Nammāzhvār

Nammāzhvār: the child who sat sixteen years under the tamarind

In Thirukkurugūr, the town on the south bank of the Tāmraparṇi that is now called Āzhvār Thirunagari, there was born a child who did not cry, did not take his mother's milk and did not open his eyes. For sixteen years he sat in silence under a tamarind tree beside the temple, and when at last he spoke, what came from him was the Veda in Tamil. The tradition calls him Nammāzhvār, "our own Āzhvār", and counts the other eleven as the limbs of a body of which he is the whole.

A promise at Thirukkuṟuṅguḍi

His family were rulers of the Kurugu country, and Thirukkurugūr was their seat. When his grandfather Poṟkāri looked for a bride worthy of his son Kāri, he went with him to Thiruvaṇparisāram, where there lived a devout Vaiṣṇava named Thiruvāzhmārbar. Before the elders of the place Poṟkāri asked for his daughter Uḍaiyanaṅgai, and Thiruvāzhmārbar gave her gladly. Pavilions hung with pearls went up, the musicians played, and the marriage was made with every rite. The young couple worshipped the Lord of Thiruvaṇparisāram and came home to Thirukkurugūr, where the priests and the people hung the streets with banners and set out pots of water to welcome them, as Ayodhyā once welcomed Rāma home from Mithilā with his bride.

Kāri and Uḍaiyanaṅgai lived as good householders, and for a long while they had no child. Once, coming back from a visit to her father's house, they turned aside to Thirukkuṟuṅguḍi, a lovely place under the hills, its groves loud with bees and birds, and there they prayed to Nambi, the Lord of the shrine, for a son. Through his priest the Lord answered that he himself would be born to them. He blessed them, and as a sign of his favour gave them the tulasi garland from his own shoulders, with the holy water and the offered food. Their hearts full, they went home, and before long Uḍaiyanaṅgai was with child.

For the Lord had called Viṣvaksēna, the commander of his hosts, and sent him down to be born on earth for the saving of the world. And ahead of him went Ādiśeṣa, the great serpent who is the Lord's couch and his constant servant, and took birth as a tamarind tree beside the temple of Thirukkurugūr, so that when the child came he would have shelter waiting.

Sixteen years of silence

The child was born in the month of Vaikāci, on the full-moon day, under the star Viśākham. He came into the world the way the sun comes up: the dark of the soul's long night lifting, the closed lotuses of men's hearts beginning to open. But he did not cry. He smiled, and lay still, and would not feed, and his eyes stayed closed. His parents were awed, and did not know what to do. In the end they gave the matter up to the Lord, saying in their hearts, "Lord, what have you in mind?"

On the eleventh day they bathed and carried the child to the temple of Ādinātha, the Lord of Thirukkurugūr. There they laid him in a cradle of gold set with gems, under the tamarind, and named him Māṟaṉ, the one who goes against the ways of the world. From that day they no longer thought of him as theirs. He was the Lord's, born to be the head of their line in a sense they could not yet see.

Sixteen years went by, and the boy under the tree opened neither his eyes nor his mouth. Within, he was turned wholly to the Lord: "I will see no one but you," the silence said, "and what is there to tell anyone, but you?" His parents could not know that. They only grieved, and wondered why the Lord of Thirukkuṟuṅguḍi had answered their prayer with so strange a gift.

The light in the south

At Thirukkōḷūr, a few miles away, there lived a Brahmin of great learning, Madhurakavi, born some years before the child, as the dawn comes before the sun. He had been given every sacrament and had mastered the fourteen branches of knowledge: the four Vedas and their six limbs, both schools of Mīmāṃsā, logic, the Purāṇas and the law. He had gone north on pilgrimage, to Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Kāśī, Dvārakā and the other cities that free the soul, and was on his way back to Ayodhyā from Badarikāśrama when, one night, stepping out under the open sky, he saw a strange light far off in the south.

It shook him and filled him with wonder. Was a village burning? A forest on fire? He dozed and woke and looked again, and it was still there, steady, dancing before his eyes. It came back the next night, and the next, always in the same place. So he set out to follow it. By day he rested; as soon as it was dark he walked, the light going before him. From one holy place to the next he came south, as far as Śrīraṅgam, and still the light was further south. He followed it on, and at Thirukkurugūr it came to rest, and went out.

Madhurakavi asked in the town, and heard about the wonderful child who had opened neither his eyes nor his mouth in sixteen years and lived under a tamarind tree. He went to the tree, and there was his light: a youth of sixteen, seated in the lotus posture, eyes closed, his right hand raised with thumb and forefinger joined in the sign of the teacher.

He was so still that Madhurakavi doubted there was life in him at all. So he lifted a large stone and let it fall to the ground. At the sound the youth opened his eyes and looked on him with grace. But his lips stayed closed. "Perhaps he cannot speak," Madhurakavi thought, and put a question to him:

"If a small thing is born in the belly of a dead thing, what will it eat, and where will it lie?"

The small thing is the soul, and the dead thing the body, matter with no life of its own. And the youth who had not spoken in sixteen years answered at once:

"It will eat that, and there it will lie."

