hern home, and each of them has produced a
huge mass of fine devotional literature in the vernaculars. In the
Tamil country the church of Vishnu boasts of the Nal-ayira-prabandham,
a collection of Tamil psalms numbering about 4,000 stanzas composed by
twelve poets called Alvars, which were collected about 1000 A.D.;
and the worship of 'Siva is equally well expressed in the Tiru-murai,
compiled about the twelfth century, of which one section, the Devaram,
was put together about the same time as the Nal-ayira-prabandham. Both
the Tiru-murai and the Nal-ayira-prabandham breathe the same spirit of
ecstatic devotion as the Bhagavata-purana; they are the utterances of
wandering votaries who travelled from temple to temple and poured
forth the passionate raptures of their souls in lyrical praise of
their deities. Through these three main channels the stream of
devotion spread far and wide through the land. Like most currents of
what we call "revivalism," it usually had an erotic side; and the
larger temples frequently have attached to them female staffs of
attendant votaries and _corps de ballet_ of very easy virtue. But this
aspect was far more marked in neo-Krishnaism, which often tends to
intense pruriency, than in the other two cults. The Alvars pay
little regard to the legends of Krishna, and concentrate their
energies upon the worship of Vishnu as he is represented in the great
temples of Srirangam, Conjevaram, Tirupati, and similar sanctuaries.

[Footnote 31: On this name see above, p. 86.]

About the beginning of the ninth century the peaceful course of
Vaishnava religion was rudely disturbed by the preaching of Samkara
Acharya. Samkara, one of the greatest intellects that India has ever
produced, was a Brahman of Malabar, and was born about the year 788.
Taking his stand upon the Upanishads, Brahma-sutra, and Bhagavad-gita,
upon which he wrote commentaries, he interpreted them as teaching the
doctrine of Advaita, thorough monistic idealism, teaching that the
universal Soul, Brahma, is absolutely identical with the individual
Soul, the _atma_ or Self, that all being is only one, that salvation
consists in the identification of these two, and is attained by
knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal
universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (_maya_)
conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to
him--in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it