Tirumurai 7: Tiruppattu (Tevaram of Sundarar)

Tirumurai 7 completes the Tevaram in the voice of Sundarar, the devotee who speaks to Siva as one already claimed by Him and therefore free to plead, complain, ask, argue and still belong.

✦The third Tevaram voice

The form of the pathigam, the role of pann and the overall shape of the Tevaram are introduced in Tirumurai 1. Appar's full life and the servant relation that marks his remembered path are told in Tirumurai 4. Tirumurai 7 does not repeat those foundations. It asks what changes when the singer speaks as Siva's friend.

Sundarar is the third of the Tevaram poets and one of the four Samaya Kuravars. He is remembered by several names: Nambi Aruran, Vanthondar, Sundaramurti Nayanar, and Tambiran Tozhar (தம்பிரான் தோழர்), “the Lord's friend”. Each name catches another part of the life told about him.

✦Why “Tiruppattu”

The seventh book is called Tiruppattu (திருப்பாட்டு), “sacred song”. Unlike Sambandar's three Tirukkadaikkappu volumes or Appar's books gathered by characteristic verse forms, Sundarar's surviving corpus stands as one pann-arranged Tirumurai under this name.

His songs are often unusually personal. He names hunger, household need, gold, paddy, bodily pain, friendship, anger, marriage, separation and failing sight. Yet the personal does not remain private. It is repeatedly pulled back into two larger relations: Siva has claimed me, and I belong to Siva's devotees.

The Periya Puranam remembers Sundarar as Nambi Aruran of Tirunavalur, claimed by Siva on his wedding day, made the Lord's friend at Tiruvarur, bound by love to Paravai and Sangili, and finally called to Kailasa on a white elephant.

✦Nambi Aruran of Tirunavalur

His life is told here as the Periya Puranam remembers it. He is born at Tirunavalur in Tirumunaipadi Nadu. His parents are named Sadaiyar and Isaignaniyar, and the child is called Nambi Aruran. He is born into an Adi Saiva family connected with temple worship.

The local chieftain Narasinga Munaiyaraiyar sees the child playing in the street, loves him and brings him up in his own household. Nambi Aruran therefore grows with both the ritual learning of his birth family and the manners of a ruling household.

This background matters to the later poems. Sundarar can speak the language of a servant and yet carry himself with the freedom of someone accustomed to direct speech. The Periya Puranam does not smooth that tension away. It makes it part of his relation with Siva.

✦The wedding that did not happen

When Nambi Aruran reaches marriageable age, a wedding is arranged. As the ceremony is about to proceed, an old Brahmin enters and declares that the bridegroom is his bonded servant. He produces a document said to have been executed by Aruran's grandfather.

Aruran is furious. He disputes the claim and uses harsh words for the old man. The matter is taken before the learned assembly at Tiruvennainallur. After examining the document, the assembly accepts the old man's claim. Asked to show where he lives, the old man leads them into the temple of Arutturai and disappears.

The claimant is Siva.

Siva then reveals that He has come to take Aruran into His service and commands him to sing. Because Aruran had called the old man piththan, “madman”, Siva tells him to begin with that word. The result is 7.1 at Tiruvennainallur, pann Indalam, the hymn beginning “Piththa piraisoodi”.

The first surviving hymn therefore begins with a paradox. The singer has argued against being made a servant, yet the verse says the deeper bond was already there: “You placed Yourself in my mind.” The human quarrel ends by revealing a relation that, in the hymn's own language, precedes the singer's consent.

✦Tiruvarur, Paravai and the Lord's friend

Sundarar's remembered life soon becomes centred on Tiruvarur. Siva receives him there not only as servant but as companion, and Sundarar comes to be called Tambiran Tozhar, “the Lord's friend”.

At Tiruvarur he meets Paravai. The sacred biography says they are drawn to one another and that Siva Himself arranges their marriage. Paravai's household then becomes one of the centres from which Sundarar worships, receives devotees and leaves on pilgrimage.

It is also at Tiruvarur that the Periya Puranam places the Tiruttondattogai, 7.39, pann Kollikkovvanam, Sundarar's hymn naming Siva's devotees. That hymn will outgrow the circumstances of his own life and become one of the foundations of the later Nayanmar tradition.

✦Paddy for the household

Kundaiyur Kizhar, a devotee who regularly supplied grain to Sundarar's household, was unable to do so when the rains failed. Siva provided a great quantity of paddy, but there was no one to carry it to Tiruvarur.

At Tirukkolili, Sundarar sings 7.20, pann Nattaragam, asking the Lord to arrange the transport. The hymn names Paravai and the household need directly. In the sacred story, Siva's attendants carry the paddy to Tiruvarur during the night, and Paravai distributes it.

