Aruṇagirinātar

Begin with the tower, as his Alaṅkāram does.

The town is Tiruvaṇṇāmalai, which the poets shorten to Aruṇai. The poet's name is made of words his own songs use: aruṇa is the red of dawn, giri a mountain, and nātar a lord. He is remembered as the lord of the red mountain, as though nobody could think of him apart from the place.

And when he came to set down a hundred verses in praise of Murugan, the son of Śiva, the first thing he did was put us in front of that tower:

At mighty Aruṇai, by the sacred tower,

I went to the north side of that gateway and there I saw him:

the elephant younger than the great bull elephant

whose trunk takes the sugar along with the knocks that fall, taḍapaḍa,

on the heads of all who come,

the great bull elephant whose temples stream and whose brow swells.

The great bull elephant is Gaṇapati, the elder brother, before whom worshippers knock their own temples with their knuckles; the sugar and the knocks, the streaming temples and the swelling brow are all his. The younger one is Murugan. The verse is an invocation, the kind a Tamil poet makes before he begins. But notice how exactly it is placed: not in a heaven, not in a vision, but at a particular gate, on a particular side of it, in a temple anyone can walk into. I went there and I saw him. It is fitting that so much of what the tradition later told about him happens at that tower.

The long verse life of him ends at the tower too. Its last canto is the canto of the tower, and it turns to a king named Vallāḷa. It says that the eastern gateway tower was all that king's tapas gathered and given form; and that at the north side of that tower, by Skanda's great grace, a poet appeared, like a cloud raining rhythm.

---

No life of him written in his own time has been found. What came down first was the poetry.

There is a great deal of it. There is the Tiruppukazh, "the holy praise", a vast body of songs to Murugan, one for this shrine and one for that, each built on its own rhythm, which some printings write out above the song in drum syllables. There is the Kantar Alaṅkāram, "an Adornment for Skanda", a hundred verses; the Kantar Anubhūti, "the Experience of Skanda", fifty-one short verses that read like a man reporting from inside something he cannot describe; the Kantar Antāti; and the Tiruvakuppu, long songs in praise of Murugan's feet, his spear, his arms.

The earliest printed notice of the man himself that has been found is an English one. In 1859 a collector of Tamil poets' lives described him in a few lines: an eminent poet, devoted to Śiva's worship, who renounced the world, took up the life of an ascetic, and lived and died at the Śiva temple of Tiruvaṇṇāmalai. That is all it says. There is no leap, no parrot, no king.

The fuller story was composed in the 1860s. A Tamil poet and ascetic named Taṇṭapāṇi Cuvāmikaḷ, known also as Murukatāca, Murugan's servant, gave the whole story a long verse telling of its own, the Aruṇakirinātacuvāmikaḷ purāṇam. He gave the poet a shorter canto as well, in his book of the lives of Tamil poets, the Pulavar Purāṇam. And in December 1894 an editor of the Tiruppukazh, setting out the songs from many handwritten copies, put a short life before them: born at Tiruvaṇṇāmalai, in the reign of a king called Prabhuḍadēva; sunk in pleasure as a young man; turned round by Murugan's grace and given the true teaching; a singer at the shrines; victor in a contest with a famous poet.

Taṇṭapāṇi said honestly where his story came from. In verses that stand before his purāṇam he says that some of it had been made known to him, waking and in dream; some came from his teacher's words; some from the elders; some from what people said. He began to tell it, he says, because he heard people telling the story in so many ways, and could not bear it. The preface to the purāṇam's 1924 printing, written after his death, says the same: he had heard the story told wrongly.

So what follows is a Collected Sacred Legend: the life as the tradition has told it, gathered in the nineteenth century, four hundred years and more after the man it tells of. No inscription naming him has been found. The songs are his. The story is the tradition's gift, told here as the tradition tells it.

---

Taṇṭapāṇi's account of this birth begins with another poet.

