शिवज्ञानबोध (मेय्कण्डार - शैव सिद्धान्त का आधारभूत दार्शनिक सूत्र ग्रन्थ)

68 SIVAGNANA BOTHAM.
a temple in words and in your mind and say 'Our Father which
art in Heaven.' This heaven of your mind is as unreal a re-
presentation of God's abode as the Temple of the earth. A
prayer is a mere word or sound worship, and all our mantras fall
within this category. God can only be and is therefore represented
by means of all the human senses, and the mental conceptions simp-
ly follow from the sensory conceptions. Of all these, however, the
eye and the ear standing foremost among the most intellectual of
the five gateways of knowledge, the symbolic forms of these two
senses are deservedly most popular. And of these, the forms of
the eye are all the varied forms of the universe, the five elements,
the Sun, and the Moon, and the luminaries and all animal form
chiefly man, comprised under what are called Ashta-Mukurtham;
which forms are again divided into Guru, Lingam and Sanga-
mam : Guru and Sangama comprising Living Beings and Lingam
including all pictorial and sculptural representations, from
the root 'lik,' meaning to write or describe. Cf. The word
'Lipika,' used in the 'Secret Doctrine.' The symbols presented.
to the ear, are sounds, words, names, and mantras, prayers, &c.
And of all these the Pranava and Sri Panchakshara stand fore-
most. And these mantras form what is called Sabda Brahm.
And how futile this worship of Sabda Brahm is when not
accompanied by Pathignanam is illustrated by the Puranic story of
the Rishis of the Tharukavana. Cf. the following extract
from Barths' Religions of India. "Sacrifice is only an act of
preparation, it is the best of acts but it is an act and its fruits
consequently perishable. Accordingly although whole sections
of these treatises (Upanishads) are taken up exclusively with
speculations on the rites, what they teach may be summed up in
the words of Munduka Upanishad "Know the Atman only and
away with everything else; it alone is the bridge to immortality."
The Veda itself and the whole circle of sacred science are quite as
sweepingly consigned to the second place. The Veda is not the