Tirumurai 12: Periya Puranam

Periya Puranam turns Sundarar's short roll of devotees into a large sacred biography, with Sundarar himself forming the frame around sixty-three individual Nayanmars and nine remembered groups.

✦From a list of names to a world of lives

The immediate seed is Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, an eleven-verse hymn in Tirumurai 7. Sundarar names devotees one after another and repeatedly declares himself the servant of their servants. Nambiyandar Nambi later enlarges that remembrance in Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034, now in Tirumurai 11. Sekkizhar takes the next step: names become places, households, occupations, conversations, vows, crises and acts of service.

That is why the Periya Puranam is not simply sixty-three separate biographies bound together. Sundarar's own life begins the narrative movement and returns at the end. As he meets, remembers and sings the servants of Siva, their lives open within his larger story. The book is therefore both a company of saints and one carefully framed poem.

✦The company it remembers

The sixty-three are not sixty-three versions of one person. Some have learning and wealth; some have neither. Some serve by ritual worship, some by feeding, some by music, some by giving cloth, some by carrying flowers, some by lighting lamps, some by mental worship, some by governing, and some by acts so extreme that a modern reader may recoil before asking what the story meant to its devotional community.

Nor are the nine groups an afterthought. Sundarar's hymn already remembers devotees collectively: the Tillai priests, poets free of false servitude, those whose mind rests in Siva, those born in Tiruvarur, those covered in sacred ash, and others whose individual names are not supplied. Sekkizhar preserves that collective remembrance beside the named sixty-three.

✦The last book looks back

By the time the canon reaches Tirumurai 12, the reader has already met Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar through their own songs; Manikkavasagar through Tiruvasagam and Tirukkovaiyar; the later singers of Tiruvisaippa; Tirumular's teaching; and the many voices of Tirumurai 11. Periya Puranam gathers many of those names into narrative memory. It does not replace the poems. It makes visible the lives through which Tamil Saivas came to hear them.

Sekkizhar, remembered as the Chola minister Arunmozhi Devar, turned a king's request into a poem of Siva's devotees and received the word “ulagelaam” as its opening at Tillai.

✦The life as Saiva memory tells it

Sekkizhar's life is told as the later Tiruttondar Purana Varalaru, also called Sekkizhar Swamigal Puranam, remembers it. He is presented as Arunmozhi Devar of Kundrathur, born in the Sekkizhar lineage, learned in Tamil and sacred learning, and brought into the service of the Chola court. The king recognised his ability and made him a minister. The king is identified with Kulottunga II, also remembered by the title Anapaya.

The court story turns on another Tamil classic. The king had become deeply absorbed in Jivaka Chintamani (சீவக சிந்தாமணி), the Jain epic attributed to Tiruttakkatevar. It is a major work of Tamil Jain literature: a long courtly narrative of Jivaka's accomplishments and relationships that finally turns toward renunciation and release. The Saiva life-story says Sekkizhar sought to turn the king's attention away from that epic and toward the lives of Siva's devotees, a different body of Tamil narrative centred on service, worship and grace.

Asked whether such lives already had an ancient basis, Sekkizhar points to Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai, 7.39 at Tiruvarur, and to Nambiyandar Nambi's Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi, 11.034. The king then asks for the lives to be unfolded as a full poem.

✦Tillai and the first word

Sekkizhar went to Tillai, Chidambaram, bowed before the Lord of the Ambalam and prayed for a beginning. The life-story says that an unseen divine voice gave him the opening word: “உலகெலாம்” — “all the world.” Later Chidambaram remembrance places his composition and public exposition of the work in the thousand-pillared hall of the temple.

The poem opens not with the minister, the king or even the saints, but with the dancing Lord whom thought and speech cannot contain.

The opening word is large, but the bodily gesture is small: bow to the feet. That movement will recur through the whole work. Kings descend from elephants to bow before someone who looks like a devotee. Householders wash feet. Saints call themselves servants. The social world is repeatedly measured against the feet of Siva and the feet of those who belong to Him.

✦Poet and minister

The remembered Sekkizhar is not a poet who had withdrawn from public responsibility before he wrote. He stands within court, administration, temple culture and Tamil literary learning. That position helps explain the breadth of the poem's social field. Courts and battlefields appear, but so do farms, fishing settlements, oil presses, weaving, pottery, cattle, flower gardens and kitchens.

