மாணிக்கவாசகர் வரலாறும் காலமும்
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܀1
15
others, even though they be his intimates, can never draw a true picture of his real self, nor can express the inner workings of his heart as faithfully as he himself can do. Nothing in the world is more mysterious than the ways of a saintly person who struggled through the experience of this lower world to that of a higher one which transcends the knowledge of ordinary mortals. Unless a man can reach the summit of self-realization attained by that great soul, he cannot hope to place himself in a standpoint different from his own, and view the extent as well as profound depth of that great mind. For a true comprehension, therefore, of the essential nature of sanctified souls, the history written of them by others who stand not only much below their level but also far from their time, cannot help us much. If we be so fortunate as to possess the very utterances of such holy men, as in the case of St. Manickavachakar and other great Saiva Saints, we may with the necessary equipment, venture to enter into the sacred precincits of their life and hope to obtain the inexhaustible treasures of spiritual experience they so surely acquired within so short a time.
The glory of Tamil literature consists in its possession of such spiritual legacies as have come down to us directly from our great Saints and Sages as Manickavachakar, Appar, Thirujnanasambandar, Sundarar and Maikandadevar. The like of which, we are sorry to say, have not been bequeathed to posterity by any other saint or religious founder in any language, literature, of religion so far as our knowledge goes. The value of a literary production that has come from a grea soul who saw God in a visible form and described Him in a way that makes it easier for us all to bring his image before our mental eye, cannot be rated too highly. One can estimate the value of our Saint's utterances only by bringing before his mind the great and irreparable loss the world sustains in ignoring them. So long as humanity blindly follows the precepts of the so-called world-teachers, who, according to their own followers, seem to have long groped for the
