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Saiva Siddhanta: An Indian School of Mystical Thought. By H. W. SCHOMERUS. Translated from German by MARY LAW, edited by HUMPHREY PALMER. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979 [First English Edition, 2000. xv, 410 pp. Rs. 595.
This English translation of Schomerus' study of the Tamil school of Saiva Siddhanta, originally published in 1912 under the title of Der Saiv Siddhanta, is a welcome addition, on both historical and topical grounds, to the growing body of literature in English on the influential Saiva Siddhanta school of philosophy. Schomerus wrote at a time when Western scholars knew little about the Saiva Siddhanta school and its texts in Sanskrit, the Saiva Agamas, and even less about the related-but not derivative-Tamil school of Saiva Siddhanta, with its fourteen canonical texts in Tamil. Although there were scholarly translations into English of at least three of the canonical Tamil philosophical texts by 1900, the then-established scholarly episteme represented Saivism in south India as a primitive, animistic tradition oriented around capricious forces and lacking in philosophical and textual sources, in contrast to the evolved north Indian tradition of Vaiavism, which promotes love (bhakti) of God through philosophy, poetry, and liturgy. Schomerus' volume shatters that representation, and it has been a definitive reference book on the Tamil school of Saiva Siddhanta philosophy; for English speakers, Mary Law's translation will likely replace M. Dhavamony's Love of God According to Saiva Siddhanta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), which has been out of print for many years, as the key booklength study.
Schomerus knew he was bucking the scholarly trend:
When I was learning Tamil, my interest in philosophy led me to choose philosophical texts for my study. As I soon discovered, these differed considerably from the philosophy of Vedanta, as presented by Professor...