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PREFACE
The first part of the following treatise was read as Presidential Address at the All South India Saiva Con- ference held at Cuddalore, New Town, on the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st 1929. The object of the Con- ference was to revive the study and practice of the oldest principles of the Saiva religion, which, in recent years, have greatly fallen into disuse and disrepute by being mixed up with the Puranic myths and which the modern Self- Respect movement calumniated in the most opprobrious language, without being able to discriminate between the cardinal points of Saivism and the merely adventitious ones.
In the conflict of thoughts and ethical sentiments that arose between the Tamilians of the south and the Aryans of the north who came and settled all over the Tamil country from the first century A. D., down to the fifteenth and still later, the religion of the land, that is Saivism. underwent a marked change its outer rim, although in its centre it remained as pure as crystal and as impenetrable as a hard diamond. What is bound and true to its core, what is perfect and complete in itself, requires no change, re- quires no improvement. At the very dawn of Tamilian civilisation, of which we catch a glimpse through the Thol- kappiamthe oldest Tamil work extant, we find the views about God, soul, and matter and salvation to have become thoroughly sound and complete. As our knowledge of these facts deepens, as our ideas about their relations expand, we find the conclusions reached by our forefathers about their nature and relations, daily receiving corroborations not only from the modern biological, geological, and other scientific discoveries, but also from the philosophical view worked out and held by such eminent thinkers as William James, Bergson, Lodge, Ward and others.