The Periya Puranam belongs to the 12th century CE. Its association with the reign of Kulottunga II places it in the Chola world shortly before the great visual cycles of Nayanmar stories at Darasuram, showing how quickly the saint narratives became part of public temple memory.

Sekkizhar · All the poets and teachers ›

Two kandams and thirteen sarukkams expand the eleven verses of Sundarar's Tiruttondattogai, with an opening and closing frame around the saint lives.

✦Three stages of remembrance

1. 1

   Sundarar · Tiruttondattogai 7.39 at Tiruvarur

   Eleven verses name individual devotees and collective groups; Sundarar repeatedly makes himself their servant.

2. 2

   Nambiyandar Nambi · Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi 11.034

   Ninety antadi verses give the names more remembered identity and incident.

3. 3

   Sekkizhar · Periya Puranam

   The company becomes a continuous sacred narrative, with Sundarar's own life enclosing the whole.

The Periya Puranam is divided into two kandams and thirteen sarukkams. The first kandam contains sarukkams 1–5 and the second sarukkams 6–13. The eleven central sarukkams are aligned with the eleven verses of Sundarar's devotee-list; Sekkizhar places an opening Tirumalai Sarukkam before them and a closing Vellanai Sarukkam after them to complete Sundarar's frame.

The electronic sequence used for the numbering below runs to 4,281 verses. Other printed traditions count the text somewhat differently, so it is safest to think of the work as about 4,200 verses rather than make one total a doctrinal matter.

✦The sixty-three and the nine groups

The list is long because Sekkizhar's argument is partly made by accumulation. No one occupation, caste location, gender, literary education or form of wealth can stand for the whole company. At the same time, the stories remain products of a medieval social world: hierarchy does not vanish merely because people of different backgrounds are remembered together. The work asks what devotion can do within and across those inherited locations; it does not give a modern social programme in advance.

Periya Puranam places kings, workers, ritual specialists, women, people of marginalised communities and renunciants beside one another, making service to Siva the relation by which the company is remembered.

✦A king can bow to a washerman

Sekkizhar repeatedly reverses what a public street seems to say about status. Cheraman Perumal descends from his elephant because a man carrying salt-stained laundry looks to him like someone covered in sacred ash. The man calls himself a washerman; the king answers by naming himself the servant of that servant. Elsewhere a ruler opens grain stores to devotees, another lays aside kingship, and another is judged by how seriously he takes harm done to a servant of Siva.

These scenes do not make medieval distinctions disappear. They do make another relation visible inside them: adiyar, the one who stands at the feet. A ruler who recognises that relation may find himself bowing before someone whose ordinary social position is far below his own.

✦Nandanar at the wall

Few lives make the pressure of social exclusion as visible as Tirunalaippovar Nayanar, Nandanar. Sekkizhar places him in a community whose hereditary work and social status keep him outside the privileged ritual world he longs to enter. At Tillai he reaches the city's boundary and does not simply walk through. He circles outside, afraid that entry is beyond what his birth permits.

The verse does not let the reader pretend that longing alone has already removed the wall. He is outside it. The sacred biography eventually carries him through fire into Tillai in a transformed Brahmin form, and that part of the story belongs to the caste imagination of its medieval world. A modern reader may therefore hear two things at once: the intensity with which Nandanar refuses to let exclusion extinguish his love, and the painful fact that the narrative imagines entry through transformation rather than by simply declaring the barrier unjust.

✦A devotee from a Sakya path

Sakkiya Nayanar's life crosses a religious boundary of another kind. The poem remembers him as a seeker who studies a Sakya path in Kanchi and comes to a Saiva conviction while retaining the outward robe. Sekkizhar then gives a compact doctrinal statement: deed, doer, fruit and the giver of the fruit are distinct.

The third line speaks from Sekkizhar's Saiva sectarian standpoint; it is not a neutral account of other Indian philosophies. The doctrinal point that matters within Saiva Siddhanta is clearer: karma is insentient and does not intelligently assign its own result. The soul acts and receives; Siva, who knows the soul's deeds, governs the giving of their fruit. Lord, soul, deed and fruit are therefore not collapsed into one thing.

