Flowers in Cupped Hands for Siva

The Sambhupuspanjali is a seventeenth-century manual in 824 Sanskrit verses, with some prose, that describes the worship of Siva, not in a temple, but in a South Indian domestic context. It is full of quotations from scriptures and manuals of the Saivasiddhanta, notably those of Somasambhu (C11th), Aghorasiva (C12th) and Vedajnana (C16th). About the author, Saundaranatha, we can deduce little other than his provenance, for he tells us that he also wrote a manual, now lost, about the worship of Sivasurya (Siva as the sun) in Manipravalam, a mixture of Sanskrit vocabulary and Tamil inflections and syntax, a literary idiom usually associated today with Vaisnava commentarial works. Several features of his Sanskrit style also reveal the influence of Tamil. The introduction presents the work and gives a detailed synopsis of its structure.