Tirumurai 6: Tevaram of Appar

Tirumurai 6 closes Appar's three-volume Tevaram with ninety-nine long Tiruttandakam pathigams: a voice broad enough to name the world, fearless enough to refuse another master, and finally simple enough to say, “I am going to Your feet.”

✦The last Appar volume

Tirumurai 4 tells Appar's full life and introduces the verse forms associated with his three books. Tirumurai 5 follows the compact movement of Tirukkurunthogai. Tirumurai 6 changes the breathing space. Every pathigam is Tiruttandakam, and the long line lets one thought keep opening into another.

The common form of the pathigam, the place of pann and the Tevaram as a whole are introduced in Tirumurai 1. What belongs especially to this volume is the tandakam movement: accumulation, repetition, widening description, and a final turn that gathers the long sentence back toward the Lord.

✦The book's scale

The volume holds 99 pathigams and 981 verses, sung at 65 shrines.

Appar's full life belongs with Tirumurai 4; this final volume preserves the fearless answer remembered from the Pallava king's summons and the Tiruppugalur hymn remembered at the close of his life.

Tradition remembers Appar as Marulneekkiyar of Tiruvamur, brother of Tilakavathiyar, then Dharmasena, a learned Jain monk, and later the servant who returned to Siva at Tiruvathigai. He endured royal trials in sacred biography, travelled among temples, served their precincts with the uzhavaram, met Sambandar, saw Kailasa by grace at Tiruvaiyaru and finally reached Siva at Tiruppugalur. His Jain teachers and companions formed part of many serious years of his life. Tirumurai 4 tells that life in full and separates sacred biography from what historical study can recover.

✦The king's summons and 6.98

One episode belongs directly to this volume. The Periya Puranam says the Pallava king sent ministers to summon Appar during the conflict that followed his return to Saivism. Appar answered with the Marumatra Tiruttandakam, 6.98 at Pothu, beginning “Nam arkkum kudi allom”, “We are subjects of no one.”

The sacred biography does not leave him simply refusing to move. After the ministers appeal to him, Appar agrees to go, trusting that Siva will stand with him through whatever danger follows. The hymn therefore joins two things that can look opposed: freedom before worldly power, and willingness to walk into danger without making the self supreme.

✦Tiruppugalur and the last hymn

Appar's life closes at Tiruppugalur. The final pathigam of this volume, 6.99, Tiruppugalur Tiruttandakam, repeatedly turns toward one sentence: “I am going to Your feet.” Saiva sacred biography remembers this as the hymn Appar sang at the end of his earthly life.

Its first verse worries about the body's nine openings closing and the mind losing its power to remember. Appar asks to go to Siva's feet before that moment overtakes him. The long pilgrimage ends in a very small request: let thought rest on the feet it has spent a lifetime serving.

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Tirumurai 6 is a book of long neduntandakam verse: ninety-nine pathigams whose broad lines can carry lists, contrasts and repeated names until the final phrase gathers them together.

✦What Tiruttandakam means in this volume

Tamil literary accounts describe tandakam as a four-line form in which each metrical line can carry six or eight cir. The six-cir type is called kuruntandakam and the eight-cir type neduntandakam. The Sixth Tirumurai is neduntandakam throughout.

Because each metrical line is long, modern displays often break it visually into two shorter rows. The verse still moves as four large lines. That breadth matters to Appar's style. A line can gather a sequence of nouns and participles, especially repeated endings such as -aki, “becoming” or “being as”, before the sentence reaches its resting point.

Appar is given the title Thandaka Vendhar (தாண்டக வேந்தர்), “king of the tandakam”, and also Thandaka Chathurar. The form was known before him; the titles honour what he made of it.

✦A long line at work

The opening verse, 6.1.1 at Koyil, Tillai Chitrambalam, already shows what the form can hold.

