Poigai Āzhvār

Poigai Āzhvār: the lamp of earth, sea and sun

In the temple tank at Thiruvekkā in Kāñcīpuram, on the water beside the shrine of the Lord who lies there on his serpent, a golden lotus opened, and in it lay a child. He had no father and no mother. He came from the water as a flower comes, and the Tamil word for such a pool, poigai, became his name. Long afterwards, on a night of storm at Thirukkōvalūr, shut in the dark with two strangers and something more, he lit the first lamp of the Tamil songs of Viṣṇu, and he made it out of the whole world.

Born of a lotus

He came into the world in the age before our own, the Dvāpara, in the month of Aippasi, under the star Thiruvōṇam, on a Tuesday. He was an embodiment of Pāñcajanya, the conch that the Lord carries in his hand, so that the voice which sounds from that conch in battle came down to earth to sound in song. In Sanskrit he is called Saro-yōgi and Kāsāra-yōgi, the yogi of the pool, after the place of his birth.

On the next day, at Thirukkadalmallai on the shore to the south, a second child was born in the same way, out of a mādhavi blossom: Bhūthathāzhvār. On the day after that, at Mayilai, a third appeared in a red lotus in the well of the temple of Ādikēśava Perumāḷ: Pēy Āzhvār. Three births on three consecutive days, in three towns, and in none of them a womb. The three are spoken of together ever after as the first Āzhvārs, and their stories cannot be pulled apart.

Three who roamed

The bodies they were given were made of the clearest stuff of nature, with nothing in them of restlessness or dullness, so that the soul within shone through as through clear glass. They knew God, they loved him, and they had no taste for anything else. Such men needed neither food nor water. What they ate was God; what their eyes and ears and hands took in was God.

Worldly people found them strange and kept away, and they in turn kept away from the world. What was day to others was night to them, and what others slept through they were awake to. So each wandered alone from place to place, staying a day, a night, an hour, as long as the people of a place could bear such company and draw some good from it. Poigai Āzhvār walked the roads in this way, by himself, for a long time. He did not know the other two, and they did not know him.

The Lord, who had long been following each of them separately, wished to bring them together. He turned the steps of all three towards one holy place: Thirukkōvalūr, where he stands as Trivikrama, the one who measured the worlds in his strides.

A night of storm at Thirukkōvalūr

Poigai Āzhvār came first. It was night when he reached an open stretch of ground near the town, and a storm broke over him: wind, and rain beating down out of a black sky. Close by he found a narrow recess in the wall of a dwelling, closed by a small door, and he went in and shut it. There was room inside for one man to lie down, and no more.

Soon a voice called from outside: "Is anyone in there? Open, please."

"There is room here for one only," Poigai Āzhvār answered.

"Where one can lie down," said the voice, "two can sit. Open, please."

No ordinary man talks like that, thought Poigai Āzhvār, and he opened the little door at once and let the stranger in. It was Bhūthathāzhvār. The two of them sat side by side in the dark while the rain poured down.

Before they had settled, a third knocked. "There is no room for a third," they told him. "We have just enough to sit."

"Where two can sit," came the answer, "three can stand."

"This is no ordinary person either," they said to one another. "Let him in." It was Pēy Āzhvār. So the three stood shoulder to shoulder in a space meant for one, and talked of God and of his ways, and were glad of one another.

Someone asked, "Who are you?" Poigai Āzhvār said, "I am other than the body, and I am for God. I am his alone." Bhūthathāzhvār said, "I belong to Vāsudeva and to no one else." Pēy Āzhvār said, "I am the servant of the king of Kōsala."

The Lord rejoiced. "At last I have them, my three, together," he said to Śrī, who is mercy itself. "How long I have followed each of them. Now let me be with them all at once."

Then, in that crush where there was not an inch to spare, each of the three felt someone pressing in among them. Nobody had opened the door. The pressure grew, closer and closer, until it was hard to stand.

