After coming to know him, Agathiyar asked that I know the Atma and Sivam too recently. I came to know this from a friend and a reader of this blog who explained it all clearly. I have shared it in my earlier posts https://agathiyarvanam.blogspot.com/2026/05/it-is-gods-will-2.html.
Agathiyar listed the phases of the journey towards arriving at the state of Light, namely the impure body, or Asudha degam, will become pure, or Sudha degam, and become the body of Prana, or Pranava degam, and eventually the body of Light, or Oli degam, in coming through a Nadi reading in 2025, read by Mataji Sarojini Ammaiyar on her visit to AVM. He assured me that he was there for me to see it through. For this purpose, he had asked that I know the Tattwas and Gunas. He pointed me to Tavayogi's teachings.
அசுத்த தேகம் சுத்த தேகமாகி பிரணவ தேகமாகி ஒளி தேகமாகும் வித்தையே ஞானம். அதற்குத் தியானத்தில் வாசியைக் கவனி. மெல்ல மெல்ல அட்டமா சித்துக்கள் உந்தனுக்கு கூடும் தானே. மகனே, அதற்கு முன் உடல் கூறு தத்துவங்களை நீ அறிய வேண்டும். லோக ராசு குருவாக உந்தனுக்கு செப்பி உள்ளான் தானே.
Tavayogi had written in his "Andamum Pindamum" that the Udal or body that came together as a result of the combination of the five Buthas shall return to the original five. In that event, the Uyir or Breath shall merge with the Atma or Soul, becoming Light and return to Agathiyar.
உடல் என்பது பஞ்ச பூதங்களில் உரு பெற்று மீண்டும் பஞ்ச பூதங்களிடம் சென்று விட்டால் உயிராகியது ஆன்மா வோடு கலந்து ஜோதிநிலையில் எம்மை வந்து அடையும். உடல் கூறு தத்துவமும் இதையே உமக்கு உணர்த்தும்.
My reader friend has come to my aid again. He wrote the following.
"AnDavan aaTchiyil adharmamey illai"
There is no Adharma in God's Governance
A study through the 36 Tattwas and Saiva Siddhantam
The Question is the Teaching
Before answering this question, it is worth pausing to honour it. This is not a casual or superficial question. It is the question of a sincere seeker who has sat long enough with the sacred texts to feel a genuine tension and who has the intellectual honesty to name it rather than smooth it over. The sacred texts speak constantly of Dharma and Adharma, of right action and wrong action, of the path that leads toward liberation and the path that leads deeper into bondage. And yet here is a verse singing with full-throated confidence that in Andavan's governance, in Shiva's own administration of this cosmos, there is no Adharma at all.
How can both be true?
The answer, when seen through the architecture of the 36 Tattwas of Saiva Siddhantam, is not only coherent but luminous. It reveals that both statements are entirely true, but they are spoken from different levels of reality, addressing different aspects of the soul's journey. To understand why, we must enter the Tattwa structure from the bottom and climb.
The Level of the Pasu — Where Dharma and Adharma are Real
The bound soul, the Pasu, currently operates within the 24 Ashuddha Tattwas. This is the level of Prakriti Maya: the gross and subtle body, the senses, the mind, the ego, the five elements. At this level, the Pasu is governed by the three Gunas — Sattwa, Rajas, and Tamas — whose interplay determines the quality of every thought, word, and action.
Here, Dharma and Adharma are not abstractions. They are lived realities with immediate consequences. The Karmendriyas — the five organs of action (speech, hands, feet, and the organs of elimination and procreation, Tattwas 31 to 35) — generate karma with every movement. When directed by a purified Buddhi (Tattwa 17) and a Sattvic Manas (Tattwa 19), these organs produce Dharmic action: action that advances the soul's liberation, that fills the Chitta (Tattwa 20) with divine impressions, and that progressively weakens the grip of the Anava Mala. When driven by Rajasic or Tamasic Ahankara (Tattwa 18), these same organs produce Adharmic action: action that deepens the soul's entanglement, that fills the Chitta with further Vasanas of craving and aversion, and that extends the cycle of rebirth.
