{"collection":"Hinduism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/hin/htss/htss02.htm","path":"hin/htss/htss02.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/hin/htss/htss02.htm","text":"Hymns of the Tamil Saivite Saints, by F. Kingsbury and G.P. Phillips, [1921]\nTHE voice of chanting and song, to the accompaniment of unfamiliar instruments, floats out over the high wall of the temple in the coolness of the evening or the dawn, making the Western passer-by wonder what it is that is being chanted and sung. If only he had a Hindu hymn-book he thinks he could learn from it the spirit of Hinduism as well as a non-Christian could learn Christianity from Christian hymns. For the Tamil country at any rate there is such a hymnbook, and our present aim is to give enough specimens from it for readers to know what the hymns are like. Englishmen are wanting to understand India more than they ever wanted before, for their debt to India is heavy. Indians are wanting more than ever before to know the wonderful past of their own country, and the wonder of it is all bound up with its religion. At such a time these hymns are worth looking into, for they are being sung in temples and homes throughout the Tamil country, and Tamil is the mother-tongue of more than eighteen millions of people. For pious \u015aaivites they equal in authority the Sanskrit Vedas; the mere learning of them by rote is held to be a virtue, and devout. Tamil parents compel their children to memorize them in much the same way as Christian parents make their children learn the Psalms.\nThe hymns here given are specimens from the D\u0113v\u0101ram and the Tiruv\u0101chakam. The D\u0113v\u0101ram is the first of the collections of works held as canonical by Tamil \u015aaivites. Its hymns were composed between six and eight hundred A.D. by the three authors of whom this book gives some account, and the whole was put together in one collection of 797 stanzas by Nambi \u0100\u1e47\u1e0d\u0101r Nambi about 1000 A.D. The Tiruv\u0101chakam, or Sacred Utterance, was written by one author, M\u0101\u1e47ikya V\u0101chaka (Tamilized as M\u0101\u1e47ikka V\u0101sahar) at a date so far unsettled that scholars are still divided on the question whether it preceded or followed the D\u0113v\u0101ram, though most scholars place it in the ninth, or early in the tenth, century. Whenever it was written, it stands even higher than the D\u0113v\u0101ram in the affections of Tamil people.\nOut of an immense number of hymns we have tried to select those which are most representative, those which are favourites, and those which contain the most striking thoughts. But it is amazingly difficult to give a fair or adequate idea of them in an English rendering. They are essentially songs, intended to be sung to Indian tunes, in metres which no English metre can represent. Much of their charm depends upon assonance, upon plays upon words, upon close knitting of word with word, upon intricacy of metre and rhyme, almost as much as upon the substance. We can only claim a fair degree of accuracy in our renderings, apologizing to the lovers of Tamil poetry for the plainness and poverty of our representation of so rich and varied an original. All our translations are new, and nearly all of those from the D\u0113v\u0101ram represent verses which have never before been done\ninto English. One of the translators of this book learned as \u015aaivite child to love these hymns, and therefore is the authority in matters of interpretation, the Englishman being responsible for the form. We shall be quite satisfied if our translations serve to call attention to the poems, and are some day replaced by worthier renderings.\nWe have tried to reduce introductory matter to a minimum, only giving such information as is necessary to enable readers to understand the hymns and the allusions in them. But it is entirely necessary to say something about the worship of \u015aiva, and to give a few words of biography of each of the four authors from whose work this book contains extracts.\n1. Its history previous to these poems.\nThe word \u015aiva occurs even in the Rig Veda, but there it is only in conjunction with Rudra. The joining together of these names provokes conjectures as to whether we have here an amalgamation of two earlier deities, an Aryan and a Dravidian, but these need not detain us here, since clearly even at this early date \u015aiva was an Aryan deity, identical with Rudra the storm-god, and father of the Maruts, storm-gods themselves. Rudra is a handsome god; he uses his thunderbolts chiefly for punishing evil-doers, and is on the whole a kindly being. The name \u015aiva means auspicious,' and must not be confused with the Tamil word for 'red,' although as it happens Rudra-\u015aiva was a red being,\nIn the period of the Pur\u0101\u1e47as, we find that \u015aiva, instead of being one of a multitude of nature-deities, has risen to be one of the great triad, Brahm\u0101, Vish\u1e47u, and \u015aiva, who are far above all gods. How the change has come about we have not yet the means of discovering. The function has changed as much as the person, \u015aiva being now the destroyer as Brahm\u0101 is the creator and Vish\u1e47u the preserver. The process of reduction in the number of the superior deities goes further, and Brahm\u0101 falls practically into the background, leaving only Vish\u1e47u and \u015aiva as supreme beings for the worship of the people of India. By the time Hinduism penetrated southwards into the Tamil country, probably somewhere about 500 B.C., it had two main forms, the worship of Vish\u1e47u and the worship of \u015aiva, the two being not too sharply disconnected. The Tamil Hindu believed in the existence of both, but held his own god, whether \u015aiva or Vish\u1e47u, to be supreme. Hinduism seemed to be Firmly established, but was dangerously shaken when the Jains and Buddhists spread over South India. Then came for the Vaish\u1e47avites the teachers known as the \u0100l\u0324v\u0101rs, while \u015aaivism was defended by the poets of whose work this book gives specimens. Hinduism was saved, but it existed henceforth in two distinct forms, Vaish\u1e47avism and \u015aaivism, separated by a wider gulf than in earlier days.\n2. The portrait of \u015aiva and its interpretation.