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XXXIV] Literature and History of Southern Saivism 13 has been held that God and energy are one and the same. Sometimes it has been held that God has created the world by His mercy or grace and that His grace is the inner dynamic force which follows the course of creation and maintenance. It is in this way that a compromise has been made between the theory of grace and the theory of karma. There are others, however, who think that we do not as of necessity have a right to reap the fruits of our actions, but we have to be satisfied with what is given to us by God. The Pāśupatas hold this view, and it is important to notice that the Nyāya which admits the doctrine of karma also thinks that we are only entitled to such enjoyments and experiences as are allotted to us by God. The fact that both the Nyāya and the Pāśupatas think that God can be established by inference, and that the grace of God is ultimately responsible for all our experiences, naturally leads us to link together the Nyāya-vaiseșika view with the Pāśupata view. The tradition is preserved in the two Şaddarśana-samuccayas of Rājasekhara and Haribhadra with Gunaratna, which, as well as the benedictory verses in most Nyāya works until the tenth and eleventh centuries, justify the assumption that the Nyāya-vaiseșika was a school of Pāśupatas which paid more emphasis to evolving a system of logic and metaphysics. The Pāśupata system generally accepted the caste-division, and only those belonging to higher castes could claim to attain spiritual liberation. Yet as time rolled on we find that men of all castes could become devotees or servants of God and be regarded as Saivas. We find the same kind of gradual extension and withdrawal of caste system among the Vaişnavas also. Both in Saivism and Vaişnavism, bhakti or devotion to God came to be regarded as the criterion of the faith.
We have already referred to the statement in the Kāravaņamāhātmya about how the Lord incarnated Himself as a descendant of Atri. He is said to have walked to Ujjain and taught a Brahmin there called Kuśika who came from Brahmāvarta. These teachings were in the form of the present sūtras called the Pañcārtha, the main substance of which has already been described. It is generally believed that the original sūtras, divided into five chapters (pañcārtha), were composed somewhere in the first or the second century A.D. The bhāşya of Kauņdinya is probably the same as the Rāšīkara bhāsya. Kaundinya does not mention the name of any writer contemporary to him. He refers to the Sāmkhya-yoga but
