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மாணிக்கவாசகர் வரலாறும் காலமும் Thiruchitrambalakkovaiyar' for days and nights together in a way quite differnt from that in which his Puranic biographers and others have viewed it. And the method of my study will be clearly seen in the extreme closeness in which the following narrative is bound up with the quotations taken from the two poems just mentioned. In spite of my ceaseless efforts to enter fully into a description of the life and experiences of our Saint, I cannot claim to have exhausted the subject in the large work that follows. As my study deepens, new facts are daily coming into light, and I cannot hope to embody them all in a single treatise of this kind. if God be willing I may be spared to publish the present work in a much more enlarged form, samy, in three or four volumes.
when I first entered upon this work some seven or eight years ago, I never thought that the work would swell to its present size of more than thousand pages. Within the last twenty seven years from the time when my interest was first kindled in the investigation of our Saint' Life and Times, many a magazine - article many a book and booklet, came from able hands, and most of these I had to study and criticize from time to time, in order to reach definite and positive conclusions as regards the two. This was how the work increased to its persent size. After so careful and comprehensive a study of the subject, it gives me no small pleasure to find that my position remains the same as it was nearly three decades back, that nothing that came in the interval from any has shaken it in the least, and that other theories, however antagonistic to my own, have, when viewed in their proper perspective, only tended in the end to bring the truth of my conclusions into fuller relief. My study of the evidences then led me to fix the age of Manickavachakar in the third century A.D., and now the same conclusion is ratified by further evidences that have come to light during this long interval.
To the following Tamil work I have prefixed an English introduction epitomizing the salient points in the Life and Times of our