The episode is characteristic of Sundarar's life. Food, household management and devotion are not placed in separate rooms. The friend asks the Lord about what is needed today.

✦Gold at Tirumudhukundram

Another episode takes place at Tirumudhukundram. Sundarar asks Siva for gold in 7.25, pann Nattaragam. The sacred biography says gold is given, placed in the Manimuttaru river and later recovered from a tank at Tiruvarur.

The story is told with miracle and humour. What matters for reading the hymn is that Sundarar's request is not disguised. He speaks before Siva about material need with the same directness with which another poet might speak about fear or release.

✦Sangili, the promise and the loss of sight

At Tiruvotriyur, Sundarar meets Sangili and asks Siva to help bring about their marriage. Sangili agrees on the condition that Sundarar will not leave her. A promise is made, and they marry.

Later the season of festival at Tiruvarur awakens Sundarar's longing to return. He crosses the boundary after having promised to remain, and he loses his sight. His pilgrimage now changes pace. He must be led, and the hymns begin to carry bodily helplessness together with the same old freedom of speech.

At Tiruvotriyur, 7.54, pann Takkesi, he asks for a remedy for his eye. At Tirukkachi Ekambam, 7.61, pann Takkesi, sight returns to one eye. At Tiruvarur, 7.95, pann Senturutti, the hymn beginning “Meela adimai” is associated with the restoration of the other.

The sequence does not erase responsibility. The Periya Puranam explicitly connects the blindness with the broken promise. Yet Sundarar does not respond by withdrawing from Siva. He goes toward Him and argues from the very relationship in which he has failed.

✦Siva walks as his messenger

When Sundarar returns to Tiruvarur after marrying Sangili, Paravai is angry and refuses to receive him. Sundarar first sends respected people to reconcile them; they return unsuccessful.

He then turns to Siva. The sacred biography says the Lord goes through Tiruvarur at night as Sundarar's messenger to Paravai, first in the guise of an elderly devotee and then openly as Himself, until reconciliation is made.

This story is one reason the title “friend of the Lord” cannot be reduced to a polite honorific. The story dares to picture Siva accepting an errand from His devotee. The same story also disturbed another devotee, Eyarkon Kalikkama Nayanar, precisely because sending the Lord as a messenger seemed too bold. Sundarar's friendship is not presented as ordinary familiarity. It is familiarity sustained by grace.

✦Cheraman Perumal

Sundarar is closely joined with the Chera king Cheraman Perumal Nayanar. They become friends, worship together and travel among shrines. The Chera king is remembered not merely as a royal patron but as another devotee within Sundarar's circle.

The friendship becomes part of the final scene of Sundarar's life. Before that close comes one more remembered act of rescue on the western journey.

✦The boy at Avinasi

At Tiruppukkoliyur, Avinasi, there are two households: one celebrating a boy's life, the other grieving because a boy had earlier been taken by a crocodile. Sundarar hears the grief and sings 7.92, pann Kurinji.

The sacred biography says the crocodile returns the child alive. The hymn itself is a prayer to the Lord of Avinasi; the restoration belongs to the traditional life remembered around it.

✦The white elephant to Kailasa

Near the close of his life, Sundarar is again with Cheraman in the Chera country. At Tiruvanjaikkalam, the Periya Puranam associates 7.4, pann Indalam, with Sundarar's desire to be released from earthly bondage.

The sacred biography says Siva sends a white elephant to take him to Kailasa. Cheraman sees his friend departing, mounts his horse and follows. The final hymn of the older core, 7.100 at Tiru Nodittanmalai, pann Panchamam, looks back on the divine act of taking Sundarar up and on heaven coming to receive him.

The life closes where its central logic began. At Tiruvennainallur Siva claims the reluctant bridegroom. At the end, the same Lord sends for His friend.

✦What history can say

Sundarar is usually placed in the late 8th or early 9th century CE. The exact placement is disputed.

One historical clue is inside the Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, where Sundarar praises a Kadavarkon Kazharsinga, a Pallava ruler. Scholars have identified this king in different ways, with proposals ranging across more than one Pallava reign; the choice changes Sundarar's date.

The remembered friendship with Cheraman Perumal gives another royal synchronism, but the identity and regnal date of the Chera ruler in the sacred biography are not secure enough to settle Sundarar's chronology by themselves. His Tiruttondattogai also stands after a remembered body of earlier Saiva devotees that includes Sambandar and Appar.

