Tirumurai 4: Tevaram of Appar

Tirumurai 4 is the first of Appar's three volumes: 113 pathigams in which return, belonging, service and grace are sung by someone who knows what it is to have lived away from the path he later chose.

✦Where this volume stands

The basic form of the pathigam, the place of pann and the shape of the Tevaram as a whole are introduced in Tirumurai 1. Tirumurai 4 begins another voice within the same sung canon. Sambandar's three books close; Appar's three begin.

Appar is one of the four Samaya Kuravars. His surviving Tevaram is divided across Tirumurai 4, 5 and 6, but the division is not merely by quantity. Four verse forms are especially associated with the three volumes.

Tirumurai 4 begins with 21 pathigams grouped under ten named panns. After them come the 58 Tirunerisai pathigams and 34 Tiruviruttam pathigams. The result is a book that begins under inherited melodic labels and then gives increasing prominence to verse form.

The Periya Puranam remembers Appar as Marulneekkiyar of Tiruvamur, then Dharmasena the Jain monk, then the servant who returned to Siva, survived royal trials, worked in temple courtyards and kept walking until even Kailasa was shown to him at Tiruvaiyaru.

✦Marulneekkiyar and Tilakavathiyar

His life is told here as the Periya Puranam remembers it. He is born at Tiruvamur. His parents are named Pukazhanar and Madhiniyar, and his elder sister Tilakavathiyar becomes the steady human presence through the first part of his life. The boy is called Marulneekkiyar.

The family story is marked by loss. Tilakavathiyar is betrothed to the warrior Kalippakaiyar, but her parents die and then news comes that the man she was to marry has fallen in battle. She does not marry. She turns her life toward Siva and later lives at Tiruvathigai, serving the Lord there.

Marulneekkiyar grows into learning and charity. After reflecting on the instability of worldly life he enters the Jain monastic community, studies its teachings deeply and becomes known as Dharmasena. He is not described as a casual visitor. The story gives him years among Jain teachers and companions and presents him as learned enough to hold an honoured place among them.

The later Saiva sacred biography tells his eventual departure from Jainism from its own devotional standpoint, and sometimes in sharply polemical language. That religious disagreement need not turn his former teachers and companions into caricatures. They were part of the life through which the man later called Appar came to Siva.

✦Illness and return at Tiruvathigai

Dharmasena is struck by a severe abdominal illness. When it does not yield to the care available around him, he thinks of his sister. He comes to Tilakavathiyar at Tiruvathigai. She receives him, gives him sacred ash, teaches him to turn again to Siva and takes him into the temple.

There he sings the hymn beginning “Kootrayina vaaru vilakkagaleer”, 4.1 at Tiruvathigai Virattanam, pann Kolli. Sacred biography says the illness leaves him. Siva gives him the name Tirunavukkarasar, “king of the tongue” or “lord of speech”.

The opening verse does not speak as though the singer has earned his return. It begins in pain, admits not knowing the full weight of what has been done, and offers the feet that will now serve.

✦The Pallava trials

The sacred biography then places his return inside a conflict at the Pallava court. It says some Jain leaders, angered by Dharmasena's departure, complain to the king and that the king orders a succession of punishments. Appar is said to be shut in a lime kiln, given poisoned food, sent before a royal elephant, and finally bound to a stone and cast into the sea.

He comes through each trial alive. The sea episode is remembered together with 4.11, the Namasivaya Pathigam, a Pothu hymn in pann Gandhara Panchamam. Its first verse says that even if one is tied to a stone and thrown into the sea, Namasivaya remains the good companion.

The same sacred biography says the Pallava king later turns to Saivism. The narrative is part of Saiva hagiography, not an independent court chronicle, and its portrayal of religious conflict reflects the perspective from which it was written.

✦A servant with a hoe

After his return, Appar's remembered life is not centred on court favour. It is centred on service. The Periya Puranam repeatedly shows him entering temples, bowing, singing and using an uzhavaram, a hoe-like implement, to clear weeds, stones and growth from temple grounds. The work is remembered as uzhavarappani, service through cleaning and tending sacred spaces.

This is the bodily face of the servant's path, dasa margam: Chariyai. The servant does not merely say “I belong to Siva”. He bends, clears, carries and leaves the courtyard fit for worship.

✦Sambandar calls him Appar

The Periya Puranam brings the older Tirunavukkarasar to the young Tirujnanasambandar at Sirkazhi. Sambandar greets him as Appar, “father”, and the name stays. The meeting and the stories of their time together are told more fully with Sambandar's life in Tirumurai 1.

