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Their collection of hymns is known as Tirumurai, and was compiled by Nambi-Andar-Nambi said to have lived under King Rajaraja (c. 1000 A.D.).  The first portion of it, known as Devaram, contains the hymns of Sambandha, Appar and Sundara.  These persons are the most eminent of the sixty-three saints[530] of the southern Sivaites and are credited with many miracles.  Tamil scholars[531] consider that Sambandha cannot have lived later than the beginning of the seventh century.  He was an adversary of the Jains and Appar is said to have been persecuted by the Buddhists.  Of the other works comprised in the Tirumurai the most important is the Tiruvacagam of Manikka-Vacagar,[532] one of the finest devotional poems which India can show.  It is not, like the Bhagavad-gita, an exposition by the deity, but an outpouring of the soul to the deity.  It only incidentally explains the poet’s views:  its main purpose is to tell of his emotions, experiences and aspirations.  This characteristic seems not to be personal but to mark the whole school of Tamil Saiva writers.

This school, which is often called the Siddhanta,[533] though perhaps that term is better restricted to later philosophical writers, is clearly akin to the Pasupata but alike in thought, sentiment and ritual far more refined.  It is in fact one of the most powerful and interesting forms which Hinduism has assumed and it has even attracted the sympathetic interest of Christians.  The fervour of its utterances, the appeals to God as a loving father, seem due to the temperament of the Tamils, since such sentiments do not find so clear an expression in other parts of India.  But still the whole system, though heated in the furnace of Dravidian emotion, has not been recast in a new mould.  Its dogmas are those common to Sivaism in other parts and it accepts as its ultimate authority the twenty-eight Saiva Agamas.  This however does not detract from the beauty of the special note and tone which sound in its Tamil hymns and prayers.

Whatever the teaching of the little known Agamas may be, the Saiva-Siddhanta is closely allied to the Yoga and theistic forms of the Sankhya.  It accepts the three ultimates, Pati the Lord, Pasu his flock or souls, and Pasa the fetter or matter.  So high is the first of these three entities exalted, so earnestly supplicated, that he seems to attain a position like that of Allah in Mohammedanism, as Creator and Disposer.  But in spite of occasional phrases, the view of the Yoga that all three—­God, souls and matter—­are eternal is maintained.[534] Between the world periods there are pauses of quiescence and at the end of these Siva evolves the universe and souls.  That he may act in them he also evolves from himself his energy or Paracatti (Sk.  Sakti).  But this does not prevent the god himself in a personal and often visible form from being for his devotees the one central and living reality.  The Sakti, often called Uma, is merely Siva’s reflex and hardly an independent existence.