Open Abhinavagupta's Tantrāloka to chapter 29, verse 51. He lists the schools of Indian religion as a hierarchy:
Veda (Smārta and Śrauta) → Vaiṣṇava Tantra (Pāñcarātra) → Pāśupata systems → Siddhānta → Vāma → Dakṣiṇa → Mata → Kula → Kaula → Trika
And then the sealing formula: kulāt parataraṃ trika — "beyond Kula is Trika."1
Abhinavagupta is the master of Trika. He sits at the top of his own ladder.
Now open Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche's Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness. He lists the schools of Buddhism as a hierarchy, with the highest (Madhyamaka, in his lineage's reading) at the apex.2 Khenpo's lineage carries Madhyamaka. He sits at the top of his own ladder.
This is the structural pattern Selvalingam names: the world of Tantra, both Hindu and Buddhist, is full of doxographical hierarchies like this where other schools are accepted as true and good but only insofar as they can lead to "my" school which necessarily I will position as the greatest.3
The structure is so consistent across traditions, geographies, and centuries that it cannot be the result of independent theological discovery. It is a move — a maneuver available to any teacher building a system that needs legitimacy in a pluralistic religious world.
A pluralistic religious world creates a problem for any teacher. If reality is one but the schools are many, the teacher has to account for the existence of the other schools. Three accounts compete:
Of the three, inclusivism is dominant in actual institutional practice. Selvalingam: more often than not, Tantra takes a religious inclusivist tone... usually in almost every case if not all cases when we do the kind of work which we're doing now you get it from a religious inclusivist perspective.4
Inclusivism dominates because it solves three problems at once:
Legitimacy: it doesn't tell the practitioner of the other school that they are wrong (which would lose them) and doesn't tell them that they're equal (which would lose the recruiting pitch). It tells them they are on the right path, doing well, but they have farther to go — to here.
Recruitment: the ladder provides a clear story for why the seeker should keep climbing — toward your school. Exclusivism repels practitioners of rival schools; pluralism gives them no reason to switch. Inclusivism gives them a reason to switch while affirming their starting point.
Internal motivation: the practitioners already inside your school get to feel that they are on the highest rung. This is hard to give up.
The hierarchy is built using a stable set of moves:
Move 1 — Identify what your school has that others don't. Abhinavagupta's hierarchy puts householder Shaiva Siddhānta above ascetic Pāśupata because in Tantra the householder is glorified — asceticism is kind of embarrassing. Then it puts Bhairava-āgamas above Shaiva Siddhānta because Bhairava-āgamas have transgressive practice that Siddhānta lacks. Then it puts Śakti-āgamas above Bhairava-āgamas because Śakti-centered practice goes beyond Bhairava-centered practice. Then Trika above all of them, with the Kālī tradition (Krama) absorbed into Trika as its esoteric core.5
Each step adds a feature the prior school lacked. Each step makes the prior school's lack into a limitation rather than a difference.
Move 2 — Reinterpret the rival school's texts to make your school's claims findable in them. Abhinavagupta says Nothing in my Tantrāloka is not in the Mālinīvijayottara Tantra. This is famously not true — the Mālinīvijayottara has nothing about the 12 Kālīs of the Krama tradition, which Abhinavagupta makes central. So he reinterprets the Mālinīvijayottara's Mātṛsadbhāva as a reference to Kālī. The Krama Kālī gets retrofitted into the Trika source-text via interpretive maneuver.6
This is the textual side of the doxographical move. If a rival school's authoritative text doesn't say what you need it to say, read it as saying so anyway and supply the interpretive bridge.
Selvalingam (Nish the Fish) adds: the move also runs in iconography, not just text — read the picture-language and the hierarchy is drawn in bodies. Kālī standing or dancing on top of Śiva is a doxographical statement in image form: whoever is on top is the apex view, so the Kālī-current (Krama) is being placed above the Śiva-centered systems it claims to complete.10 And the annexation can be smuggled into a single word: Abhinavagupta's etymology of "Kālī" — unpacking the name into a dozen powers and acts of consciousness — is itself an absorption device, defining the rival goddess's name as the contents of his own Trika so that to invoke her is already to invoke his system. Naming becomes annexation; the definition does the conquering. This is the engine of Abhinavagupta's Kālī-Catalogue: Deity-Definition as Annexation — the same retrofit as Move 2, performed on a name and an image instead of a source-verse.
