Thirumazhisai Āzhvār

Thirumazhisai Āzhvār: the seeker who came home to Nārāyaṇa

At Thirumazhisai, near Kāñcī, a sage's wife bore a child that was no child at all, a lump of flesh without face or limbs, and the parents left it under a clump of bamboo in the forest and went their way. The earth took care of it. It grew a body, and opened its eyes, and the first thing it saw was the face of Viṣṇu. That was the beginning of Thirumazhisai Āzhvār, who tried every teaching of his age before he settled on Nārāyaṇa, and for whom the Lord of Thiruvekkā once rolled up his serpent bed and walked out of Kāñcī.

The heaviest place on earth

Thirumazhisai was the old Mahīsāra, a holy place where the sages of ancient times had lived. Once Atri, Bhṛgu, Vasiṣṭha, Bhārgava, Aṅgiras and others went to Brahmā and asked him where on earth they might live and do their holy work undisturbed. Brahmā put Mahīsāra in one pan of a scale and all the rest of the earth in the other, and Mahīsāra weighed more. So he gave it to them, and they settled there.

At the western end of that place the sage Bhārgava lived, worshipping Vāsudeva through a long sacrifice. His wife conceived, and after carrying the child for twelve months she gave birth. What came was a lump without features, without separate limbs, still wrapped in its birth sac. The child was born of the essence of Sudarśana, the Lord's discus, in the month of Thai under the star Magam. But the parents saw only something they did not know how to deal with. Living in the woods as they did, they laid it in the shade of a bamboo clump and left it there.

The child under the bamboo

Mother Earth looked after it. Slowly the lump took shape, grew limbs and a face, began to breathe, and then to cry with the first pangs of hunger. In that lonely place there was no one to hear. But the Lord of Mahīsāra, the friend of the helpless, heard. He came to the child and looked on it with love, blessed it, and willed that it should never again know hunger or thirst. The child's eyes opened for the first time on the Lord's own face. Then, in a moment, the vision was gone, and the child cried bitterly in the silence of the forest at losing him.

A woodcutter named Thiruvāḷaṉ, who had come into the forest with his fellows to fell timber, heard the crying. They searched, following the sound, and found the child. Full of wonder and joy, Thiruvāḷaṉ lifted it gently and carried it home to his wife, Paṅkayachchelvi, who had no children of her own. She took it into her arms, and such a mother's love rose in her that her breasts filled with milk. But the child would not drink. It did not need milk. It wanted nothing, so it no longer cried, and still it grew, in some way no one could understand.

News of such a child travels. In the town of Mahīsāra lived an old couple of the Śūdra caste, childless, and the old man was wise enough, where no one else was, to want to see the wonder for himself. Early one morning he and his wife set out for the forest with milk. When they saw the child they were struck with awe, and with joined hands they begged it to take the milk they had brought, and the child drank. Day after day they came with milk, and it would take no other food.

The child understood what was in their hearts. One day it drank part of the milk and left the rest, and told them to drink what remained. "You will have a good son," it said. They drank, and old as they were, they felt young again. In time the wife bore a son, and they named him Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ. He grew up to be a poet who would never stoop to sing the praise of any man.

Every road but one

The grace that had first touched the child under the bamboo grew stronger in him year by year. When he was seven, being the son of a sage, he felt drawn to yoga, and he decided he would first look into every system of thought there was and choose the best.

He studied them all, the Buddhists and the Jains, Kapila and Patañjali, the Śaivas, the logicians and the schools of ritual. Some did not take scripture as their authority, those that did quarrelled among themselves, and none showed him plainly how God may truly be known. He found them all dry ground. Seven hundred years went by in this search.

At last he turned to the Vedas and the Upaniṣads, and found that the one supreme being they speak of is the only truth, the one light on the summit, the father from whom Brahmā and Śiva were born, and that he alone deserves our love and worship. He set aside the hard roads of reasoning and yoga for the glad road of love.