The first lamp

"What shall we do?" said Poigai Āzhvār at last. "Let me light a lamp and see who this can be."

But there was no lamp in that place, and no oil, and no flame. So he made one out of the world itself. The earth would be the bowl of the lamp, the ocean all around it the oil, and the blazing sun the flame:

vaiyam thagaḷiyā vārkadalē neyyāga

veyya kadhirōṉ viḷakkāga, seyya

sudar āzhiyāṉ adikkē sūṭṭiṉēṉ solmālai

iḍar āzhi nīṅgugavē eṉṟu

"With the earth for the lamp's bowl, the wide sea for its oil and the hot sun for its flame, I have set a garland of words at the feet of the Lord who holds the bright discus, so that the sea of sorrow may be crossed."

Bhūthathāzhvār answered at once with a second lamp, made of love and longing and a melting heart. Pēy Āzhvār, who said he was too drunk with love to light anything himself, looked into the light the other two had made, and cried out that he saw: Śrī, and the golden form, the colour of the sun, the fierce discus and the curling conch, in the Lord the colour of the sea, that day.

In the light of the lamps the one who had been pressing among them stood revealed. It was Nārāyaṇa with Śrī, who cannot bear to be without those who love him, as light cannot be without the sun or fragrance without the flower. That was the stranger in the dark. The splendour of it dazzled the three, and it flooded them, and they burst into song.

The hundred verses

Out of that night came three works, each of a hundred verses, the three Thiruvandhādhis. In an andhādhi each verse begins with the word on which the last one ended, and the last verse ends where the first began, so that the chain has no break anywhere in it. Poigai Āzhvār's is the first. He began it, as he began that night, with the Lord shown in the world he has made: earth and sea and sun, the visible creation, as the lamp by which God is seen. Bhūthathāzhvār began his second hundred with the name Nārāyaṇa, and Pēy Āzhvār began his third by adding Śrī to Nārāyaṇa.

All three hundreds are full of knowledge of God, love of God and sight of God, but in each a different one of the three stands out. Poigai Āzhvār's is the song of knowledge, the mind that recognises its maker. These three steps are what the Lord himself spoke of in the Gītā when he told Arjuna that by undivided love alone he can be known, and seen, and entered. They are fully known only in the highest heaven, and by grace the three saints knew them while still walking the earth.

The yogi in the cave

After that night the three went on wandering, now together. Once, as they travelled, they saw from far off a strange radiance shining from one spot. "What can that be?" they said. "Let us find out." Following the light, they came to a cave, and in it a yogi sat, lost to everything around him. Turning inward, they knew who he was: Bhārgava's son, the sage whom the world would come to know as Thirumazhisai Āzhvār.

"Holy one, are you well?" they asked him.

"Holy three," a voice answered, "born of the lotus in the tank, born of the mādhavi, born of the flower in the well, are you well?"

They greeted one another, and tears of joy came, and they embraced and spoke of God until all four were lost in him. They were joined as milk is joined with milk, or honey with honey. Then the three went on to Mayilai, where Pēy Āzhvār had been born, and stayed a long while beside the holy well, and came back to see the sage again, and went out once more on the roads.

The tank at Thiruvekkā

Kāñcī did not forget its son. When that same sage, Thirumazhisai Āzhvār, came to Kāñcī to stay, he chose to live at Thiruvekkā beside the very tank in which his friend had been born, near the shrine of the Lord who lies on his serpent there. It was at that tank that his disciple Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ came to serve him, and from that shrine, when a Pallava king banished the disciple, the Lord rolled up his serpent bed and followed his devotee out of the city, and came back when he was asked. Ever since, the Lord of Thiruvekkā has been called Sonnavaṇṇam Seydha Perumāḷ, the Lord who did as he was told.

So the tank where Poigai Āzhvār came up out of the water lies beside the Lord who does what his devotees ask of him. And the lamp he lit on the night of the storm stands at the head of all the songs that followed: the earth for its bowl, the sea for its oil, the sun for its flame.