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மறைமலையம் LOMMLDMWWILD – 31
worship to one Almighty. God whose presence they felt in light and fire, stand in need of religious inquiries, as at that remote age there was no one who could call in question their beliefs and observances.
It was only in after ages when some Tamilians of acute intelligence and tender feelings had begun to reflect upon the horrors of animal sacrifices and the waste of life, money and energy which they involved, that their virtue on the one side and their evil on the other came to be discussed with ardour and heat and systems of religious and philosophic thought sprang into existence. And this created the necessity of calling each system by a special name, and the Tamilian religion too came to be called either Saivism or Vaishnavism according as the worshippers of the Almighty God took him to be either a heat principle or cold principle.
Since the birth-place of all the different systems of thought and belief had been only northern India. Where, at the time, the Sanscrit language and its dialects were, as it is now, asserting their dominance over the Dravidian tongues, especially in the educated circles, into all of which the Brahmins had insinuated themselves, and their influence, all these different cults and creeds came of necessity to be called by distinct Sanscrit names alone. It was in this way that all manner of dissensions arose among the people of northern India and these again were brought by the Brahmins and introduced into Southern India by the aid of Sanscrit in the three centuries preceding the Christian era and in their wake came the Jains and the Buddhists also in large numbers in the early centuries of the Christian era and spread religious disputations and hair- splitting philosophic discussions among the Tamils. Before this intrusion of the northern people, all the cultured and civilized Tamils were as a body strict monotheists paying their worship only to Siva as the almighty God of the universe and therefore had no occasion to bring in any religious or philosophic discussion among them. But after the introduction of Brahminism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sanscrit, they became torn by religious differences and widely differing cults bearing Sanscrit names rose successively in their midst until our own time, this conclusion can be easily confirmed