The Jnanendriyas — the five sense organs (Tattwas 26 to 30) — similarly operate within this Dharma and Adharma framework. What the eye chooses to rest upon, what the ear chooses to hear, what the tongue chooses to speak — all of these are fields of Dharmic and Adharmic choice. The entire prescriptive structure of Saiva Siddhantam's ethical teaching — Yama, Niyama, the regulation of diet, relationship, speech, and sensory engagement — operates precisely at this level. It is directed at the Pasu navigating the 24 Ashuddha Tattwas.
The sacred texts are therefore entirely right to speak of Dharma and Adharma, to prescribe one and warn against the other. This is not merely religious morality; it is the precise technical instruction for a soul that is operating within the Guna field of Prakriti Maya. To dismiss this instruction as unnecessary because everything is Shiva anyway is one of the most dangerous spiritual errors a seeker can make — and Saiva Siddhantam is unambiguous in rejecting it.
The Pasu must walk the path of Dharma. There is no shortcut through spiritual philosophy.
The Level of Niyati and Kaala — Where Adharma is Redeemed
Moving upward through the Tattwa structure, we enter the seven Shuddhashuddha Tattwas — the level of Asuddha Maya, where the soul is being prepared and equipped for embodied experience. Two Tattwas at this level are directly relevant to our question: Kaala (Tattwa 10) and Niyati (Tattwa 11).
Kaala Tattwa is the principle of Time — the cosmic framework within which karma ripens. Niyati Tattwa is the principle of cosmic ordering — the force that ensures each soul's karmic fruits return to that soul specifically, at the right time, in the right circumstances, for the right evolutionary purpose. Together, these two Tattwas constitute what the tradition describes with great precision as Shiva's administrative wisdom — the divine module building by which each soul's birth is assigned a specific syllabus of experiences drawn from its accumulated karma.
Now here is the crucial insight these two Tattwas reveal: even what the Pasu performed as Adharma does not escape the redemptive administration of Niyati and Kaala.
An Adharmic act — a lie spoken, a harm inflicted, a betrayal enacted — generates a karmic impression in the Chitta. This impression, left unresolved, would deepen the soul's obscuration and extend its bondage. But Niyati Tattwa ensures that this very impression is eventually brought back to the soul in the form of a corresponding experience — not as punishment for its own sake, but as the precise circumstance needed for the soul to feel, understand, and release what it once inflicted. The person who was deceived becomes, in a subsequent life, the teacher of honesty. The wound that was given becomes the wound that is received and healed. And through this cycle — governed with absolute precision by Niyati and Kaala — even the Adharmic acts of the Pasu are being used by Shiva's governance in service of the soul's ultimate liberation.
This is what Thirumoolar means when he speaks of Shiva as Kaalakaala — He who is the time of Time, the transcendence of temporality. Shiva does not suffer under the governance of time; He is its author. And as its author, He ensures that no moment, no action, no consequence — however dark — falls outside the arc of His redemptive purpose.
From the level of Niyati and Kaala, therefore, what the Pasu experiences as the painful consequences of Adharma is revealed to be something else entirely: it is the curriculum of compassion, the module of maturation, the precise instrument by which Shiva is turning even the soul's darkest movements into steps on the homeward path.
At this level, Adharma is not annulled. It is redeemed.
The Level of Maya Tattwa — Where the Impossible is Made Possible
At Tattwa 6, Maya itself — the cosmic creative matrix — reveals another dimension of this truth. The tradition describes Maya with a phrase of extraordinary precision: Agatitha Gatana Patiyasi — the super specialist in combining things that are impossible to combine.
What does Maya combine that seems impossible? Among other things, it combines the soul's freedom with the soul's bondage in such a way that the bondage itself becomes the instrument of freedom. This is the deepest paradox of Saiva Siddhantam: the very Pasam — the bonds of Anavam, Karma, and Maya — that obscure the soul from Shiva are simultaneously the curriculum through which the soul grows capable of receiving Shiva's grace.
The Adharmic actions of the Pasu — which generate binding karma and deepen the Pasam — are held within Maya's creative administration in such a way that they too, over the vast arc of multiple lives, contribute to the soul's exhaustion of desire, its disillusionment with the transient, and its eventual turning toward the Permanent. Maya is the lamp that provides limited light in the night of spiritual ignorance — not the light of liberation, but enough light to keep the soul moving until the dawn arrives.