The soul takes its joys and griefs from the body it is born into, and lies bound there. But the answer had a second sense, which the boy under the tree was living: a soul that takes the Lord as its food rests in the Lord, and needs nothing else. Madhurakavi had no more doubt. He fell full length at the youth's feet, hands joined, and worshipped him with a heart running over. From that day he lived at his master's feet, called on his names, served him in every way and asked for nothing more. He knew no God but his teacher.

The four works

Then the Lord chose to show himself to Māṟaṉ in all his glory. He came riding on Garuḍa, with Śrī at his side, and opened to him everything he is: his nature, his qualities, his radiant form, the worlds and the order they keep, and all that lies in his boundless depths. The youth under the tree was so filled that he overflowed, and what overflowed was song: the whole journey of a soul towards the Lord, its joys and its griefs, its nights of separation and its days of union. These are his four works, which the tradition holds to be the four Vedas in Tamil: Thiruviruttam, the essence of the Ṛg Veda; Thiruvāsiriyam, of the Yajur; Periya Thiruvandhādhi, of the Atharva; and Thiruvāymozhi, of the Sāma Veda. Madhurakavi received them from his lips and was taught their meaning, so that through him they would go out to the world.

And not only the Lord of heaven came. The Lords who dwell in the holy shrines of the earth came before his inner eye as he sat under the tree: the Lord of the Hill at Tirupati, the Lord of Kāñci, the Lord of Śrīraṅgam, the Lord of Tirunārāyaṇapuram, and many more, one after another, and he sang each of them as they passed. In the joy of it he cried out: "Who on all this earth is my equal in love for Kṛṣṇa? Who in all the heavens can match me?" It was the Lord of Śrīraṅgam, the tradition says, who gave him the name the whole tradition uses: Nammāzhvār, our own Āzhvār.

He never tasted the sweets of this world. Kṛṣṇa was his food and his drink and every pleasure he had. His great longing was not his own salvation but that every soul, past and to come, should be saved, and in Thiruvāymozhi he set out, for anyone to hear, the whole truth the Vedas teach and the way of surrender and grace.

A dog of Thirukkurugūr

The grace of the place he lived in was told in a story the people loved. On the north bank of the Tāmraparṇi there lived a yogi who kept a dog, and every day around noon the dog swam across to the south bank, roamed the streets of Thirukkurugūr and ate what the Vaiṣṇavas there had left on their leaves. One day it did not come back. The yogi went down to the river and saw that the dog had set out for home as usual, but halfway across a flood had come down, and it had drowned. As he watched, its body rose to the surface, and from it the dog's soul went up to heaven like a blaze of light, as if a thousand lamps had been lit on the darkest night of the new moon. And the yogi sang: "O ocean of Tamil wisdom, whose songs make the Lord nod his crowned head in delight: if a dog that ate the leavings in the holy streets of Kurugūr goes up to heaven, what harm if a ghost like me is saved the same way?"

What stayed behind

When his work was done, Nammāzhvār laid aside the body in which men had seen him and went back to the realm of the blessed. Madhurakavi lived on for many years to keep his memory. He raised temples, set up his master's holy image in them and established his worship, day by day, month by month and year by year, on a royal scale. And with cymbals in his hands he went about singing his master's songs of divine love.

In those days the Pāṇḍya kings kept at Madurai an academy of three hundred poets under a chief poet, and no one could be called a poet until his work had passed before them. Some of them heard Madhurakavi proclaiming his master's greatness and objected: let this master and his songs come before the academy. "My master will not stir from his place," Madhurakavi answered. "Take this." He handed them a scrap of palm leaf with the opening of one decad of Thiruvāymozhi:

kaṇṇaṉ kazhaliṇai naṇṇum maṉamuḍaiyīr

eṇṇum thirunāmam thiṇṇam nāraṇamē

"You whose hearts long for Kaṇṇaṉ's feet: the holy name to hold in thought, surely, is Nārāyaṇa."

The academy had a sacred plank that floated on the lotus tank of the temple, which kept what was worthy and threw off the rest. They laid the scrap on it with the works of the other poets, and the plank kept the palm leaf and threw every other work into the water. The chief poet and all three hundred were won over, praised the master in verses of their own and became his followers.

Long afterwards, when his songs had fallen silent and were all but lost, Śrīvaiṣṇavas from the western country came to Kāṭṭumannārkōil and sang one decad of them, Ārāvamudhē, before the Lord there. Nāthamuni, who served that Lord, was held by the verses and asked them for more. They knew nothing beyond those eleven; but the last of them speaks of a thousand, and they told him he might learn the rest at Thirukkurugūr. So he went south. At Thirukkurugūr, Parāṅkuśadāsa, of Madhurakavi's line of disciples, taught him Madhurakavi's eleven verses in praise of his master and told him to recite them under the tamarind twelve thousand times without a break. He did, and Nammāzhvār appeared to him and gave him all his songs, and with them the four thousand verses of all the Āzhvārs. So the teaching passed to Nāthamuni, and from him, through Yāmuna, to Rāmānuja and every teacher who came after.

To this day, in every Viṣṇu temple, the priest touches the head of each worshipper with a crown that bears the Lord's feet. It is called the Śaṭhāri, after Nammāzhvār's own name Śaṭhakōpaṉ, because he is the one who lies always at those feet.