As a piece of performance, the book is obviously inspired by a desire to synthetically emulate, in the realm of Hindu philosophic investigation, the divergent achievements of Westerns like Dr. Paul Carus and Prof. David Masson. And how little the author has succeeded in his endeavour, might be transparent to any one who would only care to read with some attention the chapters bearing on the Saiva dogmatics and the Saivagamas. The Christian Literature Society is daily engaged in its storming operations' against one phase or another of Indian Thought, so that an occasional devil's advocate from within, certainly fulfils a momentous function in the economy of academic investigation. In that sense, at any rate, such an author as Mr. P. T. Srinivasa Ayyangar ought to be welcomed, instead of being tabooed as unworthy of a piecemeal examination, and sober analysis.

The Agamas contend that they constitute the truest exegesis of the Vedas, and their origins are certainly as ancient as those of some of the classical Upanishats. If the fire-worship be regarded as the ritual inculcated in the Vedas, as the outer symbolism of spiritual truths, the temple worship may, on its side, be also said to assume a similar importance in regard to the Agamas. The Agamas bring fin temple-worship as only a further concomitant of fire-worship, the one being regarded as an ancillary adjunct to the other. The only difference they introduce in the elements of fire worship is the deletion of animals as objects of sacrifice. The higher interpretations put upon the sacrificial act in many of the Upanishats, are all to be found in the Agamas, though the latter lead up to those interpretations through the symbolism of fire-worship, as worked out along the channel of temple-worship. For the rest, it will be seen that in India at the present-day, there is hardly a Hindu that does not observe some kind of temple-worship or another, which points to the conclusion that the Agamas have had, in one form or another, a universal hold upon the continent of Hindu India, and that their influence tells.

It may be easy to point to specific passages of the Vedas, and thereby put up a thesis that they do not contemplate temple-worship. Be that as it may, it will be equally easy to demonstrate that the Agamas are the legitimate outcome of the teachings promulgated by the Vedas, and that the more important portions thereof, that is to say, the purely mystic and philosophical, were in every way anterior to such as deal with the rites of temple-worship and the technique of sacred architecture. Hence, the course of development on Agamantic lines points to the inception of the Vidya and the Yoga padas of the Agamas, as the next great stride after the stratification of the earlier Upanishats; and the Vidya and the Yoga padas did, in their turn, gradually necessitate the outer rites of symbolism, in view of a congregational worship adapted to the needs of the average man with a heart within him. Those liturgic rites were enshrined in the remaining padas of the Agamas, and the places for the performance of such rites, became the temples.

There are, for instance, Agamas in which the order of arrangement of the padas, follows exactly the chronology herein explained; while there are also others in which the arrangement is reversed, due possibly to a later deliberate desire to follow logic of theoretic sequence in preference to the order of natural evolution. Temples are very ancient institutions, though only less ancient than the Upa-nishats of undoubted antiquity. And there is no doubt that, though the first impulse to temple-worship had come from the Kashmirian Region, the institution flourished in South India with considerable pomp and circumstance. The construction of the sacri-ficial pavilion for the performance of the Srauta rites, is, as made out from the Sulba-Satras, chiefly astronomical in design and import. And not less so is that of the temple, every part of which has an analogue with either an astronomical phenomenon or a zodiacal convention. And this astronomical significance of the temple-symbolism, runs, in some of the Agamas, side by side with the spiritual import that we have learnt to associate with the same symbolism.

There are also phases of the Saiva-darSana in which the temple-worship is not regarded with favour, either because it is not considered directly contributory to one's spiritual uplift-ment and eventual Emanciption, or because it proves, at a specific stage, an out-worn and jejune observance unsuited to the spiritual wants of the votary.

The Agamas have branched out from the same stem of the Vedic tree that produced the earlier Upanishats, and were at one time as wide-spread in India as the Upanishats themselves. Like the Upanishats, the Agamas also became, in course of centuries, the basis of a number of creeds which, though unanimous in accepting the essentials of the Agamic teaching, were divergent as regards rituals, observances and minor unessential details. The earliest concretion of the Agamic doctrines as a code of systematic dogmatics, had its birth in Kashmir, under the name of Spanda and Pratyabijna darsanas, which gradually swayed the whole of the trans-Vindhyan Upper India. It is not a safe procedure to associate, as some do, the early origins of the Lakutisa-Pasupata with those of any the phases of the Saiva-darsana that recognises the Saivagamas as its infallible scriptures of authority, since the dividing-line between the two forms of faith, is formed by the circumstance that the Lakutisa-Pasupata (which, at present, is confined to the upper parts of the Bombay Presidency), does not take its stand on the Saivagamas. The stream of the Pratyabhijna and the Spanda flowed south, and became the parent of the Vira-Saiva system that, in its turn, grew influential in and round about the Deccan. An earlier current of the Pratyabhijna and the Spanda had, in the meantime, found its way into South India, to form the nucleus of what later on, in the days of the mediaeval theologians, became the compact system of the Suddhasaivadarsana. The philosophy that is at the back of all these three darsanas, is the Agamanta which is known by various names, the chief of which being the appellation Saiva-Siddhanta ( = 'the logical conclusion established by the Saiva-darsana').