The Tirumandiram (Set of 5 Volumes) – Text, Transliteration, Translation and Detailed Commentary

Book Specification

Book Description

Volumes I and II

About the Book

The Tirumandiram, by Siddha Tirumular is a sacred encyclopedia of philosophical and spiritual wisdom rendered in verse form. It is one of India’s greatest texts, a spiritual treasure-trove, a Sastra containing astonishing insight. It is a seminal work and is the first treatise in Tamil that deals with different aspects of Yoga, Tantra and Saiva Siddhantha.

“The poems of Tirumular abound in technical terms conveying mystical experience. The symbolic, twilight language of the Siddhas has the advantage of precision, concentration, secrecy, mystery and esoteric significance in that the symbols, at the hands of the Siddhas become a form of artistic expression of the inexpressible. In short, the twilight language of the Siddhas is, in essence, profoundly mystical in nature and contains a “numinous aura” and existential revelations for the man who deciphers their message. The essential difficulty is that to understand the twilight language requires a total hermeneutic of reading, an awareness, in fact, of the total religious and philosophical structures that infuse it. It also requires one to enter deep states of meditation wherein the verse serves as a key that reveals a higher meaning to the initiate.” (T.N. Ganapathy)

It took five years and a team of scholars to translate each of the 3000 verses and to write extensive commentaries about them, in nine volumes. The tenth volume contains presentations from two philosophical schools of Saiva Siddhanta and a glossary, select bibliography and index.

Foreword

This monumental publication and all of the research conducted by the Yoga Siddha Research Center’s team of scholars and yogins since the year 2000 has been sponsored by Babajis Kriya Yoga Order of Acharyas, a registered educational charity in Canada and the USA, with sister organizations registered in Bangalore India and Sri Lanka. In concert with Babaji‘ s Kriya Yoga and Publications, Inc. of Canada, the Order is pleased to make this new translation and commentary available to the English speaking world.

There is some history behind this publication. The Tirumandiram is one of the first texts to emerge in the West from the gold mine of ancient Tamil literature, which until recently has been bypassed by scholars outside of south India. While the Sanskrit literature has been mined and studied by Western scholars for more than 200 years, the ancient Tamil language literature has been largely ignored. However, the late Swami Subramaniam, founder of the Saiva Siddhantha Church in Hawaii, USA, commissioned the late Dr. B. Natarajan to translate the Tirumandiram in the late 1980 ‘so Unfortunately, only the first of the nine tantras was published by the Saiva Siddhantha Church, prior to the death of the translator, Dr. B. Natarajan, in 1982. While it contained no verse by verse commentary, it did include some notes. Having received from Dr. Natarajan in person a copy. of this first tantra in 1980, and dismayed by the fact that the rest had not been published, I, as the founder of Babaji’s Kriya Yoga and Publication, repeatedly urged Dr. Natarajan’s heirs, from 1986 onwards, to allow me to publish the entire manuscript. Unknown to me, Dr. N. Mahalingam, the noted industrialist, philanthropist and scholar of Sangam literature, finally persuaded the heirs to do the same, and financed the publication of Dr. Natarajan’s manuscript in a single volume published by the Ramakrishna Mission in Chennai, India in 1992. Seeing that this edition lacked the presentation which would make it appealing and useful to the vast majority of Western readers,