Tolkaapiyam is perhaps the greatest treatise not only for Tamil philosophy but also for Indian philosophy as a whole, overlooked only because of the persistent projection of Vedanta tradition as that which is Indian and the best. It is hardly noticed that Nyaya Sutras is essentially a summary of Tolkaapiyam where the Hermeneutic Logic is transformed into Epistemological Logic and which in turn led to the various kinds of logical traditions of other philosophies.
This story has to be recalled and the important insights Tolkaapiyam brings into the analysis of human behavior must be retold .
The purpose of this series in precisely that up to a point
The Text as a Whole
The TEXT is massive running into more than 1630 sutras and divided into THREE books, the Ezuttatikaaram, Collatikaaram and PoruLatikaaram. While the final book Marabiyal is normally taken as part of the third but I believe that it is more ancient than Tol proper going back perhaps to the period of Second Academy consistent with the traditional account that Tol belongs to the Second Academy. I have written a separate paper on this and will post in the near future a revised version of it. While Tol proper is ascribed to a period around the 3rd Cent BC, there are also those who believe that some parts of it, especially that of Ezuttatikaaram had been revised consistent with the changes in Brahmi script that was current at that time. We may note here that it is only in Marabiyal that we find mention of jaties, communal groupings that are profession based - trade, agriculture, priesthood, political leadership and so forth. But this marabu -historically derived traditional groupings is NOT VarNasrama Dharma. For it is said that the Mutalvan -- the most authoritative person is a Munivan , one who has freed himself from the prejudices and shines forth in TRUE understanding that clarifies all. (Vinaiyin niiGki viLaGkiya aRivin munaivan). In order to become the metaphysically LUMINOUS, one does not need any smrities and sruties but only that of becoming FREE of prejudices of all kinds. Anyone who studies the History of Tamil Philosophical Developments and how while deconstructing other philosophies prevalent at that time, there were also furtherance of its own by deepening and broadening of the nuclear ideas, can see the continuous impact of Tol in all these.
Tolkaapiyam has constituted the MODEL and take off point for the numerous grammatical treatises that have been written since that time: IRaiyanaar AkapporuL (fully available) Cempuut Cey’s KuuRRiyal (lost), Panniru Padalam (CaGkam work but lost) puRapporuL VeNba Maalai (later work fully available) Mayeeccuram (only a few sutras available), Kaakkaip Paadiniyam (fully reconstructed from various secondary references and quotations) the massive Avinayam (only partly existent), Viiracooziyam (13th cent, fully available with commentary) Nannul ( fully available with several commentaries) , YapparuGkalam ( an encyclopedic work on Tamil Prosody) the IlakkaNa viLakkam ( 17th cent AD), the Muttuviiriyam ( 19th cent) and numerous others. We should also mention that though PaNini was known from ancient times, it is only with Viracozilyam, Pirayoka Viveekam and IlakaNNak Kottu that we see the impact of it in Tamil grammarians. Fortunately these studies also deal with similarities and differences between Tamil and Sanskrit and where as in Pirayokao Viveekam, they note that the similarities outnumber differences and all these before the European Indologists entered the scene and Aryanized Sanskrit etc and with that also introduced a racial split among the Indian folks.
The Organizational Principles.
Tol differs not only from PaNini but also from some recent developments in Linguistics in the West. And this emerges from the fact that among the THREE books, the primordial is the Third Book, the PoruLatikaaraam and it is only to make sense of the studies in PoruL that the semantic, morphological and syntactical studies are taken up in Collatikaaram. And further it is only to understand the grammatical intricacies as in Col that phonemic, phonological, phonetics, morphophonemic and so forth are taken up in the Ezuttatikaaram.
Now PoruL means MEANING but here the MEAINGS people LIVE with in the world. Thus PoruLatikaaraam turns out to be Existential Analytics where the MEANING that agitate people in their life are accessed through the Speech Acts viz. KuuRRu. It must also be mentioned that the concept of LANGUAGE itself is also very broad. Not only it includes the VERBAL both the oral and written forms (vazakku and CeyyuL) but also the KuRippu Mozi (the body language, the symbolic gestures etc) and so forth. The MEANINGS emerge in all kinds of communicative acts and unless we capture them and analyze them scientifically we cannot ACCESS the truths about the world and people.
Loganathan @ Ullaganar
( editing and re-paragraphing by his student )
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