Note on the Religious and Philosophical contents of the Paripaatal L Dr. V. VARADACHARI S.V. University College, Tirupati The Tamil literature of the early days is marked by the peculiar classification of the subject matter into internal (akam) and external (puram) kinds. Paripaatal is the name of the collections of poems of akam kind made during the period 300 B.C to 300 A.D. and included under the literature named Ettuthokai. This collection had seventy poems. Curiously enough, the collections extent now have only twenty two poems and what is more striking here is that all these poems belong only to the puram kind. Among them, fourteen are on the River Vaikai and Mathurai as against eleven which is stated to have been devoted to the description of these according to the earlier collections. In the available text, six poems depict Tirumaal, and eight Muruka while the earlier text is said have contained twenty eight and thirty one respectively on these two deities. It is possible to find, in the nature of treatment of Tirumaal the method of the Pancaraathira kind. The authors of the collections were quite familiar with the mode of the concept of Tirumal as depicted in the Puraanas, Akamas and other allied texts, Tirumaal is extolled in the Vedas as Supreme Deity, as the 401
