Temples In India-1.pdf - Vivekananda Kendra Prakashan

VIVEKANANDA KENDRA PATRIKA‘The Siddhanta consists of the essence ofthe Veda’ (Suprabhedagama); ‘This tantrais of the essence of the Vedas’; ‘Thissiddhanta knowledge which is thesignificance of Vedanta is supremely good’(Makuta). It has been suggested that theAgamic systems were developed out of theBrahmanas in the same way as theUpanishads, though at a much later stageand that some of the later Upanishads,like the Svetasvatara, which address theSupreme Being by a sectarian title and notas Param Brahman, as of yore, probablygrew up under the shadow of the Agamas.The Agamic cult which was that of thegenerality of the people and the Vedic cultwhich was that of the priestly classes,officiating for themselves and for others,were both indigenous; they existed andgrew up side by side from the earliest timeswithout any extraneous influence; thedistinction between the two was in nosense racial.The Agamas are deemed to have scripturalauthority and are often called the Vedaand the fifth Veda. As a matter of fact,the Sanskrit nighantu names the Veda asthe Nigama and the Tantra as the Agama.The ‘Veda’ and the ‘Agama’ both seem tohave been denoted by the common term‘sruti’ up to the 11th century, after whichperiod the above distinction of Nigama andAgama seems to have been adopted.An interesting passage in the Skanda Puranagives the relative places of the Vedas andthe Agamas in the form of Siva:Asya-madhye sthito vedah,Deva-devasya bhasura,Aksharam tu dantam,Jihvayam tu Sivajnanam.“The Vedas are in the middle of the mouth,TEMPLE INDIAthe aksharas are the teeth and the Agamas(Sivajnana) are from the very tongue ofSiva.”Value of the AgamasThe Agamic (tantric) texts, as we knowthem today, had for the most part precededBuddhism and only the Agamic cult hadbeen able gradually to swallow up Buddhismon the Indian sub-continent and ultimatelyto banish it altogether from the Indian soil;it was not the Upanishadic philosophy butthe Agamic cult that was responsible forthe supplanting of Buddhism and for thefusion of the salient features into the coreof the Hindu religion.Both the Vedas and the Agamas are sruti,handed down by word of mouth throughgenerations before being reduced towriting; both are considered the revealedword of God (Siva for the Agamas) andhence they are apaurusheya and nitya(eternal); all the puranas speak of themas such, together and in the same breath,as Vedagamas; and later the Sastraliterature of the different schools ofHinduism and their great preceptors alsospeak of them as such. Thus the Agamasare also sabda-pramana and lead to theself-luminous knowledge (avabodhapramana).All schools of Hinduism base their doctrineson the Agamas. The Vedas speak of manygods and the Upanishads speak of OneBrahman. The Agamas are no less monisticand they do call their doctrines ‘advaita’;instead of abstract monism, they take intoconsideration the limitations of the averagehuman mind and preach mono-theism.36