The verse does not hurry to its main verb. Appar keeps adding: difficult to reach, within the Veda, atom, hidden reality, honey, milk, light, Lord, Vishnu, Brahma, fire, wind, sea, mountain. Only at the end does the verse close on speaking of Him.

The long line therefore does more than provide extra room. It creates a devotional pressure. Name follows name until the mind has been made to hold many aspects together.

✦The order of the ninety-nine pathigams

The ninety-nine pathigams fall in this order.

The sequence moves outward and inward at once. Most of the book remains rooted in named shrines, but the final general groups give the long form freedom to range through universal descriptions, questions and declarations. Then the last pathigam returns to one place, Tiruppugalur.

The Marumatra Tiruttandakam refuses worldly ownership over the devotee, but its freedom comes from a stronger belonging: Appar has become the servant who does not turn back from Siva.

✦The answer to a summons

The Periya Puranam places 6.98 at Pothu, the Marumatra Tiruttandakam, when ministers of the Pallava king come to summon Appar. Marumattram is an answer or reply. Appar's reply begins with a sentence that sounds politically absolute: “We are subjects of no one.” The verse then tells us why.

The first half is refusal: no worldly master, no fear of Death, no servile bowing. The second half gives the ground beneath that refusal. Appar has not made himself independent of every relation. He has become “a servant who does not turn back” from Sankara.

That is the paradox at the centre of the hymn. Belonging to Siva produces freedom before lesser claims. The servant's relation is not humiliation before the world; it is what makes worldly domination lose its final authority.

✦From surrender to fearlessness

Tirumurai 4 begins Appar's surviving Tevaram with illness, return and adiyen, “I, Your servant”. Its Tiruvathigai hymn 4.2 also carries the refrain “there is nothing to fear”. Tirumurai 6 takes the same belonging and lets it speak in public: “We are subjects of no one.”

The movement is not from servitude to self-rule. It is from surrender to Siva into freedom from the demand that anyone else occupy Siva's place. In Saiva terms, the adiyar stands at the Lord's feet. That low place before Siva becomes a high freedom before fear.

Appar eventually goes with the ministers. His refusal is therefore not an escape from responsibility or an insistence that nobody may speak to him. He goes because he trusts Siva, not because the king has become his ultimate master.

✦Devotional confidence, not physical immunity

The verse says “we know no disease” and “there is no suffering” in the wide language of devotional certainty. Appar's own sacred biography is full of illness and bodily danger. The hymn therefore cannot be reduced to a promise that a devotee will never become sick or suffer pain.

Its confidence concerns final belonging. Illness, death, punishment and fear do not become the devotee's master. Prayer can carry that conviction while ordinary care, medicine and responsibility continue to matter.

Tiruttandakam lets Appar name form after form without trapping Siva inside any one of them: cow and its products, knowledge and fire, tongue and speech, flower and fragrance, gods and the Lord beyond them.

✦“Becoming” again and again

The Nindra Tiruttandakam, 6.94 at Pothu, is built from a repeated grammatical movement. Verse after verse says that Siva is or becomes earth, water, fire, air, time, kinship, speech, number, flower, fragrance and much more. The long tandakam line is well suited to such accumulation.

Its eighth verse begins with a household and ritual world immediately familiar to its audience.

The verse keeps pairing thing and meaning, bearer and what is borne: tongue and speech, flower and fragrance. Fragrance cannot be pulled away from a flower and still be the fragrance of that flower. The image helps Appar speak of divine presence without reducing Siva to one visible object.

Saiva Siddhanta keeps an important distinction in view. Siva is not simply one material thing among other material things, nor are all things identical with Siva. Through Sakti He pervades, sustains and acts without losing His own nature. Appar's devotional language sings that pervasive presence before later doctrine lays out the distinction systematically.

✦Why the long line matters

A shorter verse could state “Siva is everywhere”. The tandakam does something else. It makes the reader pass through the many. Cow, fire, offering, tongue, Veda, flower, fragrance, gods, light. The breadth is part of the teaching.

