The Thirty-Six Tattvas (Ṣaṭ-Triṃśat Tattva)

The thirty-six tattvas are Kashmir Shaivism's great map of reality, laid out as a ladder of 'levels' from the highest to the lowest. At the top is pure undivided consciousness (Śiva and its power Śakti); at the bottom is solid earth. In between, consciousness gradually contracts and divides — first into a subtle interplay of subject and object, then through veils of limitation, then into the individual mind, the senses, and finally the elements that make up the physical world. Crucially, the tattvas build on the older Sāṃkhya scheme of twenty-five principles and add eleven higher ones above it, so that what Sāṃkhya saw as the top (pure spirit and primal nature) becomes, for the Śaiva, only the middle of a longer descent that begins in God.