Periyāzhvār

Periyāzhvār: the gardener who blessed the Lord

At Śrīvilliputtūr, a town of Brahmins who spent their lives on the Veda and its sacrifices, there lived a man who grew tulasi and flowers and wove them every day into garlands for the Lord of the town. He had no learning to speak of, and said so. Yet one day he was carried through the streets of Madurai on a king's elephant, and when he looked up and saw the Lord himself in the sky above the procession, he was seized with fear for the Lord's safety, and began to sing a blessing over God as a mother sings over her child. That was Viṣṇucittaṉ, whom the world calls Periyāzhvār, the great Āzhvār.

The flower service

He was born at Śrīvilliputtūr in the month of Āṉi, under the star Svāti, to Mukunda and his wife Padmā, a family of the old Brahmin lineage. He was an embodiment of Garuḍa, the great bird who is the Lord's vehicle and stands always at his side.

From birth he belonged to Viṣṇu. He needed no argument and no proof to know what a human life is for: it is for serving God, every bit of it, and anything kept back from that service spoils the service itself. Knowing this, he asked himself what form his service should take.

He thought of how the Lord who lies on the serpent in the sea of milk was born as Kṛṣṇa at Mathurā; how Kṛṣṇa, born of Dēvakī and raised by Yaśodā, was walking through Mathurā on his way to face King Kaṃsa when a poor flower-maker named Mālākāra came out of his lane and offered him garlands; and how Kṛṣṇa turned off the royal road into that lane to accept them. That decided him. He would offer flowers to Kṛṣṇa every day, and Kṛṣṇa for him was the Lord of Śrīvilliputtūr, Vaṭapatraśāyī, the one who lies on the banyan leaf. So he made a garden, grew tulasi and fragrant flowers, and wove garlands for the temple each day.

The king's question

In those days Vallabhadēva of the Pāṇḍya line ruled at Madurai, which was then called Kūḍal. One night the king was going about the streets in disguise to see how his people fared, and he found a Brahmin asleep on the raised veranda of a house. He woke him and asked who he was.

"A Brahmin," the man said, "on my way home from a pilgrimage to the Gaṅgā."

"If you know anything worth hearing," said the king, "let me hear it."

The pilgrim recited a verse: work eight months of the year so as to live at ease through the four months of rain; work half the day so as to rest at night; work in your prime to provide for old age; and use this life on earth to make sure of liberation hereafter.

The verse stayed with the king. "I lack nothing that can be seen," he thought. "But what have I done for what cannot be seen? How should I go about it?" He sent for his priest, Selvanambi, and asked him what is the highest good for a man and how it is reached. Selvanambi said that the sayings of the wise, founded on the Veda, are the law, and that the king should call an assembly of learned men from every part of the kingdom and hear from them what the Upaniṣads teach. The king agreed. He sent out the summons, and he had a rich purse of gold tied up in a cloth and hung high from an arch in the hall, to be cut down by whoever won the contest.

"Look at my hands"

The Lord of Śrīvilliputtūr decided that his own servant should go to that assembly and speak there for him, because people forget the truth and need to be reminded of it. Vaṭapatraśāyī came to Viṣṇucittaṉ in a dream and told him to go to the king's court and win the prize.

"What?" said Viṣṇucittaṉ. "You want me to go to a contest of learning? Lord, look at my hands, all scarred from the spade and the hoe. I am a gardener, good for nothing but my small service to you. I know nothing of the Veda. How could I stand up among the scholars of the land? How could you think of such a thing?"

"What is that to you?" said the Lord. "You have only to do as we say. We will do the rest. Get up and go."

He woke amazed, and set out at once for Madurai. When he came into the assembly, the king and Selvanambi both rose, went to meet him, fell at his feet and led him to the gathering of the learned, so that everyone saw him honoured. The scholars were astonished and angry. "You honour a dullard," they told the king, "who does not know a letter of the Vedānta."

Selvanambi rose, bowed down before Viṣṇucittaṉ, and asked him to speak on the truths of the Vedānta. And the gardener began. All the Vedas, he said, stood before his eyes as if written out in clear letters. As the letter A stands first in every alphabet, so Viṣṇu stands first: Kṛṣṇa says it in the Gītā, the scriptures say it, and Viṣṇu is Nārāyaṇa, the supreme being, the cause from whom all things come, by whom they stand, and to whom they return. Whoever wants liberation must meditate on him, because he alone gives it. The Upaniṣads declare it, Manu declares it, Parāśara declares it, and so does the whole of the Mahābhārata. "Enough," he said. "There are hundreds and thousands of such passages in the scriptures. Are you satisfied? Are you convinced?"

He spoke at length, and the assembly sat as still as images. No one dared to say a word against him. And as they looked on, the purse that hung from the arch bent down of its own accord until it was within his reach. He cut it down, and in his heart he thanked the Lord who had made an empty vessel able to do his work.

The procession through Madurai

The whole assembly, the king first, rose as one body and threw themselves at his feet. They brought a richly decked elephant to the palace gate and seated him on it amid cheering. The scholars formed a procession with parasols and canopies, garlands and perfumes, and as it went they shouted: "Here comes Viṣṇucittaṉ, who knows the fruit of the Vedas! Here comes the hero whose word is truth!" Trumpets blared and conches sounded, and the king gave him the title Paṭṭarpirāṉ, chief of the Brahmins. With the king's ministers and retinue swelling it, the procession wound through Kūḍal street after street.

The Lord wanted to see his servant honoured, as parents want to watch their child's triumph. So he came, and appeared in the sky: Lakṣmī beside him, riding on Garuḍa, so that the vision looked like a great dark cloud resting on a hill of gold, with the discus and the conch, the hosts of heaven, and the gods all serving him. The vision came nearer and nearer to the dazzled eyes of the man on the elephant.