The safest historical statement is therefore modest: Sundarar belongs to the early medieval Tamil Saiva world after Sambandar and Appar, and is commonly located around the turn from the eighth to the ninth century, while scholars differ over the exact decades.

Sundaramurti Nayanar · All the poets and teachers ›

The older Tiruppattu core contains 100 pathigams arranged through 17 panns; a later-added 7.101 at Tirunagaikkaronam brings the expanded text to 101 pathigams and 1,037 verses.

✦The pann sequence

The basic meaning of pann and the reason the Tevaram is read as sung poetry are explained in Tirumurai 1. Tirumurai 7's older core places 100 pathigams and 1,026 verses through seventeen pann groups in the following order.

The expanded text also carries 7.101 at Tirunagaikkaronam, eleven verses in pann Gandharam, marked as a later addition; with it the total becomes 101 pathigams and 1,037 verses. The hymns are sung at 96 shrines; older counts differ a little.

✦A book that is not a diary

The hymns are not arranged as a continuous biography. The pann sequence can place hymns from very different moments beside one another. The traditional life therefore has to be reconstructed by bringing the received hymns into conversation with later sacred biography.

That distinction is especially important with Sundarar because so many episodes are tied to named hymns. The hymn number gives us a stable place in the corpus. The life-story tells how the community came to hear that hymn inside a larger sequence of events.

In the Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, Sundarar names Siva's devotees one after another and places himself beneath them: “I am the servant of their servants.”

✦A hymn made of names and belonging

The Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, pann Kollikkovvanam, is short beside the later literature it inspired. Sundarar names individual devotees and groups of devotees, repeatedly saying adiyen, “I am servant”.

Its opening verse begins not with Sundarar himself but with those he wishes to serve.

The repeated structure is the point. Sundarar does not merely say, “These people were holy.” He places himself in relation to them. To belong to Siva is to belong to those who belong to Siva.

✦From one hymn to the sixty-three Nayanmars

The Tiruttondattogai became the seed of a much larger remembered community. Nambiyandar Nambi later expanded the list in his Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, giving brief notices of the devotees. Sekkizhar then built the Periya Puranam, Tirumurai 12, on this inherited body of names and stories.

Through that development the short hymn stands near the beginning of the literary tradition by which the Nayanmars came to be remembered as the sixty-three Saiva saints, together with groups of devotees whom Sundarar also honours.

This makes 7.39 more than a catalogue. It is a map of religious belonging. The devotee does not reach Siva by stepping over other devotees. Sundarar repeatedly steps beneath them.

✦The friend is also a servant

The Tiruttondattogai prevents one misunderstanding of Sundarar's title Tambiran Tozhar. Friendship with Siva does not make him casual about the adiyar. The poet who can argue with the Lord bows low before the Lord's people.

That combination gives Tirumurai 7 much of its distinctive balance: freedom before Siva, humility before those who serve Siva.

Sundarar's first hymn turns the wedding interruption into a theology of grace: the Lord's claim is discovered as something already present in the singer's own mind.

✦“You placed Yourself in my mind”

The story of Tiruvennainallur can be heard as a comic legal dispute, but 7.1.1 at Tiruvennainallur, pann Indalam gives it a deeper centre. Sundarar asks how he could forget the Lord when the Lord Himself has taken up residence in his mind.

The final line is equally important: “I have become Yours; how can I now say, ‘I am not’?” The verse does not describe devotion as a contract negotiated between equals. The singer discovers that the relation has already overtaken his attempt to refuse it.

In later Saiva Siddhanta language, grace is not manufactured by the soul. Siva acts first, awakens, claims and enables response. Sundarar's hymn is not a philosophical treatise on that doctrine, but its dramatic grammar fits it closely: You placed Yourself; therefore I remember. You claimed me; therefore my denial cannot be the final word.

✦Bond and freedom

The old man's legal claim uses the language of bondage. Sundarar's later devotional life turns that language inside out. To be Siva's al, His servant, is not the end of personality. Sundarar becomes one of the most personal voices in the Tevaram.

He remembers, quarrels, falls in love, breaks a promise, asks for help and speaks of bodily need. Grace does not flatten the person into silence. It gives the person a relation within which speech can become truthful.

✦Grace does not cancel responsibility

The same story that tells how Siva claimed Sundarar also tells how Sundarar suffers after breaking his promise to Sangili. Grace is therefore not presented as permission to make every action consequence-free.

What grace changes is where Sundarar goes after failure. He does not decide that one broken promise has ended the relationship. He turns toward Siva with the failure itself.

That movement becomes especially clear in the blindness hymns.

Sundarar's friendship with Siva is heard in the freedom to ask for what a household and its people need: paddy, gold, help and the practical means to carry them.

