Tirumurai 3: Tirukkadaikkappu (Tevaram)

Tirumurai 3 completes Sambandar's surviving Tevaram with songs of daily remembrance, the name Namasivaya, public prayer, intricate Tamil craft and a final turning toward Siva.

✦The last Sambandar volume

Tirumurai 1 begins with the child at Sirkazhi and explains the common shape of Sambandar's pathigams, pann, Tirukkadaikkappu and his characteristic verse pattern. Tirumurai 2 carries the story through the Madurai setting of the Tiruneetru Pathigam (2.66), the Kolaru Pathigam (2.85), and two of his shaped compositions. Tirumurai 3 completes the three-volume body.

The emphasis now gathers around the five syllables. The Panchakkara Pathigam (3.22) tells the devotee to remember them day after day. The Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49) says that the Lord's name melts the heart and leads the reciter on the good path. The Periya Puranam then places that same Namasivaya hymn at Nallur Perumanam near the close of Sambandar's life.

The full life is told with Tirumurai 1; Tirumurai 3 preserves hymns linked in sacred biography to the Madurai water ordeal and to Sambandar's final wedding at Nallur Perumanam.

Tradition remembers Sambandar as the child of Sirkazhi who received the milk of knowledge from Uma, sang from early childhood, travelled among Siva's shrines, met Appar, gathered devotees around him and became one of the four Samaya Kuravars. He is conventionally placed in the 7th century CE, though the exact chronology remains debated. The full life, including the distinction between sacred biography and recoverable history, is told in Tirumurai 1.

✦Madurai and the palm leaf

The Periya Puranam tells of religious contests at Madurai between Sambandar and Jain teachers. In the water ordeal, palm-leaf writings were placed in the Vaigai. Sambandar's Tiruppasuram (3.54) is said to have travelled against the current. The same account links 3.32 at Tiruvedakam with the leaf coming to rest there. These episodes come through Saiva hagiography and express the community's memory of religious contest; they are not an independent court record of seventh-century events.

✦Nallur Perumanam

3.125 at Nallur Perumanam belongs to Sambandar's wedding day. After the marriage rites, he is said to have gone with his bride and the assembled devotees before Siva and sung the hymn beginning Kallur perumanam venda. A divine light appeared; the account next places the Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49) there, after which Sambandar, his bride and those gathered with them entered the light.

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The third Tirumurai is arranged through nine panns, with 127 pathigams in the IFP/PIFI arrangement and two late recoveries that make its numbering less tidy than the first two volumes.

✦The pann sequence

The ranges below follow T. V. Gopal Iyer's edition, as set out by the French Institute of Pondicherry. In it Tirumurai 3 contains 127 pathigams and 1,369 verses, sung at 84 shrines.

Two of these hymns came back late: 3.126 at Tiruvidaivasal, found carved in stone in the temple, and 3.127 at Tirukkiliyannavur, found in a later manuscript. Editions that leave out one or both count 125 or 126 pathigams.

✦The garland turned round: Maalaimaatru, 3.117

Tirumurai 1 quotes the first verse of the Maalaimaatru (3.117), sung at Sirkazhi in pann Kausikam. The second verse keeps the same rule with different words.

The word divisions are deliberately compressed by the form. Read apart, they address Siva as the fruit of sacrifice, the player of the yazh, one who takes gracious form, the mother of beings, one beyond searching, the garlanded Lord of Kazhi and the protector from suffering. The reversible sound does not replace meaning; Sambandar makes meaning survive the constraint.

The Panchakkara Pathigam makes remembrance of the five syllables a daily practice: waking or sleeping, the heart is asked to soften and return to Siva.

✦Day after day

The Panchakkara Pathigam (3.22) is a general hymn in pann Gandhara Panchamam. Its first verse gives an instruction before it gives a promise: remember.

The phrase "நெஞ்சக நைந்து", the heart growing soft, gives the practice its tone. Sambandar does not ask for bare repetition. Memory, tenderness and praise belong together.

The five letters are Panchaksharam, Na-Ma-Si-Va-Ya. Later Saiva Siddhanta gives detailed teachings about the letters. This hymn does not pause for that analysis. It speaks as devotion: remember them every day, let the heart yield, praise Siva's feet.

