Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār

After this, at Śrīraṅgam, where Uḍaiyavar was carrying the darśana, a great scholar came to argue with him.

He was a brahmin named Yajñamūrti. In Sanskrit he would later be called Dayāpāla, and in Tamil Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār.

He had gone north to bathe in the Gaṅgā. He bathed there, he defeated the scholars there, and there he took up the ascetic's order of the Māyāvādins. He grew great in learning and great in disciples. And there he heard of Uḍaiyavar's greatness.

"We must go there and argue with him," he said.

He wrote out many śāstras. He had his books tied up bundle by bundle and carried along, and he came to Śrīraṅgam in great haste and with great self-importance, all his pride of learning on show. He saw Uḍaiyavar and said, "You must argue with me."

"We shall," said Uḍaiyavar. "If you lose, what will you do?"

"If I lose," said Yajñamūrti, "I will carry your sandals, I will take your name, and I will enter your doctrine."

"If we lose," said Uḍaiyavar, "we will give up books, and say that we have lost. That is all."

Yajñamūrti agreed. So each bound himself by his vow, and they set a limit of eighteen days.

The shorter account of the line tells the terms otherwise. There Yajñamūrti comes to Śrīraṅgam on a conquest of the quarters, going from place to place to defeat the learned, and says to Uḍaiyavar: if you establish your doctrine now, I will become your disciple; if not, you must become mine.

They argued. Neither could beat the other. They went at it like two elephants in rut. For sixteen days they argued so, and Uḍaiyavar could not overcome him. On the seventeenth day Yajñamūrti's argument grew strong, and Uḍaiyavar stood with nothing more coming to him to say. In the shorter account it is seventeen days that Yajñamūrti is the stronger.

Yajñamūrti rose with his victory showing on him and went away for that day.

Uḍaiyavar went back to the maṭha troubled to the depths of his heart. He bathed the feet of Pēraruḷāḷar, the image he worshipped, and offered him food. Then, vexed with the Lord, he spoke to him.

"Perumāḷē! This darśana has come down for so long through one unbroken line, from the Āzhvār to Āḷavandār. Is it to be lost now, by making me lose? Until today you have upheld the truth that your own nature, your form, your qualities and your glory are real. If it is now your will to bring in a teller of falsehood and, in my time, to destroy every means of right knowledge and take your pleasure in it, then do so."

Having said that, he lay down to sleep without eating.

That night Pēraruḷāḷar came to him in a dream.

"Iḷaiyāzhvīr!" he said. "Why should you be troubled? We have made a disciple for you, one who will be able. Speak the refutation of the Māyāvāda that your ācārya's ācārya, Āḷavandār, composed, and defeat him."

In the shorter account the Lord asks him only, "Have you forgotten what Āḷavandār said?"

At dawn Uḍaiyavar rose saying the holy names. He opened his eyes. "What a dream this was!" he said, and he was full of joy. He kept in his heart the argument that had been given him in the dream. He did his daily rites gladly, worshipped Pēraruḷāḷar, and set out, and came into the place of the debate serene and full of majesty.

Yajñamūrti was a man who could read a face. He saw the majesty and the joy with which Uḍaiyavar was coming.

"Yesterday, when he left here, he went away drooping," he said to himself. "Now he comes in like an elephant in rut. This is not human. This is something beyond what a man does."

He rose quickly, went to meet him, and fell at Uḍaiyavar's feet.

"I have lost to Your Honour," he said. He took up Uḍaiyavar's sandals and set them on his own head. "Have mercy on me."

Uḍaiyavar was startled. "What is this!" he said. "Shall we not argue?"

"Periya Perumāḷ has shown himself to Your Honour," said Yajñamūrti, "and I have understood that there is no difference between Your Honour and Periya Perumāḷ. From now on I have no standing to open my mouth and say a word in your presence."

Uḍaiyavar was pleased. Even so, he gave him the argument.

"In the Māyāvāda you have set out, Brahman is said to have no qualities. Then the Vedic texts that speak of Brahman as having qualities, as being truth and the rest, lose their authority. Suppose you say there is no conflict, because it is Brahman covered over by avidyā, by ignorance, that has the qualities. That will not hold. For it is said:

ஜ்ஞாநரூபம்பரம்ப்ரஹ்ம தந்நிவர்த்யம்ம்ருஷாத்மகம் - அஜ்ஞாநஞ்சேத்

திரஸ்குர்யாத் க:ப்ரபுஸ்தந்நிவர்த்தநே

jñānarūpamparamprahma tannivartyammruṣātmakam - ajñānañcēt

tiraskuryāt kaḥprapustannivarttanē

The supreme Brahman is knowledge itself; what it removes is false. If ignorance were to cover it, who would have the power to remove that?

"If avidyā, which is ignorance, covered Brahman, which is knowledge, there would be nothing left that could destroy it, and avidyā would be eternal. And then there would be two things, avidyā and Brahman. The great elephant of non-duality has sunk into the deep mire of duality."