✦“There is no one to carry it”

At Tirukkolili, 7.20 in pann Nattaragam is attached to the grain supplied for Sundarar's household through Kundaiyur Kizhar. The first verse is almost startling in its practicality.

Sundarar does not divide prayer into “spiritual” matters fit for Siva and household logistics unfit for Him. Paddy must reach a home. Someone must carry it. Paravai must not be left distressed. Those facts enter the hymn.

In the story, Siva's attendants carry the grain. The teaching available in the hymn is simpler and more durable: need can be spoken plainly before God.

✦Gold without embarrassment

At Tirumudhukundram, 7.25 in pann Nattaragam, Sundarar again refuses pious vagueness. The hymn asks Siva to remove his material difficulty, and the Periya Puranam links it with the gift of gold.

The poem moves without embarrassment from cosmic Siva, burner of the three forts, to the difficulty of one servant standing before Paravai. The scale changes; the relationship does not.

This is one mark of Sundarar's devotional temperament. The Lord who holds the cosmos is also addressed about what must reach the house.

✦Not a formula for getting wealth

The paddy and gold episodes live in devotional memory as signs of Siva's care for His devotee. They are not a mechanical promise that reciting 7.20 at Tirukkolili will produce grain or that reciting 7.25 at Tirumudhukundram will produce money.

Their religious force lies in trust and candour: the devotee may bring practical need before Siva without pretending to have no practical needs.

Sundarar can say that he has slipped, demand a remedy for his eyes and still refuse to leave Siva's feet; this is the frankness remembered in his friendship with the Lord.

✦“Though I err, I will not err away from Your feet”

The blindness sequence gives Sundarar's friendship its hardest test. At Tiruvotriyur, after the broken promise to Sangili, 7.54 in pann Takkesi speaks without hiding either distress or belonging.

There is no pose of innocence. “Though I may err” belongs beside “I will not err away from Your feet.” Sundarar's confidence is not that he never fails. It is that failure does not create another Lord to whom he can go.

The story continues through 7.61 at Tirukkachi Ekambam, pann Takkesi, where one eye is restored, and 7.95 at Tiruvarur, pann Senturutti, where the other is restored. The sacred biography hears the journey as correction, dependence and mercy held together.

✦Tambiran Tozhar and sakha margam

Sundarar is remembered as Tambiran Tozhar, “the Lord's friend”, and his devotional relation is often described as sakha margam, the friend's way. Appar, by contrast, is remembered especially through dasa margam, the servant's way.

Later Saiva Siddhanta sets out the four paths of chariyai, kiriyai, yogam and jnanam. In a common correspondence, dasa margam is associated with chariyai, service as servant, while sakha margam is associated with yogam, the relation of the friend. Sundarar's poetry, however, is not a technical manual of the four paths. The label helps name the relation heard in the hymns; it does not replace reading them.

✦The last hymn looks back

The final pathigam of the older core, 7.100 at Tiru Nodittanmalai, pann Panchamam, is associated with Sundarar's ascent to Kailasa on the white elephant. Its first verse looks back on a life whose beginning was also an act of being claimed.

The verse's first movement is backward: He made me first. That echoes the logic heard at Tiruvennainallur. Sundarar's story is not finally “I found Siva”. It is “the One who had me from the beginning did not let the bond go.”

✦Looking back over the whole Tevaram

With Sundarar, the seven-volume Tevaram closes. Tirumurai 1 begins the remembered voice of Sambandar, the child to whom grace is given before he could have earned it: milk becomes knowledge, and song follows gift. Tirumurai 4 opens the voice of Appar, the adult who has lived elsewhere, returns through suffering and gives himself to service. Tirumurai 7 brings Sundarar, claimed in the middle of an ordinary human plan and taught to live the bond with the candour of a friend.

The three voices should not be flattened into one personality. Sambandar can sing with the confidence of received grace. Appar can bow as servant and work with his body. Sundarar can argue, ask, complain and then say that even when he slips he knows no other name. What unites them is not temperament but direction: Siva, Siva's shrines, Siva's devotees, and a grace that calls for response.

Tirumurai 7 lives through Oduvar singing, learning and household recitation, while the Tiruttondattogai gives collective Nayanmar worship a language of remembered names and service.

✦“Piththa piraisoodi”

The opening 7.1 at Tiruvennainallur, pann Indalam, beginning “Piththa piraisoodi”, remains one of Sundarar's recognisable hymns in Tirumurai teaching and Oduvar repertoires. It is often a natural entry into Sundarar because the first verse already contains the whole relationship: grace, remembrance, servanthood and the impossibility of simply walking away from a bond Siva has established.

