The Shiva Sutras are seventy-seven short aphorisms in Sanskrit from which the school of Kashmir Shaivism grew, and tradition holds that they were revealed to Sage Vasugupta. Sage Vasugupta is said to have lived near Mahadeva mountain, in the valley of the Harvan stream behind what are now the Shalimar Gardens of Srinagar. In one account Shiva came to him in a dream and sent him to a rock, where he found the sutras inscribed; in another, a siddha revealed them to him in a dream.
The sutras are set out in three sections, each named for a means to liberation: the way of Shiva, Shambhavopaya, in twenty-two sutras; the way of Shakti, Shaktopaya, in ten; and the way of the individual, Anavopaya, in forty-five. The opening sutra declares that consciousness is the Self. In the third section the Self is a dancer, the inner self is the stage and the senses are the audience. Kshemaraja, a disciple of Abhinavagupta, explained the sutras in his commentary, the Vimarshini, and Bhaskara in another, the Varttika.
In the twentieth century Swami Lakshmanjoo, born in Srinagar, lectured on the texts of Kashmir Shaivism there and translated the Shiva Sutras, and Jaideva Singh translated them with Kshemaraja's commentary. In Kashmir, Maha Shivaratri is kept as Herath, the night of Hara. In this collection, Kashmir, where tradition sets the revelation, holds the hilltop temple named for Adi Shankaracharya above the Dal Lake, where Shiva is worshipped as Jyeshteshwara, and high in its mountains the Amarnath cave, with its lingam of ice.