The saint Paṭṭiṉattār, also called Tiruveṇkāṭar, is said to have passed along a street of Tiruvaṇṇāmalai and to have been seized there by desire for a young woman of the courtesans' houses. She ran home, the purāṇam goes on, to her mother. It tells what followed with great delicacy: the mother brought the girl back to the holy man, and found him sunk in contemplation of Śiva; what he had let fall lay on a leaf of the sacred fig; the mother gave it to her daughter; and from that, the daughter conceived. The child was Aruṇagiri. When he was a year old, the purāṇam says, they gave him that name.

It is a strange inheritance to give a saint, and the tellers knew it. It made the boy the son of a saint, born in the very trade of pleasure he would later sing against. The Pulavar Purāṇam tells the same birth, more briefly. The preface to the purāṇam's 1924 printing sets out the objection some raised, that Paṭṭiṉattār lived centuries before the poet, and answers it by the long life that yogis are said to win. The story was defended rather than dropped, because it says something its tellers wanted said. The man who would write the hardest lines in Tamil about desire was born out of desire. His whole life was going to be the working out of that.

He had an elder sister. The Pulavar Purāṇam says plainly that the poet does not know her name. While the boy was still a child, both books say, his mother died and left her children, and it was the sister who brought him up. She is the person this story turns on.

---

He grew up, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, with beauty like Murugan's own and a mind like a ghoul's, and he fell into the great sea of lust.

The tradition is unsparing about these years, and so, when he comes to them, is he. The purāṇam says that after he turned sixteen he was going from house to house of the courtesans of the town, and that he spent whatever came into his hands. A sickness took hold of his body, and both books name it kuṭṭa nōy, leprosy. And all the while his sister kept him.

When the money ran out, both books say, she sold her ornaments, the household goods, the house. The Pulavar Purāṇam has her at the end in a little hut by another woman's house, poorer than she had ever been, somehow cooking a meal for him; the purāṇam has her weeping as she struggled to feed him.

Nothing in his own verses names a sister or a house. But one of the songs of his Tiruppukazh runs through a whole life in a few lines, from the womb and the breast and the little anklets to this:

I took up the intimacy of rare women, I tossed in sickness, I wandered round and round:

enough of that.

When shall I receive your mind of mercy?

And elsewhere, with the same flat honesty, he knows what poverty does, how it empties a life of everything that looked solid:

Let one wretch named Poverty show its face,

and see how they all pack up and leave:

looks, wealth, spirit, character, household, lineage.

The tradition hears the young man of Tiruvaṇṇāmalai in lines like these. The lines themselves are content to be true of anyone.

---

Then, as the story tells it, came the day it has never forgotten.

He came to her as he always did and asked her for money, and this time there was none. There was nothing left to sell. And his sister, both of Taṇṭapāṇi's books say, answered him with words that no one in that house could have expected.

She said that she too was a woman of that kind, a courtesan and nothing else. If pleasure was what he wanted, and there was nothing left to pay for it with, he could take it from her.

The words went into him, the purāṇam says, and burned. He turned and ran from the house without looking back. He went with his heart an open wound, resolved that he must pay the penalty; and he climbed the tower, the one it calls Vallāḷa's tower, standing like a hill, and from the top of it he jumped.

Both of Taṇṭapāṇi's tellings say so, in nearly the same words. He climbed the tower that stood like a hill, and leapt without shrinking.

---

He was saved, both tellings say. Neither says how his fall was stopped. They say who was there.

Before the one who had leapt, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, Kumāra, Murugan himself, stood there in the form of a guru. In the purāṇam he is a man shining in a plain loincloth, and what he said was a scolding and a blessing at once. Should you hate your life and throw it down like this? It is not right; do not do it again. The tapas you did in a birth before this one has kept you. And he pointed to an image on the north side of the old tower, the very side the poet's own invocation would one day name, and said that this form would give him every true thing.

Then he taught him the six-syllable mantra of Kumāra, and told him not to be idle in saying it; and he told him to make poems, all kinds of poems. Stay three days, he said, and the red Lord of the long spear will show himself to you on his peacock. He drew white ash across the young man's forehead. And as the young man bowed to him, still taking him for some wandering holy man, the stranger went into the image he had pointed to, and was gone, like a flash of lightning.

Only then, the purāṇam says, did he understand who it had been. And he was seized with a longing he could not bear.

