the powers of consciousness, meaning that they shine forth in the form of the universe.
Perception, knowledge, and action — the three powers of consciousness — are, in this tradition, not things the Self has but what the Self is. The universe is consciousness shining forth in a form; the perceiver, the act of perceiving, and the perceived are all one movement.
Māyā as covering, not illusion
A long middle stretch of the commentary works through how consciousness, unmediated and sovereign in principle, comes to experience itself as limited — the problem of māyā. Kṣemarāja is careful here: māyā is not unreality but covering, five specific limitations (kalā, rāga, niyati, and two others) laid over a consciousness that remains, underneath, exactly what the first sūtra says it is.
Even a shadow has as its support that which is luminous... Of that Māyā, how is its illusory nature? Even when the eye is closed, that too is to be conceived of the all-pervading one.
The commentary also lays out, with unusual clarity, the three states of ordinary experience as a working typology rather than a mere list.
Knowledge is the waking state. Dream is imagination. Non-discrimination is the māyā-caused deep sleep. The waking state is characterized by a specific external projection based on a unique support; the dream is characterized by the expansion of imagination; and deep sleep is characterized by the nature of non-discrimination.
Waking, dream, and deep sleep are treated as three coverings of the same consciousness, and the commentary goes on to describe a fourth, turīya, that is not a state alongside the other three but the ground running underneath all of them — reached, it says, through repeated non-conceptual absorption rather than effortful meditation on an object.
Mantra as consciousness recognizing itself
A striking passage midway through the text reframes mantra practice itself in these terms — not recitation aimed outward at a deity, but the mind's own vibration recognizing its identity with that deity.
When one is absorbed in the power of will, with mind uninterrupted, the nāma and the citta in the mantra, in the nature of the way of mantra-bhāva. Of the knowers who have attained mantra-bhāva, that citta is itself of the nature of mantra.
A philosophy of unmediated sovereignty
What makes the Śivasūtra radical is the word 'unmediated.' The Self does not need instruments to know or act — it is knowing and acting. This manuscript, Kṣemarāja's commentary written, by its own closing colophon, in Varanasi, preserves that teaching complete: its foundation myth of a stone slab on a mountain, its account of māyā as covering rather than illusion, its map of waking, dream, deep sleep and the turīya beneath them, and its reframing of mantra as consciousness recognizing its own vibration — a tradition that made consciousness, not matter or a distant God, the first and only principle of reality.