the Saivas, because he had not yet been born in this world.
Nambiyandar Nambi, the Vyasa of the Dravidian Vedas, has correctly understood the expression பொய்யடி மையில்லாத புலவர் to mean collectively the forty-nine professors of the third academy at Madu ra.
தரணியிற் பொய்மையிலாத் தமிழ்ச்சங்கமதிற் கபிலர்
பரணர் நக்கீரர்முத னாற்பத்தொன்பது பல்புலவோர்.
Do the modern Tamil scholars claim to be more learned and better informed in this matter than Nambiyandar Nambi who lived within one hundred and fifty years after Sundarar or Manikka Vachakar ?
It has been urged by a recent writer that Nambiyandar Nambi has misunderstood the above expression, and that he has wrongly calculated the total, forgetting that the 'traditional sixty-three' was the number of the individual saints sung by Sundara Murti. A grand discovery indeed ! But was our poet so ignorant of the rudinents of arithmetic as to merit the critic's condemnation ? Has Sundara Murti or any writer anterior to Nambiyandar Nambi stated that the number of individual saints was sixty-three ? And, if not, how could he call it traditional' ? Perhaps, he forgot that most of the names of the Saiva saints were almost unknown before the time of Nambiyandar Nambi, who for the first time collected and arranged the Devara and other Saivite hymns, and that their apotheosis was mainly due to his works. If we add Sundara Murti, as our poet has rightly done, to the 62 individual saints enumerated in the திருத்தொண்டத்தொகை we get the now traditional 63. But, if we take the above expression to mean Manikka Vachakar, we get in all 64 which is not the traditional number of Saiva