As his love grew, it carried him nearer to God, and visions followed, until by grace the whole nature of God was opened to him: his being and qualities, his form, his ornaments and weapons, Śrī, his heavenly hosts and world, and the world of matter, souls and time. He saw the Lord as the father of Brahmā and the grandfather of Rudra, just as he had read it in scripture, and he held to the verdict of Vyāsa: that Nārāyaṇa alone is to be worshipped. With that truth found, he sat down by the Gajēndra tank at Thiruvallikkēṇi and meditated for another seven hundred years.

Rudra's boon

While he sat there, Rudra and his consort came riding through the sky on the bull Nandi, Rudra with his trident, to test the sage's faith. They found him mending an old rag with a needle and thread, his mind fixed all the while on Nārāyaṇa. When he saw Rudra passing over, he moved aside so that Rudra's shadow would not fall on him. Pārvatī asked who this could be, so particular. "A great man," Rudra said. "He will not even look at us." "Then I want all the more to see him," she said, and the two came down to him.

He paid them no attention at all. "Why do you take no notice of us?" Rudra asked. "What have I to gain from you?" said the sage. "I have come to give you a boon." "I want nothing." "Do not let our visit be wasted. Ask for something."

The sage smiled. "Can you give liberation? If you can, give me that."

"Only Nārāyaṇa can give that. Ask anything else."

"Then can you put off by one day the death of a man who is fated to die today?"

"That goes by a man's karma," Rudra said.

"I see," said the sage, and then, mocking: "But since you are set on doing me a favour, here is one. Make this thread follow the needle."

Rudra was stung. "I will burn you to ashes, as I burned the god of love," he thundered, and opened the eye in his forehead. Smoke and fire poured out in columns as if the whole world would burn. The sage opened an eye in the great toe of his right foot, and from it came a fire like the fire at the end of the worlds, beside which Rudra's blaze was a firefly. To put it out, Rudra called the great storm clouds of the deluge, and they came and poured down torrents until the land was sea. The sage sat through it unmoved, like a mountain under rain.

Rudra was full of wonder. He praised the sage and gave him the name Bhaktisāra, the essence of devotion. Then he turned to his consort. "See where your curiosity has brought us," he said. "We meddled with an innocent hermit and were put to shame. Learn from it that those who belong to the Lord cannot be harmed." And he went on his way.

The tiger, the robe and the pill

Some time later a spirit of the sky named Śuktihāra was passing overhead on a tiger when the tiger stopped dead in the air and would go no further. Looking down, Śuktihāra saw the sage absorbed in his yoga, and understood that it was the sage's power that would not let anyone pass over him. He came down and said, "Holy son of Bhṛgu, throw away that rag. Here is a robe woven in heaven." The sage refused it, and made a robe of his own, shining like the sun and set with jewels, and showed it to him. The spirit hung his head. He tried once more and offered the sage his necklace of rudrākṣa beads. The sage held up his own necklace of lotus seeds and tulasi beads, and it was a garland of the nine precious gems. Śuktihāra fell at his feet, begged pardon for his pride, and went away.

Then a magician named Koṅkaṇa Siddha, who had heard of the sage's fame, came to try him. He offered a pill of his alchemy that could turn a scrap of copper into gold. "We have no need of your pills," the sage said. "Take this. It will give you a crore of crores." He rubbed a little of the dried sweat from his golden body, mixed it with a speck of wax from his ear, rolled it into a pill and gave it to him. The magician tried it, and it worked wonders. He came back, bowed down before the sage, received his blessing and went home.

To be free of such visitors, the sage moved to a cave, hid himself there, and turned his mind wholly on the Lord.

The three Āzhvārs at the cave

It was there that Poigai Āzhvār, Bhūthathāzhvār and Pēy Āzhvār, the first three Āzhvārs, who were always wandering, found him. They were still a long way off when they saw a wonderful light shining from that place, and they followed it to the cave. Within they found a man lost to everything around him, and looking into their own hearts they knew who he must be.