✦Ordinary time becomes prayer

"Sleeping and not sleeping" stretches the instruction across the day. The divine name is not kept for festival days or moments of danger alone. The ordinary alternation of rest and activity becomes the frame for remembrance.

✦The old story inside the verse

The reference to Death recalls the Saiva story of Markandeya: Siva protects the young devotee and subdues Death. Sambandar uses that remembered story to express confidence in the five syllables. The centre is not a technique for escaping mortality; it is refuge at Siva's feet.

In the Namasivaya Pathigam, the Lord's name is not merely pronounced: love rises, the heart melts, tears come, and recitation becomes a path.

✦Love before explanation

The Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49) is placed under Pothu, a general hymn, in pann Kausikam. It is also remembered as sung at Nallur Perumanam after 3.125 near the close of Sambandar's life.

The verse begins with love, not with a theory of mantra. The heart melts, tears rise and the name is spoken. Sambandar then makes a large claim: Namasivaya is the true substance spoken through the four Vedas.

The sequence matters. The name is not a password whose sound works apart from the person. The one who recites is being changed: love, melting, tears, right direction.

✦3.22 and 3.49 together

The Panchakkara Pathigam (3.22) says, "remember every day." The Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49) shows the inward texture of such remembrance. One gives the rhythm of practice; the other gives the heart of it.

✦The name at the end of his life

Sacred biography places 3.49 after the wedding hymn 3.125 at Nallur Perumanam. That remembered sequence gives the pathigam another resonance. The five syllables that Sambandar tells others to remember daily in 3.22 become the words with which his own life closes.

The received order of Tirumurai 3 places 3.49 much earlier. The biographical order and the canonical pann order are therefore not the same thing.

The Tiruppasuram asks for rain, flourishing life, just rule, the spread of Siva's name and the ending of suffering; it is remembered inside a religious contest at Madurai.

✦A public prayer

The Tiruppasuram (3.54) is a general hymn in pann Kausikam. Its first verse looks outward beyond the singer.

The verse moves through a whole social and cosmic field: religious learning, divine beings, cattle, water, kingship, evil, the divine name and the suffering of the world. Sambandar's prayer is not confined to his own success.

"May cool waters fall" is especially concrete. In an agrarian land, rain is not scenery. It means drinking water, cattle, fields and food. "May the king flourish" likewise places public order within the field of prayer.

✦The Vaigai ordeal

Saiva sacred biography places 3.54 in a public contest at Madurai with Jain teachers. A palm leaf bearing Sambandar's hymn was placed in the Vaigai and, tradition holds, travelled against the current. 3.32 at Tiruvedakam is then associated with the place where the leaf came to rest.

The account is hagiography shaped by a period of religious competition. Its polemical setting need not determine the way every line is heard. The opening verse itself ends not with an insult to another community but with a wish that the world's suffering cease.

✦Conviction without contempt

Sambandar's corpus contains sharp criticism of rival religious paths, including Jain and Buddhist communities. Those verses belong to the contested religious world in which the hymns took shape. Reading them faithfully does not require reproducing contempt toward living communities. The historical conviction can be stated plainly: Sambandar argues for worship of Siva and rejects teachings he sees as opposed to it.

The Tiruppasuram (3.54) lets that conviction open into a prayer for the world.

The Periya Puranam places 3.125 at Sambandar's wedding and hears its refusal of ordinary married life as a final request to reach Siva's feet.

✦"I do not desire the great marriage"

The closing hymn of the older continuous Third Tirumurai is 3.125 at Tirunallur Perumanam, in pann Andhali Kurinji. Its first verse plays repeatedly on perumanam: great marriage, rich fragrance, and the shrine-name Perumanam.

The traditional commentary reads the opening kallur through the wedding rite of stepping on the grinding stone and hears Sambandar asking whether his many earlier hymns had not already made his desire clear. The wordplay then turns perumanam from the human wedding before him toward the Lord of the shrine called Nallur Perumanam.

✦The end of the story

Sacred biography says that after the marriage rites Sambandar entered the temple with his bride and devotees and sang 3.125. A divine light appeared. He then sang the Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49), invited those assembled to enter, and finally entered the light with his bride and companions.

