Within the traditional understanding, the Tripura Rahasya is linked to the sage Dattatreya, who is regarded as the original revealer of its teaching and as the one who imparted its wisdom to Parashurama. In this sense, Dattatreya is often spoken of as the “author,” though this is better seen as a sacred attribution than as a historical claim. The text itself presents its teaching as arising from this lineage, and later tradition continues to honor Dattatreya as the source of its non-dual Śākta wisdom. Such attribution reflects the spiritual authority and symbolic role of Dattatreya rather than a verifiable biographical authorship.

From a more historical and scholarly perspective, the concrete author of the Tripura Rahasya remains unknown. The work, in its extant Sanskrit form, is generally placed many centuries after the early classical period, with most assessments situating it between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries of the common era, and many views clustering around the 13th–14th centuries in a South Indian Śākta–Advaita milieu. This broad dating reflects the difficulty of fixing precise boundaries for such a text, which emerged within a living tradition rather than as a single, datable publication. What can be said with some confidence is that the text belongs to a mature phase of non-dual Śākta thought, where philosophical exposition and narrative are woven together to convey its vision of the Absolute as Tripura, the “Threefold City” of Consciousness.