By the time the verse reaches “radiant light”, the mind has travelled across body, ritual, speech, nature and heaven. Siva's presence has been heard in each field without being exhausted by any one.

Appar pictures the five senses as occupants inside the body's inner quarters, having their demands met while karma accumulates; the poor mind is told to stop mistaking that arrangement for freedom.

✦The house and its five occupants

Tirumurai 6 holds one of Appar's sharpest images of the senses. At Tiruneyttanam, 6.42.1, the body becomes a house. Inside its agampadi, its inner quarters, stand five. The verse does not name them one by one; the traditional reading understands them as the five senses.

The image is sharper than simply saying “control the senses”. The five have taken up residence. Their requests are being met. Meanwhile the householder imagines that continuing the arrangement will somehow lead to freedom, even as the house becomes a storehouse for karma.

Appar then speaks directly to the mind: ezhai nenje, “poor mind”. The remedy is not to destroy the house. It is to change what the mind takes as its centre. Praise Neyttanam; remember the Lord rightly.

✦The senses are not the enemy

Appar uses eyes to see Siva, ears to hear praise, hands to worship and feet to walk from shrine to shrine. Tirumurai 4 even turns each limb toward worship in the Pothu hymn 4.9. The five are therefore not evil substances that must be hated.

The danger is government. Who runs the house? If every demand from sight, sound, taste, touch and smell receives immediate obedience, the supposed owner is no longer governing. The senses have become masters of the house they were meant to serve.

The final Tiruppugalur pathigam returns to the same struggle in 6.99.3 at Tiruppugalur. Appar calls the five vanchak kalvar, “deceitful thieves”, and says that Siva has cut off their claim over him; what they demand has no business left with the servant who is going to the Lord's feet.

✦Attention as a form of freedom

The final line is careful: think of Him in the way He is to be thought. Appar does not offer a technique for blanking the senses. He turns attention toward Siva. Freedom begins when the mind is no longer automatically carried by every appetite.

This is close to the servant relation heard throughout Appar's three books. A servant of Siva cannot at the same time let every passing sensation become lord of the house.

The last pathigam returns Appar's long lines to one destination: before the body's doors close and memory fails, let the servant go to the feet of the Lord of Tiruppugalur.

✦The remembered final hymn

The received Sixth Tirumurai ends at Tiruppugalur with 6.99. Saiva sacred biography identifies it as Appar's final hymn. The first verse begins not by recounting his achievements but by asking what remains worth thinking about.

The body is described through its nine gates, the openings through which embodied life meets the world. Appar knows they will close. The anxiety is not merely that the body will stop functioning. It is that the moment for conscious remembrance will pass.

So the refrain-like movement through the pathigam is “un adikke pothuginren”, “I am going to Your feet.” The servant's path reaches its most stripped-down form. No royal trial, no pilgrimage, no literary title is needed in the final sentence.

✦Looking back over Tirumurai 4–6

Across Appar's three volumes, one relation keeps deepening. Tirumurai 4 begins with the adult who returns in illness and says adiyen, “I am Your servant”. Its hymns remember grace after wandering, fearlessness before danger, the body turned toward worship and service made visible in temple work.

Tirumurai 5 compresses that relation into Tirukkurunthogai. Siva is hidden like fire in wood and ghee in milk; the remembering mind becomes His temple; the servant knows the Lord because the Lord first knows him as servant. Ordinary things become short instruments of recognition.

Tirumurai 6 gives the same voice a long breath. The servant who once said “I cannot bear this pain” can now say “we are subjects of no one” because he belongs to Siva. The Lord is sung through fire, wind, flower, fragrance, speech and time. The senses are told to return to their proper place. Finally the long line narrows to one movement: I am going to Your feet.