Feeding, flowers, lamps, cloth, sacred ash, cleaning, music, ritual and inward worship turn devotion into repeated acts that use the body, household and livelihood.

✦The holiness of repeated work

A large part of the Periya Puranam is built from things that can look small beside miracle: cooking rice, bringing water, collecting flowers, grinding sandal, washing cloth, weaving a loincloth, filling a lamp, tending cattle, cleaning a tank. Sekkizhar's saints do not all leave ordinary work behind. Many take the work already in their hands and redirect it.

Ilayankudi Mara's service happens in a kitchen. Tirukkurippu Thondar's happens through washing. Nesa's through weaving. Kaliya and Kanampulla are remembered through lamps. Gananatha organises other people into temple tasks. Muruga gathers flowers. Naminandi's memory centres on lamps at Tiruvarur. Pukazhthunai continues ritual bathing through famine. Anaya's flute becomes a bearer of the five syllables.

✦Nesa: mind, speech and hands

Nesa Nayanar's short life gives one of the clearest summaries of integrated service. His livelihood is weaving. Sekkizhar does not ask him to abandon it. The mind goes to Siva's feet, speech to the five syllables, and hand-work to the needs of devotees.

This is close to the spirit of chariyai, the servant's path: service becomes a discipline of body and habit. Yet the verse does not leave the mind behind. Nor does it detach mantra from livelihood. Thought, word and hand are pointed in one direction.

✦Outer temple, inner temple

Periya Puranam also keeps outward and inward worship from becoming rivals. Pusalar wants to build a temple but has no money. He gathers architect, materials, dimensions and Agamic order in the mind and constructs the whole shrine inwardly. Vayilar of Mylapore similarly makes remembrance itself into temple, lamp, bathing and food-offering.

This resembles yogam because worship has been interiorised; it still carries the form of kiriyai because the mind is not merely empty or formless. It deliberately enacts temple worship. The text therefore lets the four Saiva paths overlap in lived devotion rather than turning every saint into a neat label.

Appar's Kailasa journey and Sundarar's ascent beside the northern shrines: The Jyotirlingas and the Himalayan shrines.

Kannappar and Karaikkal Ammaiyar show love passing beyond convention, while Iyarpakai, Siruthondar and Chandesvara force the reader to face stories in which devotional extremity becomes morally difficult.

✦Kannappar: when the body itself becomes the offering

Kannappar begins as Thinnan, a hunter. He has not learnt Agamic temple procedure. He brings what a hunter can bring, guards the linga as he would guard someone he loves, and worships with a physical directness that shocks the temple priest in the story. When he sees blood flowing from one of Siva's eyes, he places his own eye there. When the second divine eye appears wounded, he prepares to give his remaining eye and marks the place with his foot so that blindness will not make him miss it.

At that moment Siva stops him.

The story does not end by praising successful self-mutilation. The decisive action is Siva's interruption and naming: Kannappa. The offered body reveals the measure of Thinnan's love; grace prevents the final wound and receives the devotee.

Kalahasti, where Kannappar's love is remembered, as the air shrine among the five: The Pancha Bhoota Sthalams.

✦Karaikkal Ammaiyar: love without the demand to be beautiful

Karaikkal Ammaiyar's way is different. Her story moves from household generosity through estrangement from ordinary married life to an altered, skeletal pey form she herself desires. At Kailasa, Siva addresses her as Ammaiye, “Mother.” Asked what she wants, she does not ask for lost status or restored beauty.

Her final image is not “I become the dancer.” She asks to be beneath His feet, singing and remembering. In Siddhanta language, nearness and participation do not require the soul to become the Lord as an identical self. Love can reach its fulfilment as unbroken service in His presence.

✦Iyarpakai: a wife asked for as a gift

Iyarpakai Nayanar has vowed never to refuse a devotee. Siva comes disguised as a Brahmin devotee and asks for Iyarpakai's wife. The request is deliberately intolerable. Iyarpakai agrees. His wife is shocked; the story then has her accept the demand when he explains the vow. When relatives try to prevent them leaving, Iyarpakai fights and kills them. At the end Siva reveals Himself, restores what has been broken in the divine resolution of the story, and receives the couple.