A soul that has never suffered the consequences of its own Adharmic actions would never develop the discernment (Viveka) to distinguish Dharma from Adharma in the first place. The pain of Adharma's fruits is itself a teaching — perhaps the most visceral and unforgettable teaching available within the 24 Ashuddha Tattwas. And it is Maya, in collaboration with Niyati and Kaala, that ensures this teaching reaches the soul in precisely the form it needs.
At this level, Maya reveals that even Adharma serves Dharma's ultimate purpose — the soul's liberation.
The Level of the Suddha Tattwas — Where Only Love Governs
Now we arrive at the summit — the five Suddha Tattwas, the level of Shiva's own nature — and it is from this level that the verse speaks: AnDavan aaTchiyil adharmamey illai.
At the level of Shiva Tattwa (Tattwa 1) and Shakthi Tattwa (Tattwa 2), there is only Para Nada and Para Bindu — pure consciousness and pure power, preceded by Will, and preceding Will, by Karunai — Love. The cosmological key the tradition reveals is this: Love gives rise to Will. Will gives rise to Intelligence. Intelligence gives rise to Creation. Creation does not arise from judgment. It does not arise from a divine preference for certain souls over others. It arises from Love — unconditional, boundless, and without remainder.
At the level of Sadasiva Tattwa (Tattwa 3), Shiva's Jnana and Kriya Shakthi operate in equal measure in the Bhoga state — the state of experience. Here, the divine awareness holds the entire cosmos as experience without being stained by any part of it. There is no Adharma at this level because at this level there is no division — no subject-object separation that would make it possible for one thing to violate another.
At the level of Iswara Tattwa (Tattwa 4), Shiva's Adhikara — His divine authority — governs the cosmos with the precision of Sanidhana, His pure Presence. Order does not come from Iswara Tattwa through enforcement or punishment. It comes through Presence itself, the way a teacher's entry into a classroom establishes order without a word spoken. At this level of governance, there is no reaction to Adharma — there is only the steady, unwavering presence of the divine that neither condemns nor abandons, but simply and compassionately continues to hold the space of liberation open for every soul.
At the level of Suddha Vidya Tattwa (Tattwa 5), Aham and Idam — self-awareness and world awareness — are in perfect balance. The cosmic functions of creation, preservation, and dissolution operate here. Even what appears from below as destruction — as loss, as endings, as what the Pasu calls calamity — is at this level a function of Rudra's compassionate dissolution, clearing the field for new growth, new possibility, new karmic opportunity.
From the Suddha Tattwa level, Shiva's governance is seen in its totality — and in that totality, every movement of every soul, including every Adharmic action and its consequence, is held within an unbroken arc of love whose single destination is liberation.
This is what the verse is singing. This is what AnDavan aaTchiyil adharmamey illai means.
Not that Adharma does not exist in the experience of the Pasu. It does — painfully and consequentially. But in the governance of Andavan — in Shiva's own administration from the level of the Suddha Tattwas — there is no Adharma, because there is nothing that falls outside His grace. There is no soul He has abandoned. There is no action whose consequence He has not already incorporated into the redemptive curriculum of Niyati and Kaala. There is no darkness that His light has not already surrounded.
The sun does not follow the rule "illuminate the day." It simply shines. Darkness is not the sun's failure — it is the temporary condition of a surface turned away from the light. So too, Adharma is not a failure of Shiva's governance. It is the temporary condition of a soul turned away from its own divine nature — a turning that Shiva, in His boundless patience, is already in the process of gently, persistently, lovingly reversing.
Sivaayanama
Anbe Shivam
Wanting to give credit to him by mentioning his name, he instead wrote the following.
Credits:
To Maha Siddhar Thirumoolar and through the radiant lineage of the blessed Nayanmars, the Samaya Kuravars, the Santhana Kuravars, and the venerable Acharyas of Saiva Siddhantam. Should any merit be found in these words, the credit belongs wholly to them. Any faults are mine alone.