The six paths and the four stages of speech

Audible speech is the outward expression of a movement whose subtler forms are not heard by the ear.

Tamil teaching names the four vakkus Sukkumai, Paisanti, Mattimai and Vaikari. In the terminology used here these are Sukshma, Pasyanti, Madhyama and Vaikhari. Para is another name for the first, Sukshma. These are modes of speech, not four languages or four grades of a speaker's education.

Siddhiyar, Supakkam 40–44, describes this account. Its image for Pasyanti is the peacock's egg: the colours of the future bird are present without yet appearing separately. Madhyama is inward; Vaikhari involves the bodily means of audible speech. Sukshma names the subtler ground. The text places the four in pure Maya and describes their unfolding as virutti, an expansion, rather than Siva Himself changing into sounds.

The three sound paths—vannam, padam and mantram—rest upon this fourfold account of speech. The distinction matters: the letters we hear and write do not exhaust what the tradition means by speech. Equally, an inward movement is not simply a quieter voice coming from the mouth.

Three paths describe the object world and three the sound world; the numbers count different kinds of things.

Adhva means a path or course. Here the six paths describe the ordered fields through which the soul acts and receives the fruits of its deeds. They are not six competing religions. M. Thiruvilangam's commentary on Sivagnana Siddhiyar distinguishes porul prapancham, the world of objects, from sol prapancham, the world of sound and expression.

The numbers do not make a single inventory of interchangeable objects. A realm is not a letter; a mantra is not a bodily organ. The table joins different ways of describing the soul's provision for experience. For the thirty-six principles, The 36 Tattvas gives the fuller account.

A few names make the larger lists less abstract. The bhuvanas include Kalagni, Ananta and Isana. The alphabet includes a, i and ka; its fifty-one is the ritual count used here, not the number of letters in the ordinary Tamil alphabet. The commentary's Tamil explanations of the padas begin with Om, Ammaiyappan and Al nizhalan, the One beneath the banyan's shade. These are examples from its received list, not a claim that any eighty-one everyday words would serve equally.

The five kalas name Siva's power as it withdraws, establishes, illumines, brings peace and leads beyond that peace.

The five kalas are Nivritti, Pratishta, Vidya, Santi and Santyatita. The commentary explains their work through the soul's movement towards freedom. Their names are therefore more than labels on a set of containers. They gather the paths under the action of grace.

These five should not be confused with the particular Kalai tattva among the seven Vidya tattvas. A shared word does not make the five encompassing powers five copies of that limiting principle. Likewise, Vidya as a kala must be read in this fivefold setting rather than silently substituted for every other use of the name Vidya.

✦How the paths rest within one another

The commentary gives the inward order as mantram → padam → vannam → bhuvanam → tattvam → kalai: mantra rests in pada, pada in vannam, vannam in bhuvana, bhuvana in tattva and tattva in kala. Read from the encompassing side, each later path rests in the one before it: kalai, tattvam, bhuvanam, vannam, padam, mantram. This is a relation of inclusion and support, not a spelling exercise or a claim that one spoken word physically contains a world.

All five kalas rest in Santyatita. Siddhiyar 258 further places kala in Sakti and Sakti in Siva. The resting places do not replace the Lord with an impersonal collection of numbers. The account carries the reader from differentiated experience towards its divine governance.

Each kala has an assigned share of the five other paths; the columns return the six-path totals.

The following distribution follows the commentary. Each row names one kala; the remaining five columns give its assigned tattvas, bhuvanas, vannams, padas and mantras. Thus the kala path is represented by the five rows themselves.

Nivritti's one tattva is earth. Pratishta has the remaining twenty-three of the twenty-four Atma tattvas. Vidya has the seven Vidya tattvas. The five pure tattvas are distributed as three in Santi and two in Santyatita. This explains why the familiar division 24 + 7 + 5 can be read alongside the five-row division 1 + 23 + 7 + 3 + 2 without inventing new principles.

The direct allocation of two tattvas to Santyatita is compatible with the statement that all five kalas rest there. One statement counts its particular share; the other describes encompassing inclusion. Confusing those two statements would make the total impossible to read.

