"Three lenses through which Vallalar's philosophy, the Tamil philosopher Ramalinga Swamigal (1823–∞), can be considered epistemologically are: (1) as a distinctive non-Western epistemology grounded in direct luminous experience (Suddha Sanmarga), (2) as a provocation and critique of Western rationalist epistemology, whose exclusion of embodied, compassionate knowing constitutes a structural impoverishment of what counts as knowledge; or (3) as a generative frame for investigating perennial questions, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between knower and known, through the radical claim that light of absolute compassion is not merely metaphor but the fundamental substrate of both being and knowing.
This paper will argue that Vallalar's epistemological claim, that compassion (Jeevakarunyam) is not merely an ethical disposition but the very condition of possibility for direct knowing. The purification of the body, mind, soul and spirit through compassionate practice opens faculties of perception unavailable to the detached rational subject, constitutes a direct challenge to the Cartesian separation of knower from known that underwrites modern Western epistemology. Where Kant forecloses the noumenal, Vallalar proposes a phenomenology of light of absolute compassion in which the noumenal is progressively disclosed through transformed perception."
