Colophon
Antyavachanam
अन्त्यवचनम्
ERGING WITH ŚIVA: HINDUISM’S CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS IS THE CULMINATION OF FIFTY YEARS OF TEACHING. IT WAS DRAWN TOGETHER BY GURUDEVA IN UNFAILING DAILY AFTERNOON EDITING SESSIONS FROM JANUARY, 1997 TO NOVEMBER, 1998. This third book in the Dancing, Living and Merging with Śiva trilogy was designed and illustrated by the āchāryas and swāmīs of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery on the Garden Island of Kauai. This printing was typeset in Adobe InDesign CS6 on a Gigabit Ethernet network of Apple Mac Pro and MacBook Pro computers. The text is set in Adobe’s Minion family of fonts to which diacritical marks have been added using Fontographer: 12.5-point medium on 15-point linespacing for the body of the book and 8.25 on 9.75 for the glossary and index. Sanskrit and Tamil fonts include those by Ecological Ling uistics, Brahmi Type and Srikrishna Patil. Original artwork was scanned on a Heidelberg Linoscan 2200 flatbed scanner and color corrected in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Production took place at Quad Graphics in Versailles, Kentucky, with printing by four-color offset press on 60# Orion Book Matte paper. The cover is printed on Kivar 7 Performa Graphic White covering material with Antique embossing.§
The cover art is a watercolor by Sri S. Rajam of Chennai, India, commissioned for this book in 1997. The painting on the half title page is by the same artist, a venerable national treasure of South India, music composer and traditional Tamil Śaivite artist whose work is permanently exhibited in the British Museum in London. The vivid oil portrait of Gurudeva on the back cover and the Gaṇeśa facing the half title page were gifts by India’s renowned artist and national treasure, Sri Indra Sharma during his sojourn on Kauai in late 1997. He was also commissioned to execute the portrait of Jnanaguru Yogaswami on page iv. The elegant and philosophically rich paintings that initiate each chapter, as well as the color alphabet initials, are the work of Tiru A. Manivelu, commissioned in 1998, with several new paintings executed for “Cognizantability” in the months prior to the completion of the second edition. The background patterns adorning the title pages were created in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 by a gifted soul of our sannyāsin order based on Manivelu’s paintings. Assistance in original indexing and the glossary was provided by Mr. Jnanadeva Shanmuganatha. The index was finely retooled for the second edition by Tirumati Chamundi Sabanathan of Santa Rosa, California, using Sonar Bookends. Gurudeva enjoyed painting with vibhūti on black paper the art that appears on the title page of each chapter. A few of Gurudeva’s original handwritten aphorisms and commentaries from the 1950s appear on the pages of “Cognizantability.” §
For the transliteration, or spelling, of Sanskrit words we chose the system used by Monier Williams (1819-1899) in his Sanskrit dictionaries. It seemed more natural to us than the system now used in academic texts. Denoting the ch sound and the sh sounds are two of the main differences. In the academic system, the ch sound (as in chakra) is rendered by a simple c. We chose ch instead, because in English the c is always sounded as c as in count, or c as in cinder, never as a ch sound, as in charm. We also sought a system that does not require a change in spellings when diacriticals are dropped off. That’s why we also chose to not use the dot under the s for ष, and instead use sh, and to put an i after ṛ, as in ṛishi. A chart of pronunciation is found on page 857.§
Assistance in Sanskrit translation was provided by Dr. Swamy Satyam, with Sanskrit proofreading by Dr. P. Jayaraman, Executive Director, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Woodside, New York, and Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., Director, Yoga Research Center, Lower Lake, California. Proofreading of the entire book was completed by Vayudeva and his wife Peshala Varadan of Rockville, Maryland, and Mrs. Sheela Venkatakrishnan of Fremont, California.§
Finally, we express a heartfelt mahalo nui loa (that’s our Hawaiian-style “thank you”) to devotees worldwide who supported this book with pūjās and prayers, and to all the insightful souls who thoughtfully penned encouraging reviews and comments. Thank you, thank you, thank you.§