The traditional reading is radical non-possession: “nothing I call mine may be withheld from Siva's devotee.” But the narrative also treats a wife as something her husband can give and makes lethal violence part of the test. Those features cannot be turned into a rule for marriage or religious obedience. The story is hagiographic extremity, not permission to surrender another person's autonomy.

✦Siruthondar: the child demanded as food

Siruthondar, remembered also as Paranjyoti, leaves military life and makes feeding Siva's devotees his daily discipline. Siva appears as a fierce northern ascetic and says he will eat only a meal made from the flesh of a family's only son, killed and prepared by the parents themselves. Siruthondar and his wife carry out the demand. When the guest then asks that the boy be called to eat with them, the child comes running back alive. The terrifying meal has vanished; Siva reveals Himself and blesses the household.

Traditional interpretation sees a test of total surrender: even the deepest possessive attachment cannot be placed above the Lord. Yet the story reaches that claim through imagined harm to a child. Its force depends on the reader knowing that the demand is unbearable. It is not an instruction that divine love suspends ordinary duties of care.

✦Chandesvara: worship and the father who interrupts it

Chandesvara begins as Vichara Sarma, a boy who tends cattle and uses their milk to bathe a sand linga. His father, angry at what he sees as waste, interrupts the worship and kicks the vessels. Absorbed in Siva, the boy strikes; the staff becomes an axe and cuts his father's legs. Siva appears, declares that He Himself will now be the boy's father, garlands him and appoints him to guard the Lord's property and offerings. The father's fate is also taken into divine grace in the received story.

The traditional reading places divine belonging above even the closest worldly bond and explains Chandesvara's continuing temple role as guardian of Siva's possessions. The violence against a parent is nevertheless real within the narrative. It belongs to the extremity of the sacred biography; it is not a model for resolving conflict between worship and family.

Chandesvara's place beside the sanctum, and how devotees take leave of him: The temple and its plan.

The canon begins with saints singing Siva and ends with Sekkizhar remembering the many kinds of lives from which worship, song, service and teaching arose.

✦From song to remembered life

Tirumurai 1 begins with Sambandar's voice. Tirumurais 1–3 preserve his Tevaram; 4–6 preserve Appar's; 7 gives Sundarar's. Those seven books are the Tevaram, shrine after shrine sung by three different voices. Tirumurai 8 places Manikkavasagar's Tiruvasagam and Tirukkovaiyar beside them. Tirumurai 9 gathers the Tiruvisaippa poets and Senthanar's Tiruppallandu. Tirumurai 10 gives Tirumular's sustained teaching in the Tirumantiram. Tirumurai 11 becomes a garland of forty works and carries Sundarar's remembered devotee-list forward through Nambiyandar Nambi.

Then Tirumurai 12 turns from anthology to biography. Some of the people whose poems we have read become people who walk, cook, quarrel, govern, weave, fight, pray, cross fields, wait outside walls and stand before the linga. The canon closes without separating doctrine from practice: the Lord is sung, the soul serves, bonds press on human life, and grace repeatedly makes possible what the devotee cannot complete alone.

✦Siddhanta inside sacred biography

Periya Puranam is not a later philosophical manual like Sivagnana Bodham, yet Siddhanta relations are everywhere within it. Siva is Lord, not merely a symbol generated by the devotee. Souls act, love, err and receive grace. Karma has fruit but does not become an all-knowing governor. Bonds can be cut. Sacred ash, mantra, temple, guru and devotee become ways in which embodied people turn toward Siva. Mental worship can interiorise ritual without making outward worship meaningless.

The paths of chariyai, kiriyai, yogam and jnanam can therefore be recognised across the stories without forcing each saint into only one box. Gananatha teaches temple service. Pukazhthunai keeps ritual worship. Vayilar builds the temple inwardly. Sakkiya Nayanar receives a doctrinal insight by grace. Karaikkal Ammaiyar asks for unbroken remembrance beneath the dancing feet.

✦The servant of the servants

One phrase from Sundarar silently holds much of the canon together: he is the servant of the servants. Tirumurai 7 sings it as a refrain in 7.39 at Tiruvarur. Tirumurai 11 expands the names. Tirumurai 12 spends thousands of verses showing why those names are remembered.