His own verses remember a teaching too, and they remember it differently. Not a mantra to repeat, but the end of all repeating:

Murugan the Lord,

the thief who steals the red deer's daughter,

who is never born and never dies, said to me:

"Be still. Let words end."

And the moment he said it, ah, I knew nothing at all.

The red deer's daughter is Valli, the girl of the hill people whom Murugan courted in her family's millet field. The last line is not a confession of ignorance. It says that once he spoke, there was no thing left over to be known. Cummā iru, "be still", and let words end: that is what he says he was told.

And in another verse he keeps the memory of a voice in his ear on a day he was in trouble:

You saw my distress that day

and spoke a secret into my ear, your servant's ear,

and now that secret has come out into the open in the hill hamlet.

The verses do not say which day it was. They only say that it happened, and that it was the turning point of everything.

---

His sister, the purāṇam says, went from house to house looking for her brother, and found him at the temple. He told her what had happened. Guha, he said, using another of Murugan's names, had taken him as his own.

She had dreamed it, she said; and now the dream had come true. She bowed to Guha and spoke to him about her brother. You have taken him as your own, she said. Now the care of him is yours. Then, after a few days of living on the food given out at the temple, she went to Kailāsa, Śiva's mountain, as her grandmother and her mother had gone before her, and her brother's eyes ran with tears. It is the purāṇam's way of telling that she died. The woman who had sold everything for him, and then offered the one thing left, has no more part in the story. She had done what she came to do.

He lived on there, the purāṇam goes on, begging his food as his father had, and the great sickness left his body. Taṇṭapāṇi adds, with real tenderness, that another sickness left him at the same time: the one called the world's contempt. Women came to him, seeing him fairer than before, and offered themselves now for nothing; his mind had become a rock of diamond. And Guha came to him in the likeness of an ascetic and gave him the holy robe.

And then, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, like rain clouds pouring down at the end of a day of burning heat, Murugan showed himself to him, on the peacock, with both his consorts and the spear in his hand.

His Tiruppukazh song for Tiruvaṇṇāmalai keeps a day like that, and keeps the promise he made after it:

in compassion they came once to Aruṇai with your devotees,

the Śruti attending at their side,

those two lotus-flower feet with their anklets:

I will not forget them, in dream or in waking.

And the Alaṅkāram puts the whole turn of his life in two lines, without a tower or a sister in them, and with no merit of his own anywhere:

I have not the least tapas to earn a reward,

and still he opened a way for me out of the mud they call the spread-out world.

What a way he made!

He earned nothing. A way was opened.

---

What he did next, the tellings agree, was sing, and keep singing, for the rest of his life.

The life of 1894 says he went from shrine to shrine of Murugan the way the old Śaiva saints had gone from shrine to shrine of Śiva, and sang at each one, and the songs came to be called Tiruppukazh, the holy praise. The Pulavar Purāṇam has him go south and see shrine after shrine, and at Centil, it says, he sang the Tiruppukazh whole. The life of 1894 repeats what the elders said about their number: sixteen thousand songs. Barely a thousand of them, it adds, can now be found together anywhere.

The book that gathers them orders them by place, and the places read like a pilgrim's road: Tirupparaṅkuṉṟam, Tiruccentūr, Pazhaṉi, Swāmimalai, Tiruttaṇikai, Pazhamutircōlai, and then the hills, one after another. First among the songs it sets the one that begins muttaittaru, and its note says why: because the elders handed down that this was the first song he made.

The songs are not like anything else. Each is built on a rhythm pattern, a line of drum syllables that the singer has to fill exactly, syllable for syllable, and he fills them with a rush of Tamil and Sanskrit, names and epithets and stories in a phrase, pouring out so fast that the sense can hardly keep up with the sound. An old verse quoted in that life of 1894 says it simply: for word, Aruṇagiri.

In the Alaṅkāram he calls his own work by its name, as a man might name the one thing he has to offer:

I will praise him in the holy praise that is sung.

When Death comes to catch me with his noose,

you will come and say, "Do not be afraid."

---

Fame brings challenges, and the tradition gives him a famous one.

