The aim of this book is basically to introduce the reader to the fundamental principles that Trika philosophers have enunciated in their philosophical – cum-theological treatises. Such an approach has been adopted deliberately on account of the fact that Trika system of thought, which is very rich in philosophical vocabulary, is hardly known to general public in the manner of Advaita Vedanta of Samkara.
Although non- dualistic in orientation, yet it differs radically from the monism of Samkara with regard to the nature of the Absolute and the world. The Trika philosophy rejects the Vedantic view of the Absolute as being inactive. Instead of an inactive Absolute, it thinks of the Absolute theistically, and so speaks of Paramasiva as being both consciousness and reflective awareness. As such the Absolute of Trika is equated with the absolute freedom, and so the school also is referred to as being that of Freedom. In so far as the status of the world is concerned, the Trika thinks of it as being extension/emission/reflection of Paramasiva and so is considered to be real. It means that the world, even though a reflection of Paramasiva, is actually Siva itself.
From these main differences it can be discerned that the Trika absolutism is radically different from the one that Samkara has adumbrated. It is hoped that the reader upon reading the book will be able to have the grasp of the main philosophical principles that the Trika has enunciated and developed.
Moti Lal Pandit, trained as a theologian and linguist, has been engaged for last three decades in such dialogic research as would disseminate knowledge concerning the essence of such forms of spirituality as has been enunciated by such major religions as Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity.
Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book.
I recommend ABBYY Finereader 11 (or similar) for doing this work in a relatively easy way. If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won't be duplicated by others. Please upload back the final pdf. Thank you.
Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose - to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. So please don't waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead please contribute a few hours of your time and OCR and proofread the posted book. Thank you.
MsSVig