That is a distinctive close for a sacred canon. The final book does not end by asking only, “What did the great poets say?” It also asks, “What did devotion look like when someone had to cook, weave, rule, give, wait, lose, forgive, worship or keep a lamp burning?”

The Periya Puranam remains visible through the annual guru-puja cycle, the sixty-three Nayanmar images in Siva temples, and the continued reading and exposition of the saints' lives.

✦A calendar of guru-pujas

The Nayanmars are remembered through the Tamil year by guru-puja days associated with a Tamil month and star. The result is not one annual “Nayanmar day” but a moving calendar: one saint is remembered in Chittirai, another in Vaikasi, another in Ani, and so on. Temples, monasteries and devotional groups differ in the scale of observance, but the calendar keeps individual names from dissolving into the number sixty-three.

Sekkizhar too has a remembered guru-puja on Vaikasi Pusam. On the days of individual Nayanmars, their puranam may be read or explained, their image honoured, and their characteristic act recalled.

✦The sixty-three in the prakaram

Many Siva temples keep images of the Arupathumoovar, the sixty-three, in a prakaram or associated shrine space. In some temples the images also enter collective festival processions. The visual row does something the book's long structure also does: it lets the devotee see a community before knowing every biography.

The order matters less to ordinary worship than recognition. Sacred ash, folded hands, a distinctive object or posture, and the saint's name begin the connection. Periya Puranam supplies the remembered life behind the image.

✦Reading and hearing Periya Puranam

The work continues to be read, recited and expounded in devotional settings. A full reading is large, so practice often centres on one Nayanmar's puranam, a sequence of lives, a guru-puja discourse, or a public series over many days. Recorded and in-person discourses continue the older habit of hearing biography explained rather than encountering the verses only as silent literature.

That manner suits the work. Sekkizhar's poem is narrative: one scene leads to another, speeches matter, place matters, and the end of one life often turns directly toward the next. Hearing a teacher tell the story while returning to the Tamil verses is still a natural way into it.

The day each of the sixty-three is remembered, by Tamil month and star: Festivals and Guru Pujas.

Several of these lives have been told in Tamil films; what each film keeps and what it adds: Stories in film.

Twenty-two of these lives, gathered by theme (love, service, trial, grace, the threshold, women, the hard stories): Stories of the Nayanmars.

Read the complete Tamil poem beside the earlier devotee-lists, Sekkizhar's remembered life and focused histories of difficult or much-loved Nayanmars.

✦Complete Tamil text

Project Madurai, Periya Puranam, sarukkams 1–2 begins with “ulagelaam”, Sundarar's opening frame and the Tillai Vaz Andhanar Sarukkam. Sarukkam 3 contains Kannappar. Sarukkams 4–5 include Nandanar, Chandesvara, Appar and Karaikkal Ammaiyar. Sarukkam 6, concluding part carries the sequence from Eyarkon Kalikkama through Somasi Mara. Sarukkams 7–13 bring the work from Sakkiya Nayanar to Sundarar's final ascent.

Shaivam.org's Periya Puranam contents provides the thirteen-sarukkam sequence and access to individual Nayanmar puranams. Its Nayanmar guru-puja calendar sets the sixty-three through the Tamil months and stars.

✦Sekkizhar and the court story

Project Madurai's Tiruttondar Purana Varalaru / Sekkizhar Swamigal Puranam gives the later sacred biography used for Sekkizhar's ministerial life, the king's interest in Jivaka Chintamani, the journey to Tillai and the divine opening “ulagelaam”. For the Jain epic itself, Project Madurai's Jivaka Chintamani summary with notes lets the reader meet the work on its own terms.

✦Difficult lives

For fuller traditional tellings of three episodes treated briefly above, see Shaivam.org's lives of Iyarpakai Nayanar, Siruthondar Nayanar and Chandesvara Nayanar. They are useful read beside Sekkizhar's Tamil because the ethical difficulty lies in the narrative itself, not in a one-line summary.

✦Continue through the canon

Return to Tirumurai 1 for Sambandar, Tirumurai 4 for Appar and Tirumurai 7 for Sundarar. Tirumurai 10 gives Tirumular's Tirumantiram, while Tirumurai 11 shows how Nambiyandar Nambi stands between Sundarar's short devotee-list and Sekkizhar's large narrative.