Villiputtūrār, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, was an emperor among poets. Both of Taṇṭapāṇi's books remember him as a man who went about challenging other poets, and who cut off the ears of those he beat. He came to Aruṇai, the purāṇam says, to beat this one, and King Prabhuḍadēva sat to hear them. The rule was the old rule of such contests: one would sing, and the other must give the meaning.

Aruṇagiri sang the Kantar Antāti. One verse of it was the trap. It is built almost entirely of the syllables ti and ta and tu and tā, a run of sound that seems at first hearing to be no words at all. Villiputtūrār could not give its meaning. Every telling agrees on that; the life of 1894 adds that Aruṇagiri then gave the meaning himself.

Then came the moment the books like best. The loser's ears were forfeit. What good would it do to cut them off, Aruṇagiri said? Let him keep them, as ears I have given him. The Pulavar Purāṇam has him say only: let your ears live.

It is a poet's story, told by poets, and it has a poet's moral. The Tamil that sounds like drumming is not noise. Every syllable of it is meaning, if you can hear it; and the man who could make it was not interested in anyone's ears.

---

The king, the tellings agree, was called Prabhuḍadēva; the purāṇam calls him lord of Aruṇai. And at his court, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, there was a man named Sampantāṇṭāṉ, a worshipper of the Goddess, who could not bear to see the king honour the poet.

He put a challenge to the king. If this man's god is real, let him show him to you. And the contest came down to this: whether Aruṇagiri's Murugan would show himself. In the Pulavar Purāṇam the poet goes into a pavilion of the temple and worships Guha, asking him to come in the pillar at its north-east corner. And the pillar shone; its light went through the stone.

The purāṇam tells it with a showman's delight. He came out of the pillar in a single instant, it says, and stood there in the king's sight. And the poet warned him: the form of the Lord of the long spear is more than your eyes can hold. Look at it with one eye, and keep the other back.

The king did not listen. He looked with both eyes, out of a great longing to see, and the eyes that had looked were taken from him.

Then the poet bowed at Guha's flowering feet and asked him to give back the eyes of a man who could still do him service, and grieved. And Murugan, the purāṇam says, gave the king his eyes. The Pulavar Purāṇam adds that the king worshipped, and gave the temple a pavilion and other works.

At the end of the episode the purāṇam asks a question it does not answer. Where does Murugan live now? In Aruṇagiri's heart? In the pillar? In the tall tower? In the hills, in the Vedas, in the Āgamas?

Among his own songs there is one that names a king of that name. It calls on the whole of creation to dance, the serpent under the world and the mountain at its centre, the goddess and the god and the moon, and asks Murugan to come dancing on his peacock too; and it ends:

and let the heart, too, of the great king Prabhuḍadēva,

a radiant garland on his chest, dance:

great Lord of the gods who live!

It is the only song in this edition that names a king.

---

The story goes on: Sampantāṇṭāṉ, beaten, tried again, and this time the trap was a request.

He put it into the king's mind that the poet who could bring Murugan out of a pillar could surely bring a flower from heaven, the flower of the gods' own garden: the pārijāta, the purāṇam calls it; the Pulavar Purāṇam calls it the flower of the kaṟpaka tree. The king asked. Aruṇagiri agreed, and said he would bring it within a few days.

To go where a human body cannot go, the purāṇam says, he left his. He laid his body down on the upper storey of the sacred tower, and entered the body of a parrot that had died, a parrot bright as gold; and in that body he flew up into the sky. The gods, it says, were astonished to hear a parrot singing Tamil among them. Indra knew him for a servant of the Lord of the spear, and gave him the flower.

Meanwhile, the Pulavar Purāṇam says, Sampantāṇṭāṉ went to the king with grave news. The poet was dead, he said. His body lay up there on the tower, and it was not fitting to leave it; it should be given its rites. Both books tell how the body was taken and burned.

---

In the purāṇam the parrot came back with the flower, and found nothing to come back to.

It says he learned that his body had been burned and did not grieve, taking it as Skanda's will. The king understood at last what had been done, cried out and fell to the ground, and begged him to come back. And the parrot gave him an answer that is the whole of this saint's teaching in one sentence.