Move 3 — Use the rival school's vocabulary, but redefine it upward. Abhinavagupta places Veda at the bottom of his hierarchy but spends serious time arguing that the Vedas were taught by Shiva himself — the Vedas were forgotten, and in this Kaliyuga, in order to restore Vedic knowledge in a way meaningful for the people of this day and age, Lord Shiva manifested as Śrīkaṇṭha, and as Śrīkaṇṭha (an incarnation of Shiva) he teaches Duality, qualified non-duality, and non-duality.7 The Vedic Brahmins reading this can accept it — their Vedas are vindicated as Shiva's revelation. The Shaiva Tantrics reading this can accept it — Shiva also gave their Tantra, and the Tantra is the more advanced gift.
The move uses the rival's authority structure (the Vedas are authoritative) to position one's own school as the higher version of that same authority structure.
Move 4 — Drop the bottom rungs. Abhinavagupta is comfortable putting Pāśupata above Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra. He is also comfortable saying that Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra "shoots itself in the foot" via rāga reifying separateness and can't have advaitic realization.8 The hierarchy is generous in form but exclusive in substance — the lower rungs are named and positioned but their claims to ultimate liberation are quietly denied. The form is inclusivist; the practical effect is exclusivist for everyone below the top rung.
The exact same machinery appears in Tibetan Buddhism — same problem, same moves, different vocabulary. Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso's Progressive Stages of Meditation on Emptiness lays out the Buddhist schools as a graduated path through emptiness-doctrines: Vaibhāṣika → Sautrāntika → Yogācāra/Cittamātra → Svātantrika Madhyamaka → Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka, with the highest realization at the end. The seeker is told that all the schools are correct — at their level — and that the practice trajectory moves through them sequentially. Khenpo's own lineage operates at the apex of that trajectory.9
Tibetan Buddhism has its own internal hierarchies between the four main schools (Nyingma / Kagyu / Sakya / Gelug), each with its own ordering claim. Each school positions itself at the top of its own ordering. The Progressive Stages genre is the institutional mechanism for doing this.
The structural identity across Hindu and Buddhist traditions is the evidence that doxographical hierarchy is a strategy, not a discovery. If discovery, the hierarchies would converge on the same ordering across traditions. They don't. Each tradition's hierarchy puts its own apex at the apex.
This pattern is the religious analog of what the strategic-conduct corpus calls frame control. In Greene's Laws of Power and Hughes' Behavior Ops Manual, the actor who controls the frame of comparison controls the outcome of comparison: define what is being measured, who counts as a peer, and the ranking among those peers, and the substantive judgments follow automatically from those framing choices.
A doxographical hierarchy is frame control at theological scale. The hierarchy answers three questions simultaneously: what are the legitimate schools (the peer set), what dimension are they ranked on (subtlety of realization / depth of view / completeness of practice), and who sits at the top of that ranking. Whoever sets the hierarchy has already won the comparison.
The structural parallel to behavioral-mechanics persuasion is exact: the contender who controls the frame controls the contest. The pluralist alternative refuses to set the frame at all, which is institutionally costly precisely because frame-refusal cedes the recruitment advantage. Religion is not exempt from the strategic principles that govern other institution-building.
The handshake produces an insight neither domain generates alone: the dominance of inclusivism in actual institutional religion is not a fact about theology — it is a fact about which framings survive under recruitment pressure. Exclusivism is too narrow to recruit cross-tradition; pluralism is too flat to recruit at all; inclusivism is the recruitment-optimal frame. Religion's epistemology is shaped by recruitment selection pressure, not (only) by truth-tracking.