✦Appudi Adigal at Tingalur

At Tingalur, Appar meets Appudi Adigal, a devotee who has never seen him but has named charitable works after him out of reverence. Appudi invites Appar to eat. While the meal is being prepared, Appudi's eldest son goes to cut a banana leaf and is bitten by a snake. The family, unwilling to interrupt service to the guest, hides its grief until Appar learns what has happened.

Sacred biography says Appar has the boy brought before Siva and sings the hymn of numbers beginning “Ondru kolam”, 4.18, a Pothu hymn in pann Indalam. The boy is restored to life. The scene joins two kinds of service: a household serving a devotee, and a devotee carrying the household's grief into prayer.

✦Toward Kailasa, and back to Tiruvaiyaru

Later Appar longs to see Kailasa. He travels north and presses on even when the journey wears down his body. Siva appears in the form of a sage and tells him that Kailasa cannot be reached by bodily effort in that way. Appar is directed to enter a pool.

He emerges not in the Himalaya but at Tiruvaiyaru in the Kaveri country. There, the story says, Siva grants the vision he had sought. Appar sees the creatures around him in pairs and sees through them the divine pair, Siva and Uma. The hymn beginning “Mathar piraik kanniyanai”, 4.3 at Tiruvaiyaru, pann Gandharam, is received as the song of that vision.

Kailasa, and the shrines of light Appar also sang (Srisailam 4.58, Rameswaram 4.61): The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

✦Tiruppugalur

Appar's life closes at Tiruppugalur. After decades of pilgrimage, song and temple service, he is remembered as reaching Siva's feet there. His life therefore ends not with a royal office or a settled school but in the same relation his hymns repeat: adiyen, “I, Your servant”, at the Lord's feet.

✦What history can say

Appar is conventionally placed in the early 7th century CE. The usual historical link starts with the sacred biography, which speaks of a Pallava ruler and later associates his Saiva turn with a temple named Gunadharavichcharam at Tiruvathigai. Historians have often connected the name Gunadhara with Gunabhara, a title attested for the Pallava Mahendravarman I.

A Tiruchirappalli cave inscription of Mahendravarman, using the title Gunabhara, presents the king as a worshipper of the linga and contains language that has been read as looking back on a change in religious conduct. This has often been brought beside the Appar story.

Some scholars question both the Gunadhara–Gunabhara identification and the claim that the inscription records a conversion from Jainism. The early-seventh-century placement is widely used, but the king's role in Appar's sacred biography cannot be treated as independently established in every detail.

Tirunavukkarasar (Appar) · All the poets and teachers ›

Tirumurai 4 contains 113 pathigams and 1,070 surviving verses: 21 hymns under ten named panns, followed by 58 Tirunerisai and 34 Tiruviruttam hymns.

The hymns are sung at 50 shrines. The ranges below follow T. V. Gopal Iyer's edition, as set out by the French Institute of Pondicherry.

Appar's first hymn begins not with certainty about himself but with pain, confession and a decision to remain at Siva's feet.

✦“I cannot bear it”

The verse does not give us a neat spiritual autobiography. Appar says “I do not know” and “I cannot bear it.” The return begins inside limitation. He cannot diagnose every cause of his suffering, and he cannot free himself from the pain. What he can do is turn.

The decisive word is adiyen, the servant at the feet. Repentance in this hymn is therefore not only regret about the past. It becomes a new relation expressed through worship: night and day, “I will not leave Your feet.”

Later Saiva Siddhanta will speak systematically of grace, bondage and the paths of practice. Appar sings the human side of that movement before it becomes a classroom sequence. A person who has gone elsewhere can return; the return itself becomes an act of grace.

✦Sambandar and Appar: two beginnings

Sambandar's remembered life begins with a child receiving the milk of knowledge and singing from the first gift of grace. Appar's remembered life begins differently: a grown man has lived through family loss, charity, years of Jain learning, illness and a change of religious allegiance before his first surviving Tevaram hymn. The one voice begins with grace received in childhood; the other speaks from grace encountered after years away. Neither story needs the other to be smaller. Tirumurai 1 tells Sambandar's beginning in full.

✦Return is not erasure

Appar does not become spiritually interesting because the Jain years can be dismissed. They matter precisely because he had belonged, studied and lived there. His later songs of surrender come from someone who knows the weight of changing direction.

That makes “return” larger than nostalgia. He is not simply going back to childhood custom. He is choosing again, as an adult, and then giving the rest of his life to the consequences of that choice.

Appar sets out for Kailasa with his body; grace gives him Kailasa at Tiruvaiyaru, where ordinary creatures become part of a transformed seeing.

