Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the ÔSrivaisnavas of South India

Examines texts and commentaries in the Tamil-language SArivastradition of South India; about the general issues of text, vision, and narrative that such texts raise, and about the implications of these for a particular style of comparative theology.

Seeing through Texts invites us into the world of south Indian Hinduism through a study of 100 songs of the Tiruvaymoli, the great masterpiece of the ninth-century Hindu saint Saṭkopan. These unique songs, dedicated to the Hindu god Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa, lead us through poetic and imaginative, philosophical and moral reflections on the nature of the self and the world, ancient myths and temple worship, and the mystical moods of longing, desire, and love in which one seeks, loses, and finds again the God who loves us first. The book is also a study of the interpretation of the Tiruvaymoli in the traditional Hindu Srivaiṣṇava commentaries of the twelfth-fourteenth centuries, as well as a comparative theological study which explores the implication of the songs and their commentaries for readers from outside the Srivaiṣṇava tradition.