Tradition and literature in India have always emphasized the transient nature of earthly life and insisted that the individual seeking enlightenment must strive for liberation from the earthly bonds and for ultimate union with the Eternal One. The aim of all education and the goal of all human aspirations have ever been this, and every school of thought in the land has evolved its own disciplines for the attainment of this goal. Saivism, as the oldest school of thought in the land, has laid down that Siva-puja is the most appropriate sadhana for a harmonious exercise of thought, word and deed, in the path of God. When these three faculties in the human personality work in unison for a single purpose, naturally integration of the mind with the spirit and union with the object result.
The influence of Siva-puja on the lives of the Saivas is also manifest in another way. Thousands of Siva temples dot the TamilNadu and there is a temple in every small village. Siva-puja is daily offered there on the agamic lines; festivals are also conducted there throughout the year; hundred of temples are renovated at great cost even in these days of cold reason and nihilism; every ritual is conducted, not on any modernised or revolutionary lines, but only on the lines laid down in the agamas, some twenty centuries ago. All these are standing monuments to the glory of the agamic worship and the pulsating vitality of their regulations regarding Siva-puja.
The presence of God should always govern the actions of human-beings. The Siva-puja are intended only as a reminder of this presence. The agama lays down. "A man may even dare to give up his life or cut off his own head; but let him not dare to take a single morsel of food without performing Siva-puja."
Man cannot live without surrendering himself to a higher being; this was recognised even by Sankara, hailed as the greatest exponent of advaita; he is known to have helped to re-establish the six schools of worship and so he has come to be hailed as the Sanmata-sthapanacarya; he had felt the need for an upasana-murti for man to give him inward peace.