Spanda
A living tradition within Śaivism.
Spanda is a living tradition within Śaivism.
Origin
No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. IEP lists Spanda among the major sub-schools — the stream that 'interprets Shakti as cosmic pulsation', associated with the Śiva Sūtra transmitted by Vasugupta in the 9th century. No founder separately named; no founding year given. [CORRECTION] Reparented. The first pass placed Spanda under Trika; the cited IEP article treats the Spanda system (9th century onward) and the Trika sub-tradition as parallel developments within monistic Kashmiri Śaivism, with Pratyābhijñā developing INSIDE Trika. The tree contradicted itself: its own Trika entry says 'IEP lists Trika, Spanda and Pratyabhijñā as distinct sub-schools within it'. Pratyābhijñā's parent (Trika) is correct and unchanged.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Spanda.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-spanda.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-spanda-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Spanda},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-spanda},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.