Kashmir is a high enclosed valley whose religious history is out of all proportion to its size. Buddhism was established there early and strongly, and Kashmiri scholars carried Sanskrit Buddhist texts north into Central Asia and Tibet; tradition places a major Buddhist council in the region under the Kushan king Kanishka.
Its most distinctive contribution is a school of Shaiva philosophy developed between the ninth and eleventh centuries, usually called Kashmir Shaivism, whose leading figures are Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta. Against a Vedanta that treats the world as illusory, this tradition holds that reality is a single conscious power which manifests the universe as an act of free self-expression, and that recognition of one's identity with that consciousness is liberation. Abhinavagupta's writing covers ritual, philosophy, and aesthetics, and his theory of aesthetic experience as a form of the same recognition remains influential in Indian literary theory independently of its theology.
Islam arrived from the fourteenth century and took a local form. The Rishi order, associated with Nuruddin Nurani, drew on the ascetic patterns already present in the valley, and shrine veneration became central to Kashmiri Muslim practice in a way that later reformist currents have contested. The shrine of Hazratbal in Srinagar, which holds a relic attributed to the Prophet, is the most prominent of them.