Every day, it said, so many human bodies fall to the earth. If I wanted one, could I not take any of them? I will stay with the flocks of parrots and make them glad. Do not be angry. And it flew.

So, the purāṇam says, he stayed a parrot. He lived on the tower of Aruṇai among the other parrots, and from there, Taṇṭapāṇi says, he poured out Tamil: the Kantar Anubhūti and the Alaṅkāram and many garlands of verse besides. The purāṇam hears the Anubhūti as the parrot's song, the voice of someone who no longer has a body to speak from. Its forty-third verse is where some old copies of the poem end:

Murugan, beloved of the one who wears fine gems and silk:

by your love and your grace the fetter of desire crumbled to dust,

and then it was born, the experience no one can speak of, anubhūti.

As for Sampantāṇṭāṉ, the purāṇam ends him in his own scheme. Wanting worse harm still, it says, he set out to call up the fierce Kāḷi by worship, to ruin the king's family, to lay waste Aruṇai, and to kill the parrot with all its kin; and the goddess came on her lion, and in her anger at him she struck him down. The Pulavar Purāṇam sets Kāḷi against the parrot and the king, and from there the two tellings go their own ways.

---

There is one more turn, and it is the gentlest in the story.

The parrot flew, the purāṇam says, to the west of Śiva's mountain, and sang on the peak of Kandamādana, where Skanda lives. Murugan heard the parrot's red words with his twelve ears. And he called to it: Do not wilt. Come. Come. And he took it up and set it on his right shoulder, and the poets rained flowers.

The Pulavar Purāṇam gives it the same road. The parrot flew north, it says, to the peak of Skanda's hill to the west of Kailāsa, and sang the Anubhūti there, and Guha called it and set it on his right shoulder; and there it sits to this day, as many in the world say.

The 1859 notice says only that he lived and died at the temple. The purāṇam does not tell of a death at all. The body burned; the singer did not stop.

---

No one knows the year he was born or the year he died.

What there is, is a king. The tradition puts him in the reign of Prabhuḍadēva, and one of his own songs names a king of that name. The life of 1894 works from there: it says the king ruled in 1450, and that the poet must therefore have lived about four hundred and forty-five years before its editor wrote. The preface to the purāṇam's 1924 printing, setting out an objection to the birth story, speaks of him as a man of the sixteenth century. The song does not say which king it means, or when he ruled. Nothing written in his own time, on stone or on leaf, has been found that names the poet at all.

So the safe thing to say is that he lived most likely in the fifteenth century, perhaps in the sixteenth, and that the date rests on a king's name in a song and on the tradition that reads it. Everything else in this life is told, not dated.

---

It is tempting to read his verses as a diary, and the tradition has always done it. The life of 1894 says his turn from pleasure to grace is plain from his own songs. A line about women becomes the young man of the town; a line about being spoken to on a day of distress becomes the tower.

But listen to what the verses actually return to, again and again, and it is not his own story. It is the one who taught him. Murugan, in the songs, is above all a teacher, and the story the poet loves best is not about himself at all. It is the story of the child who taught his own father:

Lord, Kumāra:

when Śiva said "Homage, teach me",

what was the meaning you spoke to him?

In the story, Brahmā could not say what the sacred syllable means, and the young Murugan held him prisoner for it; and Śiva bowed to his own child and heard the teaching from him. The verse does not name the syllable. It only asks the son what he said, as though the poet wanted to be told it too.

That is the shape of his whole life as the tradition gives it. A man who had nothing, and deserved nothing, was spoken to. A son taught a father. A god came out of a pillar for a king who looked too hard. A parrot would not go back to a burnt body because there were bodies falling every day. And under all of it is the stillness those two words opened:

"There is nothing to tell."

There, everything is lost and one can only be still,

and he let me go into that place.

What a thing he did!

Tāyumāṉavar, a poet-saint of a later age, called him father, and asked who in all the world had ever spoken one word as truly as he had. In another verse he calls on him as Aruṇagiri, who flourished on this earth so that people might be still and come to grace. Be still.

॥ ॐ ॥

---