DECEMBER, 1873.]

NOTES ON THE SAIWA-SIDDHANTA.

343

NOTES ON THE SAIVA-SIDDHANTA. BY THE REV. C. EGBERT KENNET, VEPERY, MADRAs.

In a brief review of F. Bouteloup's manual, Phi losophia, Indicap Erpositio, which appeared in the Indian Antiquary (vol. I. pp. 224-5), it was remarked that, “in treating of the Pašupatas,

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

whom Colebrooke describes under the northern

he was able at the time to procure. The

appellation of the sect, it was of importance

Agamist philosophy, or, as it may be more properly termed, the Saiva-Siddh in ta, is essentially antagonistic to V ed a n tism.

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 aud popular worship connected with the great temples of Madurá, there is at that place a well-organized school of esoteric religious teaching in full vi gour and operation, representing the Saiva Siddh á nt a 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 Ā g a mists. The Rev. W. Taylor in his Catalogue Raisonné (Vol. II. p. lxxxix.) confounds this sect with the

Vira- Saivas,

who are not Saiva

The monotheism of the V ed as , 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 indivi

dual 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

books were

one, only and secondless Being, and that all visible forms of creation are only an ideal de velopment of him, having no real existence whatever, the Å g a mists teach the existence

written, and whose use of the male symbol only,

of three distinct eternal entities, God, soul, and

to the exclusion of the female, is sufficient to distinguish them from the other Saiva wor

matter (pati, pašu, pásam), the Deity being a

Sid dh á n tas or Ag a mists, but the Jan gam as or Ling a dh á ris—a sect which did not exist when

the

Siddhānta

Person and not a mere abstraction, and distinct from the human soul and matter, both which

shippers among the Tamils. As already observed, Colebrooke describes the Ågama school of religious philosophy under its northern appellation and characteristics,

derive their existence from him as their efficient cause. They repudiate the Vedantic doctrine of the creation of the universe by the Deity out

as that of the ‘M a he Św a ras' and ‘Pa Su

of his own essence, and maintain the distinct

p a tas' (Essays, vol. I. pp. 406-413), but

and separate existence of the efficient and mate

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

rial causes of the creation—the first, active,

Madurá 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 sup posed, only in Sanskrit. Mr. Hoisington's work was printed in America in 1854, and made the

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 com prehended but by grace or divine illumination,