Tiruvundiyar

Tiruvundiyar brings Siddhanta close through short, repeated utterances about receiving grace and learning to live in it.

The work belongs to the fourteen Meykanda Sastras, although it precedes Meykandar himself. The collection's name does not make all its authors his disciples. Tiruvundiyar witnesses an earlier current of Siddhanta teaching, handed from teacher to pupil.

Its manner differs from Sivagnana Bodham. It does not begin by proving the existence of God, the soul and the bond. It begins with the Lord who cannot ordinarily be known coming within reach. Its concern is what receiving Him asks of the soul: old habits must be loosened, grace must not be forgotten, and union must be understood without losing the distinction between Lord and soul.

✦A song that asks us to return

Undi is a girls' game associated with springing or jumping up, and with the song sung for it. The refrain உந்தீபற, undi para, gives these verses their name. It recurs at the ends of the second and third lines. The metre is kalittazhisai; “undi” names the play-song form in which that metre is used.

Manikkavasagar had already used the form in Tiruvasagam's Tiruvundiyar, Tirumurai 8.14. Uyyavandadeva gives it another task: the repeated movement now carries instruction about the soul's release. The two works share a title and refrain, but their verses are different.

Tirukkalirruppadiyar is its close companion. It expands Tiruvundiyar's compressed teaching in venba verses. Reading them together lets a short utterance open into explanation.

His life survives chiefly as a teacher's presence in Tiruviyalur and as the teaching passed through his pupils.

His life is told as the tradition remembers it.

Uyyavandadeva was a Sivayogi associated with Tiruviyalur. He taught Aludaiya Deva Nayanar and composed Tiruvundiyar for him. The surviving account tells little of his family or early life; it remembers what he gave a pupil.

Aludaiya Deva later taught a seeker at Tirukkadavur and gave him his own teacher's name, Uyyavandadeva. This younger Uyyavandadeva Nayanar of Tirukkadavur wrote Tirukkalirruppadiyar to unfold Tiruvundiyar. He was thus a disciple in Tiruviyalur Uyyavandadeva's teaching line, through Aludaiya Deva.

✦What the work itself preserves

Verse 44 blesses the one who came to dwell in the author's thought and upon his head, together with the Mother. The teacher is remembered through Siva's gracious presence. Verse 45 names Uyyavandadeva and speaks of the teaching's work against the bonds. These are the personal traces with which the book ends.

He belongs to a teaching succession before Meykandar, rather than to the four Santana Kuravars beginning with Meykandar.

✦His period

The work is usually placed in the 12th century, before Sivagnana Bodham. The basis is the older succession leading to Tirukkadavur Uyyavandadeva and his expansion of the work, together with the dates transmitted in later accounts. A date around 1147 CE is customary for Tiruvundiyar; it is not a securely recorded year from the author's own lifetime.

1. 1

   Uyyavandadeva of Tiruviyalur

   teaches Aludaiya Deva; composes Tiruvundiyar

2. 2

   Aludaiya Deva Nayanar

   passes on the work and his teacher's name

3. 3

   Uyyavandadeva of Tirukkadavur

   expands it in Tirukkalirruppadiyar

Uyyavandadeva Nayanar of Tiruviyalur · All the poets and teachers ›

The verses move from the Lord's coming to the soul's practice and freedom, then close in gratitude to the teacher.

Tiruvundiyar has 45 numbered verses, each in three lines. The final verse, which names the author, is included in that count. There are no formal chapters in the continuous sequence. This reading map gathers its movements without turning them into separate books.

The refrain does not replace the teaching. Before each return, a line introduces a distinction, a direction or an image. A verse can therefore be brief without having only one thing to say.

The sequence includes yogic language as well as the language of love. Verses 8 and 22 concern spiritual supports and the disciplining of breath and thought. Verses 17 and 18 turn towards the Dancer and the remembrance of grace. The work carries these approaches together; its brevity does not make it a manual of techniques.

The Lord beyond ordinary knowing makes Himself known; the soul receives before it can claim to understand.

Tiruvundiyar begins with a coming. What no one can readily know without form becomes present in form and gives itself.

✦The direction of the gift

The opening does not describe a soul capturing the Lord by its own power. The initiative is His. The movement from formlessness to form makes teaching possible: Siva comes as the guru, disclosing what the soul's ordinary instruments cannot reach by themselves.

Verse 12 pictures someone brought out of a corner into a courtyard. The image gives the guru's work a spatial clarity: a confined life opens. Verse 44 returns to the teacher in gratitude. What began as a coming ends as a blessing of the one who came.

Receiving grace does not mean that all further attention is unnecessary. Verse 18 directs the reader not to forget grace amid obscuration and clarity. We can mistake a moment of understanding for something we have produced and now possess. The poem turns us back towards the giver.

✦What the later Sastras unfold

Sivagnana Bodham, sutra 8 sets out Siva's coming as teacher when the soul is ready. Tiruvarutpayan explores why grace is already sustaining the soul before it recognises that help. Tiruvundiyar gives the event in a few words: He came; He gave Himself. The later works explain the soul's readiness and the nature of that giving.