Fear for God

The sight overwhelmed him, but he did not let it puff him up, nor did he lose his senses at it. He drew breath, and kept his balance, and thought: here is my God, who knows all, can do all and protects all, the colour of sapphire, bright with gold, beautiful beyond words, young for ever, worthy of heaven and of the worship of the immortals. And here he is, in this place ruled by time, among men whose minds are crooked, in an age when the light of the spirit is hidden. How can he show himself here? Love for him does not make me forget myself, because fear rises above it: fear for his safety, so precious a thing in so unworthy a land. Let nothing mar his beauty, nothing take away his strength, nothing rob him of his glory. Let me bless him. What moves me, he said, is not the love of a lover or of a servant or of a wife. It is the love of a mother for her child.

So, overflowing with that love, Viṣṇucittaṉ took hold of the bells that hung on the elephant and rang them like cymbals, and sang a song of blessing over the Lord: Thiruppallāṇḍu, many years, many thousands of years, may you live long. He blessed the Lord and his consort, his discus and his conch, and called on people of every kind to join him in the blessing.

Other Āzhvārs had moments of this love that fears for God and blesses him. In Viṣṇucittaṉ it never left him. Where others lost their footing in the depth of the Lord's grace, the water was shallow enough for him to stand. What overwhelmed others in the Lord's beauty only made him keener in his service. Others lived by seeing God, by enjoying him, by serving him; he lived by blessing him. For this he is called Periyāzhvār, the great Āzhvār.

Home to the garden

Periyāzhvār blessed the good king Vallabhadēva, received every honour from him, and hurried home, eager to get back to the Lord of Śrīvilliputtūr, whose service he had had to leave for this journey. He laid all the king's gifts before the Lord and asked him to take them as his own, because what a servant earns belongs to his master. Then he went gladly back to weaving garlands.

Service to God may be of the mind, of the voice or of the body. He had chosen the service of the body, growing flowers and offering them, after the pattern of Mālākāra of Mathurā. And as Mālākāra blessed Kṛṣṇa's strong arms after the Lord came out victorious from his fight with the wrestlers Cāṇūra and Muṣṭika, so Periyāzhvār took the deeds of Kṛṣṇa as the subject of his blessing song, the Periyāzhvār Thirumozhi. In it he imagines himself one of the cowherd folk among whom Kṛṣṇa was born, and lives the child's deeds as if they were happening again before his eyes, until he felt the love and joy of them in his own body.

The child in the tulasi

One day, as he was digging in his garden, he found a beautiful baby girl lying in the earth among the tulasi, as King Janaka once found Sītā in the furrow under his plough. It was the month of Āḍi, under the star Pūram. He lifted her up as a child of God, named her Kōtai, and raised her with all a father's tenderness. As she grew, he let her play as she liked, and in his absence she would take the garlands he had made for the Lord, wear them in her hair and look at herself in a mirror, asking whether she was a fit match for him.

One day he caught her at it. He scolded her for her irreverence and set the garlands aside as spoiled, and that day the Lord had no flowers. That night Vaṭapatraśāyī came to him in a dream and asked why no garland had come. Periyāzhvār told him his daughter had worn them. "Spoiled?" said the Lord. "Say rather made holy. They smell sweeter for her having worn them. We want no others." Periyāzhvār woke in wonder. Was she Śrī herself, or Bhū, or Nīḷā, in this guise? From then on he took to the temple only the garlands she had worn first. She is called Āṇḍāḷ, and Sūḍikkoḍutta Nācchiyār, the lady who wore the garland and then gave it.

The Lord's father-in-law

As she grew, her love for the Lord grew with her, until she could not bear to live apart from him. When the time for marriage came, her father was troubled, and asked her which mortal she would marry. The very word made her angry: if it were ever said that she was meant for a man, she would not live. "Forgive me," he said. "Of course you shall marry a god. But which of the hundred and eight?" She asked him to tell her of each, and he described the Lords of the holy shrines, of the Pāṇḍya country, the western hills, the north and the Toṇḍai land, of Śrīvilliputtūr and of Thirumāliruñjōlai, and last of Śrīraṅgam. At Raṅganātha her heart melted, and from then on she sang and dreamed of no one else.

Periyāzhvār did not know how such a marriage could be brought about. Then Raṅganātha came to him in a dream and said that he himself would ask for her. At Śrīraṅgam the Lord's word came through his priest, and the temple servants set out with umbrellas, fans and all the Lord's insignia to fetch her. Periyāzhvār asked leave of his own Lord, Vaṭapatraśāyī, who told him to do as Raṅganātha said. He made ready a jewelled palanquin, screened from all eyes, and took her to Śrīraṅgam with music and trumpets and crowds crying out her names. King Vallabhadēva, his disciple, was there to see it.

She stepped down from the palanquin, walked to where the Lord lay, went up onto his serpent bed close to his side, and was seen no more. She had passed into him. Periyāzhvār, who had cherished his child so dearly, burst into tears. Then a voice came from the shrine and called him in. "You too are raised now to be our father-in-law," it said, "as the Lord of the sea of milk gave us Śrī. Let us honour you." The priests garlanded him and gave him the holy water and every honour, and he was told to go home to Śrīvilliputtūr, serve the Lord there as he always had, and wait for his own time.

The end

So Periyāzhvār went home to his garden and his garlands. He lived on there, singing the deeds of Kṛṣṇa, drawing his heart nearer and nearer to God, until at last love carried his soul out of the body and into the Lord, as a cowherd girl of Kṛṣṇa's village once left her body for longing of him. Periyāzhvār died of love.

His blessing song, sung from an elephant's back with its bells for cymbals, begins as he began it in the streets of Madurai: pallāṇḍu pallāṇḍu, many years, many years.