The Melting Heart: Religious Experience in Contemporary Tamil Saivism

Abstract

This article compares the religious experience of the founding poet-saints of the Saivite bhakti movement in the Tamil country of the sixth to ninth centuries CE with that of contemporary Saivite devotees. The historical background of the bhakti tradition within Tamil Saivism is sketched, with a brief description of its spirituality. Material collected in interviews with Tamil-speaking Saivites is presented, including personal accounts of the origins of the interviewees’ religious faith and reports of their experience of God in their daily lives. This material is discussed in terms of Fowler's developmental stages of faith, with additional reference to other categorisations of religious motivation. It will be shown that the experience of the founding poet-saints is not entirely dead in contemporary Saivism, but that it is restricted to quite a small minority of devotees.