Freedom asks for a change in the soul's habitual direction, and fulfils its relation to Siva without abolishing it.

The second verse immediately brings the opening gift into practice. Old habits do not disappear simply because we have heard a true statement.

✦The habit beneath an action

The repeated word pazhakkam, habit or accustomed practice, matters. What has trained our attention outward cannot be loosened by a passing wish. The soul learns another way of attending, grounded in the reality disclosed through grace.

The bond is more than one regretted act. Anava obscures the soul's knowing; deeds and embodied experience sustain the recurring life in which that obscuration works. Tiruvundiyar addresses the grip through its effects: habitual pursuit, self-appropriation and forgetting the help by which we know.

Verse 26 speaks of bondage ceasing to sprout. Verse 38 asks why a golden ploughshare is being used for a small crop. The images ask where knowing is being directed and what is being allowed to grow. The teaching concerns a change in the soul's relation to what it knows and seeks.

✦Union without the soul's destruction

The language of receiving Siva can sound as though the soul becomes the Lord without distinction. Verse 40 prevents that reading.

Siva can stand intimately with the soul through His grace. The soul's union with Him does not make it the independent Lord. Its bondage can end while its reality as a soul remains. Siddhanta's advaitam names an inseparable relation, not the erasure of the one who receives grace.

Sivaprakasam develops the soul's conditions and the ripening through which its old orientation changes. Sivagnana Siddhiyar, especially Supakkam 320, argues why the Lord's knowing and the soul's receiving remain distinguishable even in union. Tiruvundiyar states the distinction within the song itself.

The play-song makes the words memorable, while their images ask the reader to look beyond what is first heard.

“Fly up, undi” belongs to a song of movement. In Tiruvundiyar the return of the refrain also carries commands: remember, know, worship, stand. The listener is repeatedly brought back to something to be attended to.

Verse 17 directs that attention towards the Dancer through the sound of His anklet.

✦What an image can carry

The sound leads towards the one whose dance it accompanies. It is a direction of worship and inward attention, not a prediction that every reader will hear an extraordinary sound. A short image can hold together movement, recognition and reverence.

Elsewhere the poem uses a courtyard, seed and sprout, a ploughshare and a crop. These are familiar things, but the relations they show are exacting. The reader must ask what is confined, what grows, and what knowing is being used for. A memorable image gives a difficult thought a place to remain while we learn to understand it.

✦From hearing to understanding

Tirukkalirruppadiyar expands such compressed directions. Unmai Vilakkam names the soul's instruments and explains the five letters. Sivagnana Bodham arranges the doctrine into an argument. Those works help unfold what Tiruvundiyar asks us to remember; they do not make its song merely a decoration around their teaching.

The work is approached through recitation, patient explanation and its companion text, rather than through a promise of immediate attainment.

Tiruvundiyar continues to be explained in Siddhanta discourse. A recorded exposition by Siva. Saurirajan accompanies the Tamil text linked under Read further. Its short verses can be read aloud and held in memory, while a commentary helps unfold what their brevity leaves implicit.

The traditional commentary by Tillai Chitrambalavar, also known as Sivaprakasa Tambiran, and Tirukkalirruppadiyar belong beside it. A refrain that is easy to repeat may carry an image that takes time to understand.

✦A modest reading practice

Read one verse aloud. Let the two returns of undi para remain audible. Put the direction before each refrain into your own words. Read the explanation, then return to the Tamil. Ask what distinction the verse is preserving, and what habit of attention it asks you to reconsider.

With verse 2, that might mean noticing where attention repeatedly goes, rather than announcing that the old habit has ended. With verse 40, it means remembering that freedom belongs to a soul sustained by grace. The practice is attentive reading; the verses are not promises of a result on demand.

Read the complete Tamil, its old commentary and its companion work together.

✦Text and commentary

• Project Madurai: Tiruvundiyar and Tirukkalirruppadiyar — Tiruvundiyar follows the companion work; this text supplies the four quotations above.
• Tamil text with Siva. Saurirajan's recorded exposition — all 45 verses with a discourse recording.
• Tamil Wikisource: Tiruvundiyar — another complete transcription.
• Introduction preserving the old account of the teachers — reports the succession through Aludaiya Deva and the customary dates.
• Account of Uyyavandadeva of Tiruviyalur) — a concise account of what is known and transmitted.

Commentary to seek: Tillai Chitrambalavar's Tiruvundiyar Urai. He is also called Sivaprakasa Tambiran; this is not Umapathi's work titled Sivaprakasam.

✦Companion works

• Tirukkalirruppadiyar — the expansion composed within this teacher line.
• Sivagnana Bodham — the later arrangement into twelve sutras.
• Sivagnana Siddhiyar — the sustained argument, including the soul's relation to Siva in release.
• Unmai Vilakkam — the soul's instruments and the five letters.
• Sivaprakasam — the soul's conditions and ripening.
• Tiruvarutpayan — grace and the guru.