Pratyabhijñā-hṛdayam · Sūtra 8
तद्भूमिकाः सर्वदर्शनस्थितयः
tad sarvasthitayaḥ
The positions of all philosophical views (darśanas) are stages (bhūmikāḥ) of that [one consciousness].
Context
The final sūtra of the cosmological survey (1–8). Having described the structure of reality from the cosmic (sūtras 1–3) through the individual (sūtras 4–7), Kṣemarāja now addresses the landscape of human understanding itself: all philosophical systems are expressions of this same consciousness at various levels. The survey thus closes by absorbing even its own rivals into the picture it has drawn.
Primary reading
A bold inclusivism: no philosophical position is simply wrong — each is consciousness expressing itself at a particular degree of self-recognition. The materialist, the dualist, the Buddhist, the Advaitin, the Trika practitioner — each represents a stage (bhūmikā) of consciousness's self-inquiry. The claim is total (sarva — all views, without exception) and structural: disagreement between systems is not noise to be eliminated but the visible form of consciousness knowing itself at different altitudes.
Commentarial layer
Kṣemarāja's commentary here makes a significant philosophical move: by claiming that all darśanas are expressions of citi, he positions Pratyabhijñā as the meta-perspective that can account for every other perspective without being threatened by any of them. Rival systems are not refuted so much as located — each is shown to describe accurately what consciousness looks like from a particular degree of contraction, and to err only in taking its level for the whole.
Common misreadings
Reading this as relativism — as if all views were equally valid. Trika is inclusivist, not relativist: it maintains a hierarchical ordering of the darśanas, in which each is true of its level and the levels themselves are ranked by the degree of consciousness's self-recognition. The sūtra dignifies every position; it does not equalize them.
Everything turns on bhūmikāḥ, which means both 'stages/levels' and 'roles' in a drama: the first rendering makes the sūtra a hierarchy claim — every philosophy sits at some altitude of consciousness's self-recognition — while the second makes it a theater claim — consciousness freely plays every philosophical part. The choice decides whether the sūtra's inclusivism sounds like a ranking or a performance.
What the differences reveal
The roles-versus-states fork is the real one, and it maps a genuine tension in the doctrine: rendered theatrically, the sūtra emphasizes svātantrya — consciousness freely performs the materialist as convincingly as the non-dualist, and no role binds the actor; rendered as levels, it emphasizes hierarchy — each view is a fixed altitude of self-recognition, and Trika sits at the summit. Kṣemarāja requires both at once: his inclusivism ranks the darśanas while insisting the ranking is citi's own play, not a ladder imposed from outside. Singh's added 'only' tips the sūtra toward polemic; Shantananda's 'states' toward the systematic map; Wallis's double rendering makes the polysemy explicit at the cost of the sūtra's compression. Together they show that the sūtra's three Sanskrit words contain an entire philosophy of religious pluralism — inclusivist, hierarchical, and non-dual at once — that no single English sentence has managed to hold.
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