\n\u015aiva as imagined by his worshippers has a human form, usually with one but occasionally with five or six heads. He has three eyes, the right one being really the sun, the left eye the moon, and the one in the middle of his forehead fire, His reddish hair is\nmatted in the ascetic way, and on it is the crescent moon, the Ganges, and one or more cobras, while wreathed about it is a garland of kon\u1e0dai (Cassia) flowers. He has four arms, though occasional representations show eight, but one body and two legs. Commonly he is seated on a grey-coloured bull. In colour he is reddish, but his body is smeared over with white sacred ash. He holds in his hands various things such as a battle-axe, a deer, fire, a trident, a bow. Round his neck, which is dark, hangs a long necklace, the beads of which are skulls. At his waist he wears sometimes an elephant's hide, sometimes a tiger-skin, sometimes only a very scanty loin-cloth. Generally his consort, Um\u0101, is at his left side, but sometimes he is pictured as half man and half woman, the right half (\u015aiva) being pink-coloured, and the left half (Um\u0101) green or black. \u015aiva's abode is said to be on Mount Kail\u0101sa in the Him\u0101layas, but among his special haunts is the burning-ground, where bodies are cremated. One of the favourite manifestations of \u015aiva is that as Na\u1e6dar\u0101ja, the dancer in the great hall at Chidambaram, of which we give a picture (see frontispiece). Here \u015aiva has one face, four arms, and two legs, performing a spirited dance. His right foot rests on a demon named Muyalahan. He is sometimes represented as dancing along with K\u0101\u1e37\u012b, not the K\u0101\u1e37\u012b who in North India is identified with Um\u0101, but a she-devil feared in the South.\nDoubtless each of these features in the manifestation of \u015aiva has its history, but that is unknown at present. The legends give fanciful explanations of most of them. The tiger's skin and the elephant's hide, for instance, are those which \u015aiva stripped from the wild animals sent against him by the magic of his\nenemies the \u1e5bishis of Daruk\u0101vana. But it is of more interest to find the religious ideas which these things suggest to a thoughtful \u015aaivite devotee to-day. The hides remind him that \u015aiva has all power, and all opposition to him is vain. That right foot of Na\u1e6dar\u0101ja set on Muyalahan means that God crushes down all evil. Those skulls in his necklace are the skulls of successive Brahm\u0101s, each of whom died after a life lasting many ages. This is a way of saying that while other gods at last come to their end, \u015aiva is eternal and unchanging. \u015aiva's dance suggests how easily, and how rhythmically, he performs his five functions of making, preserving, destroying, judging and purifying. And his dance in the burning-ground may sometimes carry the message that God becomes most real to men in the solemn hour when they part from their dead.\n3. Four common legends and their meaning.\nOf the many legends concerning \u015aiva four are so frequently alluded to in our poems that they should be told here, to avoid repeated explanatory notes.\n1. Brahm\u0101 and Vish\u1e47u once saw a pillar of fire that seemed to grow from the depths of the earth and to pierce beyond the highest heavens. They longed to learn its depth and height, and agreed that Brahm\u0101 should become a swan to fly to the pillar's top, and Vish\u1e47u a boar to dig to its root. The swan flew up to the sky, but never reached the pillar's summit. The boar dug through the earth with his tusk, but never found where the pillar began. Brahm\u0101 and Vish\u1e47u perforce acknowledged their limitations and prayed to the pillar, whereupon \u015aiva revealed himself, for the pillar was a form he had assumed. Not even the greatest and\nwisest of creatures can by their searching find out God. But to the humble-hearted He reveals Himself.\n2. R\u0101va\u1e47a, the ten-headed giant king of Ceylon, while on his conquering progress through many realms, came to the North of India and saw Kail\u0101sa the silver mountain. Coveting its beauty he determined to uproot and transplant it to his own island. With his ten heads and twenty arms he tried to lift it from the earth, and Kail\u0101sa shook. All the hosts of heaven, and even Irma., were terrified by what seemed to them an awful earthquake. But \u015aiva simply set his big toe upon the mountain, and lo, R\u0101va\u1e47a found himself being crushed to death. Repenting of his folly, R\u0101va\u1e47a prayed for mercy, and \u015aiva not only forgave him but even gave him fresh boons. For God pardons sinners who repent, and gives them blessings which before they did not know.\n3. Three Asuras, or supernatural beings, once by doing penance obtained from \u015aiva three castles, one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron. These castles could fly at the owners' desire, and settle down on towns and villages, destroying many lives. In course of time the Asuras became very proud and ignored \u015aiva. Determining to punish them, \u015aiva mounted a chariot whose wheels were the sun and moon and whose scat was the earth. Brahm\u0101 was his charioteer, the four Vedas the horses, Mount Meru his bow, the ancient serpent \u0100di\u015besha his bow-string, and Vish\u1e47u his arrow. At sight of these preparations the gods became conceited, thinking that \u015aiva could not destroy his enemies without them. \u015aiva knowing their thoughts simply laughed, and at that laugh the three castles were on the instant reduced to ashes.\nThose who forget God in their pride must be punished. When those whom God uses as his instruments begin to think themselves indispensable to him, he shews that his purposes can be fulfilled without them.\n4. The gods once began to churn the ocean in the hope of obtaining divine nectar. The mountain Mand\u0101ra was their churning-stick, the primeval tortoise the pivot on which the stick rested and turned, and the serpent V\u0101suki was the churning-rope. As they churned, at first, great and splendid things came up. But suddenly something black rose up and darkened the whole universe. It was a mass of poison, deadly alike to gods and men. In terror of destruction, the gods and demons called on \u015aiva. He came, drank the poison, and saved them all. That which was enough to destroy the universe could only stain his throat with a bluish colour. That is why \u015aiva is often called the \"poison-necked\" or \"blue-throated\" god. There is a link here, small but real, with the Christian teaching of God as ready to suffer for the sake of humbler beings.","title":"Hymns of the Tamil Saivite Saints: Introduction","type":"page"}