Yajñamūrti agreed, and owned himself beaten. He broke his single staff and threw it away, and lay full length at Emperumāṉār's feet.

Emperumāṉār set his own lotus feet on his head. He lifted him up, embraced him, and was very gracious to him.

"Please give me the triple staff and the ochre and the rest," said Yajñamūrti.

"We will," said Uḍaiyavar. "But because you gave up the tuft and the sacred thread before, you must do expiation for it."

There is a Sanskrit rule for it:

ஹீநோயஜ்ஞோபவீதேந யதிஸ்யாத்

த்யாகபிக்ஷுக:-தஸ்யக்ரியாநிஷ்பலாஸ்ஸ்யு: ப்ராயஶ்சித்தம்விதீயதே-காயத்ரீ

ஸஹிதாயைவ ப்ராஜாபத்யாந்ஷடாசரேத் - புநஸ்ஸம்ஸ்காரமாஹ்ருத்ய தார்

யம்யஜ்ஞோபவீதகம்

hīnōyajñōpavītēna yatisyāt

tyākapikṣukaḥ-tasyakriyāniṣpalāssyuḥ prāyaścittamvitīyatē-kāyatrī

sahitāyaiva prājāpatyānṣaṭācarēt - punassamskāramāhrutya tār

yamyajñōpavītakam

If a man without the sacred thread should become a mendicant by renunciation, his rites are in vain; an expiation is laid down for him: with the Gāyatrī let him perform six Prājāpatya penances; then, having received the rite again, he must wear the sacred thread.

Uḍaiyavar had him do the expiation by the procedure the śāstra gives, and had him take back the tuft and the sacred thread.

Then he gave him the five saṃskāras, beginning with the holy seal. He told him, "Wear the triple staff and the ochre and the rest as long as you live."

And in the fullness of his joy, so that the help Pēraruḷāḷar had given him by speaking in the dream should be remembered, he gave him a holy name: Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ is Pēraruḷāḷar, the Lord of Kāñcī. Emperumāṉār was Uḍaiyavar's own name.

The shorter account tells the end of the debate more simply. At dawn, it says, Emperumāṉār held all those meanings in his heart, and with them he defeated Yajñamūrti in Vedānta. He gave him the ascetic's order after expiation, with the tuft and the sacred thread, and the five saṃskāras, and named him Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār after the dream, and taught him the special meanings, beginning with the holy Tamil hymns.

After that Uḍaiyavar took him to worship Namperumāḷ, and had tīrtha and prasāda given to him, and the Śrī Śaṭhakōpaṉ.

Then he took him to the maṭha and showed him Pēraruḷāḷar, the image Uḍaiyavar himself worshipped.

"This one, you see," he said, "is the one who joined you to us."

He had him perform the worship. He gave him food, ate himself, and gave him the food that had been offered to the Lord. Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār ate, and lived on there in great happiness; some copies say he lived there of one heart with them.

Uḍaiyavar looked at him one day.

"Come, Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār!" he said. "Learn the holy hymns the Āzhvārs made."

Beginning with the Tiruppallāṇḍu, he taught him the whole Nālāyiram, the four thousand Tamil verses, and gave him the further teaching he needed on the nature of things.

Uḍaiyavar kept Kūrattāzhvāṉ and Mudaliyāṇḍāṉ and Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār about him in those days, and the house became an assembly of the learned. Word went out that the ācāryas had all come and taken refuge at Uḍaiyavar's feet. Four men heard it: Anantāzhvāṉ, Eccāṉ, Toṇḍaṉūr Nambi and Marudūr Nambi. They came wanting to take refuge at Uḍaiyavar's feet.

Uḍaiyavar had them take refuge at the feet of Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār instead.

That made him afraid. He turned to the four of them.

"Uḍaiyavar has done what a man does who ties a palmyra fruit to a sparrow's neck," he said. "You must hold that Emperumāṉār's feet alone are your refuge."

The account tells this twice, and the second time it calls it the good counsel he gave the four who had come to his feet. Many copies have a round stone in place of the palmyra fruit.

He was a small man. When Bhaṭṭar, the son of Kūrattāzhvāṉ, was in his fifth year, he heard his father reciting a hymn in which the Āzhvār speaks of "small great men," and asked how smallness and greatness could be in one thing. Āzhvāṉ said the boy was not yet old enough for the sacred thread, so he could not convince him from the śāstras; he would show him with his own eyes instead. "Men like Ciṟiyāccāṉ and Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār," he said, "small in body and great in knowledge: those are the small great men."

For a time he lived in a maṭha of his own.

One day two Śrīvaiṣṇavas from another country came to Śrīraṅgam. They stopped some people standing in the holy street and asked, "Which is Emperumāṉār's maṭha?"

"Which Emperumāṉār's maṭha?" the people said.