For personal recitation, the hymn can become a way of returning attention to that line: You placed Yourself in my mind. The practice is remembrance, not an attempt to reproduce the dramatic event of Sundarar's wedding day.

✦Tiruttondattogai and the Nayanmars

The Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, pann Kollikkovvanam, is especially suited to collective remembrance of the Nayanmars. It is recited and taught in settings connected with Nayanmar worship and guru-puja observances because the hymn itself names the devotees and repeatedly declares service to them.

Its later history deepens that use. When worshippers stand before images of the Nayanmars, they are not meeting an arbitrary list assembled long afterward. They are entering a chain of remembrance that runs through Sundarar's hymn, Nambiyandar Nambi's Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi and Sekkizhar's Tirumurai 12.

✦Praying with need without turning hymns into guarantees

The paddy hymn 7.20 at Tirukkolili, the gold hymn 7.25 at Tirumudhukundram, and the eye-plea 7.54 at Tiruvotriyur are naturally attractive to devotees facing material need or illness because Sundarar himself speaks from such situations.

They can be prayed with trust, but not as contracts promising a particular material result. A hymn about sight does not replace medical care; a hymn about gold does not guarantee wealth; a hymn about grain does not guarantee a miraculous delivery. Their devotional practice lies in bringing real need into worship without hiding it.

✦Hearing Sundarar as Sundarar

When sung by an Oduvar, the hymns carry their panns and their repeated forms of address. Hearing matters because Sundarar's personality is often in the movement of the line: praise becomes petition, petition becomes complaint, complaint turns back into adiyen.

A useful way to study one hymn is therefore to listen for that turn rather than extracting only the requested object.

1. 1

   Hear the address

   How does Sundarar name Siva before asking anything?

2. 2

   Name the need

   Paddy, gold, sight, reconciliation or release is spoken plainly.

3. 3

   Find the bond

   Look for adiyen, the Lord's feet, remembrance or the refusal to seek another refuge.

4. 4

   Return to relation

   The request matters, but the hymn ends inside belonging rather than transaction.

Sundarar's hymns to Kedaram (7.78), Srisailam (7.79) and Tirunodittanmalai (7.100), and the places they name today: The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

Sundarar at Kachchi Ekambam (7.61), Tirukkalatti (7.26) and Tiru Anaikka (7.75), three of the five element shrines: The Pancha Bhoota Sthalams.

Read Tirumurai 7 beside Sundarar's sacred biography and the later literature of the devotees: the final Tevaram volume became one of the bridges from sung shrine devotion to the remembered community of the Nayanmars.

✦Tamil text and arrangement

Shaivam.org's complete Seventh Tirumurai presents the expanded sequence through 1,037 verses and gives access to individual shrine hymns, including 7.1, 7.20, 7.25, 7.39, 7.54, 7.92 and 7.95.

Digital Tevaram, prepared from the Pondicherry Tevaram work, gives Sundarar's pann-arranged corpus and identifies 7.101 at Tirunagaikkaronam as a later addition in Gandharam. Its page for 7.100 at Tiru Nodittanmalai preserves the closing white-elephant hymn used above.

Tamil Virtual Academy's study of Sundarar gives the older total of 100 pathigams, 1,026 verses, 17 panns and 96 shrines and places special attention on the Tiruttondattogai.

✦Sundarar's traditional life

The Periya Puranam, Tirumurai 12, is the central later sacred biography. Sundarar's life forms part of its organising frame: the poet who sings the devotees becomes the figure through whom their stories are unfolded.

For an online continuous retelling drawn from that tradition, the Sundaramurti Nayanar series on Shaivam.org follows Nambi Aruran from Tirunavalur through Tiruvennainallur, Tiruvarur, Paravai and Sangili, the journeys with Cheraman and the final ascent.

✦From Tiruttondattogai to Periya Puranam

Tamil Virtual Academy's account of Saiva literature describes the Periya Puranam as inspired by Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai and Nambiyandar Nambi's Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi. Its discussion of Sundarar likewise identifies the Tiruttondattogai as the basis for those later works on the devotees.

Continue from the short list of names in 7.39 at Tiruvarur to Nambiyandar Nambi in Tirumurai 11, and then to Sekkizhar's Tirumurai 12, where the names become full sacred biographies.

✦The seven books together

Read Tirumurai 1 for Sambandar's full traditional life and the foundations of Tevaram form and music. Read Tirumurai 4 for Appar's full life and the servant's path. Tirumurai 3 closes Sambandar's three volumes; Tirumurai 6 closes Appar's. Tirumurai 7 closes the larger body they all share.