✦Appar and the next voice

Tirumurai 6 closes Appar's surviving Tevaram. The canon now turns to Sundarar in Tirumurai 7. Appar often speaks as the servant whose body works and whose freedom comes from belonging. Sundarar will bring another devotional relationship and another human voice into the same Tevaram.

Tirumurai 6 remains sung scripture and personal prayer; its long verses are used to steady attention, remember Siva's pervasive presence and place fear beneath the deeper fact of belonging.

✦“Nam arkkum kudi allom”

6.98 at Pothu remains one of Appar's most recognisable declarations. Devotees recite or hear it as a hymn of courage because its first verse refuses fear of worldly masters and Death while grounding that refusal in service to Siva.

The devotional use needs the whole verse, not only its opening slogan. “We are subjects of no one” is completed by “we have become His servants and will not turn back.” Reciting the first line without the last can change Appar's freedom into a different idea.

Its statements about disease, distress and Death belong to the confidence of devotion. They are not guarantees of physical immunity or a reason to neglect medical or practical care.

✦Thinking with 6.42

6.42.1 at Tiruneyttanam is used by devotees for daily reflection. It lends itself to a simple inward examination: what are the five senses asking for, how automatically are their requests being met, and what is accumulating in the house while the mind is distracted?

The verse does not require withdrawal from every sight, taste or sound. It asks for a different centre of government: remembrance of Siva rather than automatic obedience to appetite.

✦Remembering before the gates close

6.99 at Tiruppugalur is also used as a prayer of final orientation. Its concern with the nine bodily gates closing makes it natural for reflection on mortality, ageing and the wish to remember Siva while awareness is clear.

That practice is not a prediction of how or when death will come. It is a decision about what deserves repeated attention while one can still choose it.

✦Hearing the long form

As part of the Tevaram, Tirumurai 6 belongs to Oduvar singing and Tirumurai teaching. The long line rewards hearing as well as silent reading. Repeated sounds such as aki, parallel clauses and the delayed ending become clearer when the verse is voiced.

1. 1

   Hear

   Listen for the long four-line movement rather than treating every visual row as a separate metrical line.

2. 2

   Gather

   Notice the chain of images or names Appar places before the final clause.

3. 3

   Find the turn

   Ask where the verse moves from description into relation: servant, refuge, remembrance or the Lord's feet.

4. 4

   Remember

   Learn one complete verse accurately and let its final movement carry the earlier images with it.

Appar's Kailasa Tiruttandakam (6.55 to 6.57) beside the mountain and its pilgrimage: The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

Read Tirumurai 6 as the completion of Appar's three books: a sustained Tiruttandakam corpus whose long line carries his theology of presence, service, courage and final return to Siva's feet.

✦Tamil text and form

Tamil Virtual Academy's account of Appar gives 99 pathigams, 981 verses and 65 shrines and explains the distinction between six-cir kuruntandakam and eight-cir neduntandakam. Its literary material treats the Sixth Tirumurai as neduntandakam and records Appar's honorific Thandaka Vendhar.

Shaivam.org's complete Sixth Tirumurai gives the 981 verses in sequence and shows the named closing groups from 6.93 through the Marumatra Tiruttandakam 6.98 and Tiruppugalur 6.99.

Project Madurai's Sixth Tirumurai text provides the latter half of the volume, including the Nindra Tiruttandakam 6.94 and the closing hymns.

✦Appar's remembered life

For the full life, begin with Tirumurai 4. The Saiva account preserved in the Periya Puranam places the Marumatra Tiruttandakam at the Pallava summons and 6.99 at Appar's final turning to Siva at Tiruppugalur.

Read Tirumurai 5 between them to hear how dramatically the compact Tirukkurunthogai movement differs from the long Tiruttandakam without changing Appar's central relation of servant and Lord.

✦Continue the Tevaram

With Tirumurai 6, Appar's three-volume body is complete. Continue to Tirumurai 7 for Sundarar, the third Tevaram poet. The change is not merely another author. It is another way a human being speaks to Siva inside the same sung canon.