A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c19.s1.32

c19.s1.32

Viśishtādvaita was the philosophy also of Śaivism. The earliest Śaiva writer in Sanskrit is perhaps Haradattācārya (d. 1116) whose Śruti-sūkti-mālā (also called Caturvedatātparya-sangraha) delineates the salient features of Śaiva thought, while his Harihara-tāratamya is a sectarian polemic. He was followed by Śrīkantha whose Brahma-mīmāmsā-bhāshya expounds the Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa from the Śaiva viewpoint. Śrīkantha may well be identical with the ācārya who, according to Aghoraśivācārya, came down from Gauda to worship Naṭarāja at Chidambaram and whom Vikrama Chola adopted as his guru. There are notable verbal coincidences between Śrīkantha's Bhāshya and the Śrībhāshya of Rāmānuja. Śrīkantha's system is called Śivādvaita to distinguish it from the Śaiva-siddhānta system developed in the Tamil books. Attempts have been made to treat both the systems as one, but they cannot be regarded as successful. Aghoraśivācārya’s (c. 1158) commentaries on *Tattvaprakāśikā* of Bhojadeva and on the highly philosophic *Mrigendrāgama* are important in the history of Śaiva philosophy. Umāpatiśivācārya’s (c. 1290-1320) *Bhāshya* on the *Paushkara Samhitā* is a powerful plea that Śiva is the one deity for everyone to worship. Ñanāśivācārya of the *matha* at Sūryanārkōyil in the Tanjore district, and preceptor of Śevvappa Nāyaka of Tanjore, commented on the *Śivajñānabodha*, not the Tamil work of Meykaṇḍār, but a section of the *Raurava Āgama*, from the more usual Śaiva-siddhānta standpoint; the commentary is notable for its many valuable citations from works no longer extant. His other works were *Śaiva Paribhāshā*, a manual in five sections on the categories of Śaivism, and the *Śivāgrapaddhati* and *Kriyādīpikā* on the rituals of worship and renunciation. Śrikantha’s work was carried further by Nilakantha (c. 1400) whose *Kriyāsāra* is a metrical compendium of Śrikantha’s *Bhāshya* which attempts to discover common ground between his system and that of the Vira-śaivas; and by Appaya Dikshita’s striking contributions to Śaiva philosophy, particularly in his monumental commentary on Śrikantha called the *Sivārkamanidipikā*.