The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a Sanskrit dialogue between Bhairava, as Shiva is named in it, and the Goddess Bhairavi, and it presents itself as the essence of the Rudrayamala Tantra. It belongs to the Trika tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. In it Bhairava gives the Goddess one hundred and twelve dharanas, ways of centring awareness, a number the text states itself in its one hundred and thirty-ninth verse.
The text opens with the Goddess's doubt: she has heard all that has come from the Rudrayamala, yet she still asks what Bhairava truly is. Bhairava answers that his true state is free of direction, place and time, cannot be put into words and is a fullness known within, and that this state of Bhairava is Bhairavi herself; Shakti and the one who holds her are never apart, as the power to burn is never apart from fire. Asked how that state is entered, he gives the dharanas, and in the closing verses the Goddess, content, says she has grasped the essence of the Rudrayamala Tantra, and embraces Shiva.
In 1918 the text was printed in the Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies in two volumes, one with the commentary of Kshemaraja and Shivopadhyaya and the other with Ananda Bhatta's. In the twentieth century Swami Lakshmanjoo taught it in Kashmir and Jaideva Singh translated it, and in 1957 Paul Reps brought it to wide attention with a poetic English version in his book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Bhairava, the name under which Shiva speaks here, is also the name of the fierce form of Shiva worshipped as the guardian of Kashi at the Kaal Bhairav temple in Varanasi, and as the guardian of ancient Avanti at Ujjain.