The visitors were hurt. "Why do you talk as if there were two? Are there two Emperumāṉārs for our darśana?"

"There are," the people said. "We asked because Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār lives here too."

"We do not know him. We asked for Uḍaiyavar's maṭha."

"Then this is Irāmānucaṉ's maṭha," they said, and showed it, and the two went in.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār heard of it by chance.

"Alas!" he said. "Is it not because we live apart from Uḍaiyavar, in another place, that people have spoken of us as a rival to Emperumāṉār? This is the harm that has come to us."

He was in great distress. At once he pulled down his own maṭha. Then he came and clasped Uḍaiyavar's feet and grieved.

"From time without beginning this soul has suffered harm, kept away from your holy feet," he said. "Is that not enough, that now too you have resolved to put it away from you?"

"What is the reason for this?" Uḍaiyavar asked.

He told him what had happened.

Uḍaiyavar heard it all. "Then what is fitting for us to do for you now?"

"From today," he said, "like the shadow and the footprint, as the Āzhvār's words have it, 'grant that I may come to serve beneath your two feet': keep me beneath Your Honour's holy feet, and take service from me every day."

"Then come here from now on," said Uḍaiyavar.

He kept him in his presence and did not let him be parted from him even for half a moment, and he gave him every meaning there was to give.

Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār had what he wanted. He knew no god but Uḍaiyavar. He made two works, the Jñānasāram and the Prameyasāram, the essence of knowledge and the essence of what is to be known, so that women and simple people might easily take in the heart of the whole Vedānta, learn it, and be saved. In them he said this: for a good disciple, the good ācārya is the supreme deity; service at his feet is the highest thing to be reached; and the ācārya is a special descent of the Lord himself.

He was among the mudalis, the first disciples, when Uḍaiyavar gathered them and said that he must set out the meaning of the Vedānta, and they said, "Please do so." He was among those to whom Uḍaiyavar taught the Śrī Bhāṣya, with Kūrattāzhvāṉ and Mudaliyāṇḍāṉ and others. When the daily services at Uḍaiyavar's feet were shared out, the kitchen to one, the oil to another, the water pot and sandals to a third, the worship of the Lord was his.

When the tradition later told over the ways Pēraruḷāḷar had made Uḍaiyavar's greatness known, it remembered him. In an argument with Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār, when no answer would come and the matter was laid before Pēraruḷāḷar, a smile showed on the Lord's red lips and he said, "Answer in this way."

He is named in the roll of those who took refuge at Uḍaiyavar's feet, and among the seventy-four ācāryas. The shorter account of the line, counting the seventy-four who held the seats, sets him among the jīyars, next after Embār. And when the child Bhaṭṭar shamed a scholar who had come into the holy street blowing a horn and calling himself the all-knowing one, it was because, Bhaṭṭar said, this was the place where Uḍaiyavar lived, and Āzhvāṉ, and Āṇḍāṉ, and Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār, and Embār.

He taught his own disciples as he had taught the four: Emperumāṉār's feet alone are the refuge. The account names him with Āzhvāṉ, Āṇḍāṉ, Embār and Bhaṭṭar as one of those who taught it so.

At the end, when Emperumāṉār called his disciples together, bound them by his oath to do nothing rash when he was gone, and gave them into the hands of four teachers, Eccāṉ and Anantāzhvāṉ and Toṇḍaṉūr Nambi and Marudūr Nambi and others were given into the hands of Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār. They were the four who had first been sent to him. One of the verses by which the tradition salutes Anantāzhvāṉ calls him the one vessel of Dayāpāla's compassion.

And when Emperumāṉār was gone, Kandāḍai Āṇḍāṉ and Aruḷāḷa Perumāḷ Emperumāṉār and Embār and Vaḍuga Nambi and all the others cried out and fell like trees cut at the root, and lay there weeping.

The account does not say when or where he himself died. It keeps his taṉiyaṉs, the verses by which the tradition salutes him. One gives him to Rāmānuja's mercy:

யதிராஜதயாபாத்ரம் யதிபங்க்திவிபூஷணம் - தயாபாலமுநிம்வந்தே

தேஶிகாக்ரேஸரம்ஸதா.

yatirājatayāpātram yatipaṅktivipūṣaṇam - tayāpālamunimvantē

tēśikākrēsaramsatā.

The vessel of Yatirāja's compassion, the ornament of the line of ascetics: I worship Dayāpāla Muni, the first among teachers, always.

The other remembers his two Tamil works:

தயாபாலநதேவாய

ஜ்ஞாநஸாரப்ரதாயச - ப்ரமேயஸாரந்தததே நமோஉஸ்துப்ரேமஶாலிநே

tayāpālanatēvāya

jñānasārapratāyaca - pramēyasārantatatē namōustuprēmaśālinē

To the lord Dayāpāla, who gives the Jñānasāra, who gives the Prameyasāra: let there be bowing to him who is rich in love.