✦Kailasa at Tiruvaiyaru

The Periya Puranam hears this hymn through the Kailasa story. Appar wanted the northern mountain, exhausted himself on the road, entered water at a divine command and came out at Tiruvaiyaru. The verse then does something quiet. It does not describe a remote snow peak. It describes worshippers carrying flowers and water, and an elephant coming with its mate. The ordinary scene opens into divine vision.

The repeated “I saw” is important. Grace has not merely transported the pilgrim to another geography. It has altered what can be seen in the place where he now stands.

✦The senses opened

Some commentators hear in this hymn the release of a lifetime of discipline. Appar had lived for years under the strict restraint of the senses, first as a Jain monk and then as a Saiva renunciant walking from shrine to shrine. At Tiruvaiyaru the eyes that had been held in check open fully. Through the pathigam he sees creatures in pairs, the tusker and its mate among them, and in each pair he sees Siva with Uma. The world he had guarded himself against becomes the place where the Lord is shown.

The hymn does not say that the creatures are Siva. It says that in them he saw Siva's feet. In Saiva Siddhanta the world is not God, yet God is not absent from it: Siva pervades it, and grace can make that presence seen. The senses that once had to be restrained are not now indulged. They are given back, turned toward Him.

✦The lifted foot at Tillai

The same willingness to receive divine sight appears in 4.81 at Koyil, Tillai Chitrambalam, within the Tiruviruttam section. In its fourth verse Appar gathers face, hair, ash, body and lifted foot into one act of seeing.

This is not a rejection of embodied life. The sight of the dancing Lord makes human birth itself desirable because a human being can see, worship and love. Appar's devotional world does not ask the body to become irrelevant. The body walks, bows, clears the temple ground, sings and receives vision. What the raised foot and the other gestures mean in Siddhanta is read in Nataraja and the five acts.

Tillai as the shrine of space among the five element temples: The Pancha Bhoota Sthalams.

Appar's fearlessness is not a claim that danger vanishes; it grows from belonging to Siva and from the five syllables carried into danger.

✦“We are the people of that One”

The second pathigam, 4.2 at Tiruvathigai Virattanam in pann Gandharam, carries a refrain that has become inseparable from Appar's remembered courage.

The turn comes before the refrain: “We are His people.” Fearlessness is relational. Appar does not say that fire, kings, elephants, sickness or sea are imaginary. His sacred biography is full of them. He says that none of them has the final claim on the person who belongs to Siva.

This is close to the force of adiyar, the one at the feet. Belonging changes the scale by which danger is measured.

✦The companion in the sea

The Periya Puranam places this hymn with the last of the Pallava trials. The verse itself gives the image directly: stone, binding, sea. Yet the thing named as “good companion” is not a miraculous technique. It is Namasivaya, the five-syllable name by which the devotee remains turned toward Siva even when nothing else can be held.

The first verse ends with Namasivaya, and the pathigam keeps returning to the five syllables. In practice, that makes 4.11 a natural hymn of refuge. Its devotional confidence does not amount to a promise that every person who recites it will escape physical danger in the same form as the sacred story.

Appar's servant-path joins song to work: the body that bows before Siva also clears His courtyard and serves His devotees.

✦The servant's path

The path of the servant, dasa margam, is Chariyai: outward service offered to Siva. Appar's remembered life gives this teaching a physical image. He carries the uzhavaram and clears temple precincts. The Tamil practice remembered from that image is uzhavarappani.

The work is deliberately ordinary. Weeds return. Dust returns. Leaves fall again. A courtyard cleaned this month will need hands again next month. Service therefore has no single dramatic finish. It is love taking responsibility for a place of worship.

Tirumurai 4 also turns the body itself toward worship. The Tiruvangamalai, 4.9, a Pothu hymn in pann Sadhari, "the garland of the limbs", speaks to the body one part at a time, from the head downward, and gives each its work. Its verses open like this:

1. 1

   Head · தலையே நீ வணங்காய்

   "O head, bow down" before the Lord who wears the skull and the moon.

2. 2

   Eyes · கண்காள் காண்மின்களோ

   "O eyes, will you not see" Him.

3. 3

   Ears · செவிகாள் கேண்மின்களோ

   "O ears, will you not hear" His praise.

4. 4

   Nose · மூக்கே நீ முரலாய்

   "O nose, breathe" His fragrance.

5. 5

   Mouth · வாயே வாழ்த்துகண்டாய்

   "O mouth, praise Him."

6. 6

   Heart · நெஞ்சே நீ நினையாய்

   "O heart, think of Him."

