Indian Antiquary Vol 02

SR No.: 032494
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 428
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 20 MB

Page 377

DECEMBER, 1873.]
NOTES ON THE SAIVA-SIDDHANTA.
NOTES ON THE SAIVA-SIDDHANTA. BY THE REV. C. EGBERT
In a brief review of F. Bouteloup's manual, Philosophic Indica Expositio, which appeared in the Indian Antiquary (vol. I. pp. 224-5), it was remarked that, "in treating of the Pasupatas, whom Colebrooke describes under the northern appellation of the sect, it was of importance that notice should have been taken of their existence and their tenets as found in South India." It is intended in the present paper to put together a few notes, made at different times, illustrative of this subject.
Independently of the exoteric and popular worship connected with the great temples of Madurâ, there is at that place a well-organized school of esoteric religious teaching in full vigour and operation, representing the SaivaSiddhanta system, the most popular system of philosophy and religion among the Tamil people. It is based on the eight-and-twenty Saiva books, or Agamas as they are termed, whence its adherents are called Agamists. The Rev. W. Taylor in his Catalogue Raisonné (Vol. II. p. lxxxix.) confounds this sect with the Vira Saivas, who are not SaivaSiddhantas or Agamists, but the Jangamas or Lingadharis-a sect which did not exist when the Siddhânta books were written, and whose use of the male symbol only, to the exclusion of the female, is sufficient to distinguish them from the other, Saiva worshippers among the Tamils.
As already observed, Colebrooke describes the Agama school of religious philosophy under its northern appellation and characteristics, as that of the Maheswaras' and 'Pasupatas' (Essays, vol. I. pp. 406-413), but the Tamil development of its tenets is marked by very peculiar features which lead me to hazard an opinion that it owes them, in some degree, to contact with the teaching of the Madurâ missionaries of the Church of Rome at
the close of the sixteenth century. The late Rev. H. R. Hoisington, of the Jaffna American Mission, translated from the Tamil three of the treatises on which the Agamists base their sys
tem, but most, if not all, of the other treatises are as yet little known, existing, as it is supposed, only in Sanskrit. Mr. Hoisington's work was printed in America in 1854, and made the
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KENNET, VEPERY, MADRAS.
teaching of this school accessible to English scholars for the first time, with the advantage of having the obscure text of the original elucidated by the best native assistance that he was able at the time to procure. The Agamist philosophy, or, as it may be more properly termed, the Saiva-Siddhanta, is essentially antagonistio to Vedantism. The monotheism of the Vedas, such as it was, made it impossible to distinguish the object worshipped from the mind of the worshipper, and while therefore it implicitly contained the later polytheism which contented the vulgar mind, it fostered in more aspiring intellects the most extravagant pantheism. The essence of the Vedantic doctrine consists in the individual soul considering itself the same as God, or as resolvable into God, and the whole visible world an illusion. In opposition to this, Saiva teachers most strongly insist upon the real, and not merely apparent or illusory, distinctness of God from all other spirits and from matter. While the Vedantists maintain that there is but one, only and secondless Being, and that all visible forms of creation are only an ideal development of him, having no real existence whatever, the Agamists teach the existence of three distinct eternal entities, God, soul, and matter (pati, pasu, pásam), the Deity being a Person and not a mere abstraction, and distinct from the human soul and matter, both which derive their existence from him as their efficient cause. They repudiate the Vedantic doctrine of the creation of the universe by the Deity out of his own essence, and maintain the distinct and separate existence of the efficient and material causes of the creation-the first, active, moving; the second, passive, moved: the one effective, the other yielding itself to be acted on by it. "Matter cannot proceed from spirit, therefore the world was not developed from God," is a maxim of this school. That which knows is the soul, and that which is known is the Deity, and hence it follows, "When it is said one exists, he who says it must also exist," which is another maxim. And these two express the distinguishing principles of the system it represents. Yet God cannot be comprehended but by grace or divine illumination,