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166 Saiva Philosophy in some Important Texts [CH. have twenty-four categories of avyakta-guna-tattva, buddhi, ahankāra, manas, the five cognitive senses, the five conative senses, the five tanmātras, and five mahābhūtas. Altogether these are the thirty-six categories.
If we attend to this division of categories, we find that the socalled impure categories are mostly the categories of Sāmkhya philosophy. But while in the Sāmkhya, prakyti is equated with the avyakta as the equilibrium of the three guņas, here in the Saiva philosophy the avyakta is the unmanifested which comes from māyā and produces the guņas.
To recapitulate, we find that the system of thought presented in the Tattva-prakāśa, as based on the Saivāgamas, is a curious confusion of certain myths, together with certain doctrines of Indian philosophy. One commentator, Srīkumāra, has tried to read the monistic philosophy of Sankara into it, whereas the other commentator, Aghora-śivācārya, has tried to read some sort of duality into the system, though that duality is hardly consistent. We know from Sankara's account of the philosophy of the Saiva school that some Saivas called Māheśvaras tried to establish in their works, the Siddhāntas, the view that God is only the instrumental cause (nimitta-kāraņa) of the world, but not the material cause (upādāna-kārana). In Sankara's view God is both the material and the instrumental cause of the world and of all beings. Aghora-śivācārya's pretext for writing the commentary was that it was interpreted by people having a monistic bias, and that it was his business to show that, in accordance with the Saivāgamas, God can only be the instrumental cause, as we find in the case of the Naiyāyikas. He starts with the premise that God is the sum total of the power of consciousness and the power of energy, and he says that the māyā is the material cause of the world, from which are produced various other material products which are similar to the Sāņhkya categories. But he does not explain in what way God's instrumentality affects the māyā in the production of various categories, pure and impure and pure-and-impure. He says that even the energy of māyā proceeds from God and appears in the māyā as if undivided from it. There is thus an original illusion through which the process of the māyā as bindu and nāda or the desire of God for creation and the creation takes place. But he does not any further explain the nature of the illusion and the