7. 7

   Hands · கைகாள் கூப்பித் தொழீர்

   "O hands, join and worship."

8. 8

   Body · ஆக்கையாற் பயனென்

   "What use is this body" if it does not go round His temple?

9. 9

   Feet · கால்களாற் பயனென்

   "What use are these feet" if they do not walk to His shrine?

The life and the hymn point in the same direction. The body is not an obstacle to be escaped; each part of it has a service. Later Tamil poets took up the idea of a garland of the limbs, and the form is remembered as Appar's.

✦Service to a devotee at Tingalur

The Appudi Adigal story widens service from temple ground to the household that receives an adiyar. The tragedy in that story happens while the family is preparing to feed Appar. When Appar learns of the boy's death, he does not accept honour and continue eating. He turns the family's grief toward Siva.

The pathigam proceeds through numbers, one after another. Sacred biography remembers it as the prayer through which Appudi's son is restored. The theological point of service does not depend on reproducing that miracle. The story asks what a servant does when devotion meets another person's loss: the guest stops being the centre, grief is not ignored, and prayer is offered for the household that had been serving him.

✦Service without ownership

Appar's temple work is a particularly clear image of Saiva Siddhanta's servant relation. The devotee works, but does not claim to own the temple, the merit or the result. Service is offered because the place and the work belong to Siva.

That posture prepares the deeper meaning later Siddhanta gives to service: the loosening of the claim “I am the independent doer.” Appar's hoe does not itself explain the whole doctrine, but it gives the body a way to learn it.

Appar's hymns still live as sung prayer, and his image of service continues whenever devotees clean and care for temple spaces together.

✦“Sotrunai Vedhiyan” as prayer

4.11, the Namasivaya Pathigam, is recited and taught as a hymn of refuge. Its opening image is unusually direct: even stone, rope and sea cannot take away the companion named at the end of the verse, Namasivaya. Devotees may turn to the hymn in fear, difficulty or travel because the sacred biography places it at a moment of extreme danger.

That use is an act of faith. It is not a guarantee that danger will disappear, that illness will reverse, or that a particular worldly result must follow recitation. The hymn's promise is first about where the devotee stands and what name remains available there.

✦Uzhavarappani

Appar's courtyard service remains a living model. Uzhavarappani groups still gather at temples to remove weeds and rubbish, sweep and wash precincts, clean objects used in worship and help maintain spaces that may not receive regular attention. The tasks differ from place to place, but the devotional idea is recognisably Appar's: bodily labour offered without making oneself the owner of the work.

✦In temple singing

As part of the Tevaram, Tirumurai 4 belongs to the repertoire of Oduvar recitation and to Tirumurai teaching. The older pann labels and the distinctive Appar forms remind the listener that these poems were made to be voiced, not merely read as devotional statements.

A useful way to live with the volume is to learn one whole pathigam slowly. 4.1 gives the language of return. 4.2 gives belonging without fear. 4.11 gives Namasivaya as companion. The words become clearer when the whole hymn is heard, not only the famous opening line.

Read the complete Tamil of Tirumurai 4 beside Appar's traditional life, and then continue through Tirumurai 5 and 6 to hear how his voice changes with form.

✦The Tamil text

The French Institute of Pondicherry Digital Tevaram sets out all 113 pathigams and their musical or verse-form classifications. Shaivam.org provides the continuous Tamil text of the 1,070 verses and individual hymn pages useful for reading one pathigam at a time.

For Appar's verse forms, the Digital Tevaram's discussion of music and metre places Tirunerisai and Tiruviruttam in Tirumurai 4, Tirukkurunthogai in Tirumurai 5 and Tiruttandakam in Tirumurai 6.

✦The traditional life

Project Madurai's Periya Puranam gives Sekkizhar's Tamil account of Tirunavukkarasar and of Appudi Adigal. Read it as sacred biography: it preserves the tradition's remembered sequence of illness, return, trials, pilgrimage, service and final union with Siva.

For the historical question around Mahendravarman I, modern scholarship sets the Periya Puranam's Pallava story beside the king's attested title Gunabhara and his Tiruchirappalli cave inscription, while also questioning whether these pieces establish the conversion story in full.

✦Continue Appar's three volumes

Tirumurai 5 is the Tirukkurunthogai volume. Tirumurai 6 is the Tiruttandakam volume. Together with Tirumurai 4 they preserve Appar's surviving Tevaram before the canon turns to Sundarar in Tirumurai 7.

For Sambandar's full traditional life and the common architecture of the Tevaram pathigam and pann, return to Tirumurai 1.