The doxographical move is also a historical maneuver, not just a logical one. When Abhinavagupta places the Vedas at the bottom of his hierarchy but argues that the Vedas were taught by Shiva, he is doing legitimacy-work in real historical time: he is operating in a Brahmanical context where Vedic authority is non-negotiable, and he must position Tantra without appearing nāstika (rejecting the Vedas, like Buddhists and Jains). The doxographical hierarchy is the device that lets him be more-than-Vedic without being anti-Vedic.
The handshake to the Faxian/Asokan inheritance pattern: the same incorporation mechanic appears across Indian religious institution-building. New schools either reject the prior tradition (Buddhism, Jainism) and pay the cost of being branded heterodox, or they include-and-supersede the prior tradition and inherit its legitimacy. Tantra chose include-and-supersede; the doxographical hierarchy is the literary form of that choice. This is structurally distinct from how Buddhist schools incorporated their predecessors (typically through the tīrthika / non-Buddhist binary).
Inside the practitioner, the doxographical hierarchy produces a specific psychological effect: I am at the top of the ladder. This is unrelated to the substantive merits of the school. The Madhyamika reading Khenpo gets the same psychological reward as the Trika practitioner reading Abhinavagupta gets: we have arrived at the apex; the others are still climbing. The reward is real and felt; it is one of the binding agents that keeps a practitioner committed to a specific lineage across the inevitable doubts and difficulties.
The handshake to in-group/out-group identity formation: the hierarchy provides not just doctrinal certainty but positional certainty within a sacralized cosmology. The ego is offered the apex slot. This is hard to give up — and one of the reasons pluralism is rare: pluralism offers no apex slot, refuses to give the ego that hierarchy-relief, and therefore loses out on a major psychological binding mechanism. Inclusivism is more psychologically sustainable than pluralism even before any institutional considerations enter.
Selvalingam is in a hard spot in this lecture. He is reconstructing Abhinavagupta's doxographical hierarchy while arguing for the pluralist alternative against it. He defends Abhinavagupta's position carefully (it makes perfect sense to the one who has that view) and then explicitly steps off the ladder (I'm trying to fight against this tendency of communities to default to the biases of certain members).
The convergence point that holds: even Abhinavagupta is doing more than ladder-construction. The Tantrāloka contains genuine Trika philosophy, genuine ritual instruction, genuine cosmological detail — the ladder is one feature, not the whole text. A reader can study Abhinavagupta's Trika without endorsing the doxographical-hierarchy framing, just as a reader can study Khenpo's emptiness-instructions without endorsing the Progressive Stages frame. The frame and the content are separable.
This is the most honest pluralist move: take the philosophical contents of each school seriously, take its doxographical framing as institutional positioning, and don't let the framing tell you what to believe about the contents.
The frame and the content are not always cleanly separable. Sometimes the philosophical content of a school is partly constituted by where the school positions itself in the doxographical map. Abhinavagupta's Trika needs to be read as the apex view to operate as the apex view; the Trika apex-claim is not external decoration on the Trika system but part of what Trika is. The pluralist move that strips the framing risks misreading the school whose self-understanding includes the framing.
Inclusivism may be epistemically required by certain views. A strict non-dualist who actually believes non-duality is the deepest truth cannot consistently endorse pluralism (which would require treating dualism as equally true). The doxographical hierarchy may be the only honest position for a committed non-dualist — exclusivism is too rude, pluralism is incoherent, inclusivism is what's left. The institutional-strategy reading risks underestimating the philosophical pressure toward inclusivism, not just the institutional pressure.
If the doxographical move is primarily institutional rather than philosophical, then the standard pedagogical sequencing in many spiritual traditions — first you learn dualism, then qualified non-dualism, then non-dualism — is teaching the strategy alongside the content, and the student is being trained in the apex-positioning move as part of being trained in the tradition. By the time the student has internalized the sequence, the apex-positioning is invisible to them — it just feels like the natural order of how spiritual understanding deepens. The hardest thing to see inside any tradition is the frame the tradition uses to position itself against its rivals, because that frame is what made the tradition recruitment-viable in the first place.