The story does not treat marriage itself as impure. The ceremony is completed. Its point is that Sambandar's desire is directed beyond household life to Siva.

✦Looking back over Tirumurai 1–3

Across Sambandar's three volumes, one voice keeps several worlds together. Siva is beyond the reach of Brahma and Vishnu, yet He is the Lord of a temple that can be reached by road. He bears moon, Ganga, ash, serpent and Uma, yet He is also the one who enters the singer's heart. Devotion is inward love and outward practice: flowers, music, sacred ash, circumambulation, service, Tamil song and the divine name.

The three volumes also preserve a poet of strong religious conviction living amid real contest. He can sing against rival teachings, pray for the king and society, comfort the grieving, praise a named landscape, submit Tamil to demanding verbal patterns and return again to Namasivaya. Later Saiva Siddhanta will systematise doctrine in another literary form. Sambandar gives the tradition a sung world in which doctrine is encountered as worship.

Tirumurai 3 remains sung scripture, while the Panchakkara and Namasivaya pathigams give household prayer a simple daily centre in the five syllables.

✦Five syllables in daily prayer

The Panchakkara Pathigam (3.22) lends itself naturally to daily recitation because its own first verse says to remember the five letters day after day, asleep and awake. Devotees recite the whole pathigam or use its opening as a reminder to return to Namasivaya through ordinary time.

The Namasivaya Pathigam (3.49) is likewise used in prayer and Tirumurai singing. Its opening description of love, inward melting and tears keeps recitation from being understood only as counting repetitions.

These uses are expressions of devotion and trust. The hymns speak confidently about protection, right direction and release from affliction, but devotional use is not a promise that every worldly event will take the form the worshipper prefers.

✦In temple singing

Tirumurai 3 remains part of Oduvar repertoire. The pann labels matter because these are songs before they are passages of prose. Modern recordings also preserve 3.54, 3.125 and 3.49 in sung form, allowing readers to hear how familiar lines live beyond print.

The Maalaimaatru (3.117) adds another dimension. It is worth reading with the Tamil visible because its reversible construction belongs to the eye and tongue together. The sound can be sung, while the written syllables reveal the turn.

✦In remembered sacred history

At Tiruvedakam, the story of the Vaigai palm leaf keeps 3.54 and 3.32 tied to place. At Tirunallur Perumanam, the wedding and entry into light keep 3.125 and 3.49 joined in devotional memory even though the canonical pann order places them far apart.

A pilgrim therefore encounters more than one ordering of Sambandar's hymns: the musical order of the Tirumurai, the geography of the shrines and the narrative order of the saint's life.

Rameswaram (3.10, 3.101) and Kailasa (3.68, 3.109) in the wider sacred geography: The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

Tirukkalatti (3.36), the air shrine among the five: The Pancha Bhoota Sthalams.

Read Tirumurai 3 beside the first two Sambandar volumes, keeping its musical arrangement, later recoveries and traditional life-story in view.

✦The Tamil text

Shaivam.org's complete Third Tirumurai text gives the older continuous body through 3.125 and then lists later additions. Its individual hymn pages give Tamil text, pann and place for 3.22, 3.49, 3.54 and 3.117.

Project Madurai's Third Tirumurai text provides an independent electronic text for the later part of the volume, including 3.125 at Nallur Perumanam.

The IFP/PIFI Third Tirumurai arrangement gives the nine pann groups and the 127-pathigam arrangement used for the structure above. The DHARMA record of the Tiruvidaivasal inscription documents the eleven-stanza hymn now numbered 3.126 and explains why it entered modern printed collections.

For the Maalaimaatru (3.117), Tamil Wikisource sets out the reversible text and traditional word divisions verse by verse.

✦Sambandar's life in the hymns

For the full life, return to Tirumurai 1. For the Madurai fever story and the hymns of sacred ash and protection, continue through Tirumurai 2. The Shaivam compilation of Sambandar hymns cited in the Periya Puranam is useful for seeing which pathigams later sacred biography attaches to particular episodes.

The story of Tirumurai 1–3 is now complete. The Tevaram does not end with Sambandar: Tirumurai 4 begins Appar's three volumes, and Tirumurai 7 will bring Sundarar's voice.