The Sixty-three Saiva
Saints (Nayanmars)
Authentic biographies of the 63 Saiva
Saints are given in a famous 12th century work in Tamil called Periapuranam.
Even a listing of their names, let aside brief details about their lives,
will not be attempted in this note. We shall only touch upon six of them:
The first of the four in chronology is Tirunavukkarasunayanar, belonging
to the 7th century; known more by the popular name, Appar(Father). As a
youth he became a Jain. His sister who brought him up prayed for his reconversion
and there are tales about the many miracles performed by the wandering Appar
after the reconversion. He lived for 81 years. His junior contemporary,
Tiru-jnana-sambandar, who lived for only 16 years, is said to have cried
out for mother's milk at the age of 3 and was breast fed by the Mother Goddess
Herself with divine milk. Having tasted the milk of true knowledge, as it
were, he became a wandering minstrel who sang poems and triumphantly established
the Saiva branch of Hinduism in opposition to religions like Jainism and Budhism.
The third saint in this group that must be mentioned is Sundara-murti-nayanar
of the 9th century, who performed many miracles and contributed 1036 hymns
to the Saiva canon. Manikkavasagar, also of the 9th century was a minister
in the court of a Pandya king, but he later renounced everything. His Tiruvachagam
of 600 hymns is a deeply moving work which is as famous among the Tamils
as the Sanskrit Gita itself. The bhakti literature that sprang from these
four great saints of Tamil Nadu has in no small measure contributed to the
establishment and sustenance of a culture that broke away from the ritual-oriented
vedic religion and rooted itself in Bhakti as the only source of salvation.
Along with the Vaishnava literature of the Prabandhams, they helped to make
Tamil religious life independent of a knowledge of Sanskrit.
The other two Saiva Nayanmars are Nandanar and Kannappar.
Nandanar was born as an outcaste and was not admitted into any temple.
But he was such a devotee that, when he prayed to the Lord, standing outside,
the Lord graced him by having the stone bull (Nandi) move out of his way
so that he might have a good darsan. The story of Nandanar's yearning
to visit the temple of Chidambaram to see Lord Nataraja and his ultimate
merging in Him is part of the classical folklore of Tamil Nadu. The story
of Kannappar is even more fascinating. He was totally a rural, unsophisticated
hunter in a forest, who became enlightened by just seeing the Linga of Kalahasti
in the Andhra region. He knew not how to ritually worship the lord. Of the
need for external purity while offering worship, he had not even an inkling.
He offered meat to the Lord, and that too, meat he had first tasted himself,
and he also committed several acts of 'sacrilege'. But his devotion was
so pure that the Lord performed a miracle before the temple priest to show
the depth of Kannappar's bhakti. Having already lost one eye, he was prepared
to offer the other also to the Lord. The intensity of Kannappar's Bhakti
is referred to as a model by Sankara in his Sivananda Lahari.
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