For the padas, the ordering runs from the encompassing end: Santyatita 1, Santi 2–12, Vidya 13–32, Pratishta 33–53 and Nivritti 54–81. This gives 1, 11, 20, 21 and 28 respectively. It is enough to recognise the arrangement without memorising all eighty-one expressions.

The eleven are five brahma mantras and six anga mantras; here we learn their names.

The commentary groups the eleven as five plus six. The five brahma names also occur in the account of Siva's five faces in The Agamas. Here they belong to the mantra path. These are names of mantras, not the full formulas for recitation.

The alternative in the final entry does not create a twelfth mantra. It records the commentary's other name for that place. Nor should the word brahma here be taken to mean five separate creator gods: it names this group of five mantras.

The lists of realms, vannams and padas are much longer than the mantra list. They are given in full on the page about the distribution, in the commentary's spelling, with the eighty-one padas in Sanskrit, the Vyoma Vyapi mantra; still, the relation among the paths is the central idea. A complete liturgical use requires the received text and the teacher's instruction, including matters that a list of names cannot supply.

Adhva suddhi addresses the soul's binding connection with the fields of experience through the teacher's grace-bearing action.

In nirvana diksha, the purification of the paths is called adhva suddhi, அத்துவ சுத்தி. The six paths are the fields in which action and its fruits take place. Purifying them concerns the soul's bondage through those fields; it does not mean destroying every world or removing the organs of the disciple's body.

The commentary makes the scope visible with a drawing of a standing human figure. Five regions rise from the feet to the crown: Nivritti from the feet to the knees, Pratishta from the knees to the navel, Vidya from the navel to the chest, Santi from the chest to the brow, and Santyatita from the brow to the crown. Each has its element (earth, water, fire, air, space) and its presiding deity (Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Mahesvara, Sadasiva). Beside the figure a thread with four knots marks the divisions. The purification proceeds through the regions and their included paths, with ritual gathering, offerings and successive treatment of the thread. The body is presented as a meeting place of the wider order, not as five unrelated pieces.

Each region bears the same set of counts used in the distribution table. The drawing thereby joins the vast cosmological list to the particular disciple receiving initiation. It is a way to represent comprehensive purification; the numbers do not describe a medical anatomy.

Sivagnana Siddhiyar, sutra 8, places this teaching within the Lord's coming as the teacher. Irupa Irupathu presses the related difficulty: how can acts of mind, speech and body outlast their moment and continue to bind? The rite belongs within the answer of grace, knowledge and release from karma's hold. The teacher's action and the knowledge it serves must remain together in our understanding.

Consecration brings the same encompassing order into the consecrated form through kala and tattva nyasa.

The commentary then turns from the disciple's body to the Sivalinga. In consecration, nyasa is the ritual placing or establishing of the kalas and the paths they contain. The pedestal is associated with Nivritti, the avudaiyar (the basin round the linga) with Pratishta, and the shaft, rising, with Vidya, Santi and Santyatita. It also names three parts: the pedestal as Brahma's part, with the letter A; the avudaiyar as Vishnu's, with U; and the linga as Rudra's, with M. Object and sound paths are gathered together in this establishing, so that worship addresses the consecrated form in its Agamic fullness.

The body drawing and the linga drawing thus use the same fivefold arrangement for different ritual purposes. One concerns purification in initiation; the other concerns establishment at consecration. Their correspondence helps explain why the commentary places beside the linga the following verse on the human body.

Tirumular sets body, linga, sacred space and divine dance alongside one another. Read here, the verse invites reverence for the body as a place of divine presence. It does not remove the distinction between Siva, the soul and the equipment through which the soul experiences.

Return to The Agamas for the scriptural setting of initiation and temple worship. The six-path account gives us a way to recognise their shared breadth: sound and objects, the human body and the ordered worlds, are held within the work of Siva's power.

The six paths are taught in the eighth sutra of Sivagnana Siddhiyar and its commentaries.

• M. Thiruvilangam, commentary on Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Supakkam, the eighth sutra: the five kalas and the paths in each, the full lists of bhuvanas, vannams and padas (in Tamil and in Sanskrit), the eleven mantras, and the paths in initiation and consecration.
• Sivagnana Siddhiyar, Tamil text: Supakkam 40–44 for the four stages of speech, and 259–261 for the six paths.
• Tirumantiram, Tamil text: the Seventh Tantra, Pindalingam, verse 1726.