"Holy one," they said, "are you well?"

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

They met and greeted each other, and tears of joy came, and their bodies trembled. They embraced and spoke of God and his endless glories, and all four together drank so deeply of God that they were lost in him. They were joined as milk with milk and honey with honey, with one pursuit and one aim. After a time the three went on to Mayilai, Pēy Āzhvār's birthplace, came back to him again for another taste of God in his company, and then went out once more on the roads.

The white clay of the Lord's feet

Bhaktisāra left his cave to visit his birthplace, Mahīsāra, and there he found that he had run out of the white clay with which a Vaiṣṇava marks his body after bathing, the sign of the Lord's feet. He dug, but found no vein of it. For a Vaiṣṇava to go a day without those marks is a grave thing; without them he may not pray or worship or eat. He lay down in grief. In a dream the Lord of Thiruvēṅkaḍam came and led him to a place where the clay lay. He woke, found the spot and the clay, and marked himself with joy.

Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ and the Lord of Thiruvekkā

Then he went to Kāñcī, where his friend Poigai Āzhvār had been born, and settled beside that very tank at Thiruvekkā, near the shrine where the Lord lies on his serpent. Another seven hundred years went by there.

Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ, the son of the old couple who had brought him milk in the forest, had grown up. He heard where the sage was, left his village, came to Kāñcī, fell at his feet and stayed to serve him. An old woman of Kāñcī came too, and gave the rest of her days to serving him: she swept the ground, sprinkled it with water and drew patterns on it. One day the sage came out of his meditation, saw her at work, and was pleased. "Ask me for anything," he said. She asked that her old age might leave her and her youth come back. He looked at her with mercy, and she stood there young and as lovely as a goddess.

The Pallava king of that country saw her and was so struck by her beauty that he asked her to be his queen, and she agreed. Years passed, and the king grew old, but she stayed young. "How do you keep your youth?" he asked her. "By the grace of Bhaktisāra," she said. "You could have it too. You know Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ, who comes to the palace every day for alms? He is the sage's disciple. Win him over, and through him the sage may grant you youth."

So the king waited for Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ, and when he came, asked him to bring his master to the palace. "Impossible," said Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ. "My master goes to no man's door, and cares nothing for kings." "Never mind him, then," said the king. "You beg at my door. Sing a verse in my praise." Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ refused. His tongue, he said, would never stoop to praise a mortal; it was made to sing the Lord alone. The king pressed him, and Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ sang instead of the Lord who sits at Pāḍagam, stands at Ūragam and lies at Thiruvekkā, in the groves of Kāñcī. The king flew into a rage. "We commanded you to sing of us, and you sing of this? Leave our kingdom."

Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ went straight to his master, told him everything, and asked his leave to go. "If you go, my son, shall I stay?" said the sage. "And if I do not stay, will our Lord stay behind? And if he goes, how can his hosts remain? Let me go to the shrine and wake him and bring him with us." He went to the Lord of Thiruvekkā and sang:

kaṇikaṇṇaṉ pōgiṉṟāṉ kāmaru pūṅkachchi

maṇivaṇṇā nī kiḍakka vēṇḍā, thuṇivuḍaiya

seṉnāp pulavaṉum pōgiṉṟēṉ nīyum

uṉṟaṉ paiṉṉāgap pāy suruṭṭik koḷ

"Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ is going, sapphire-coloured Lord of lovely, flowering Kāñcī. You need not lie here any longer. I, the bold, sweet-tongued poet, am going too. Roll up your bed of the hooded serpent, and come."

Without a question, the Lord rose and followed him. And as when the sun goes the stars cannot stay, every god and sage and lesser deity in all the shrines of Kāñcī went after him. The land of the proud Pallava turned dark and dead. Neither sun nor moon seemed to rise, and famine came.

The king called his ministers in haste and went after the fugitives. He found them resting at a place called Ōrirukkai, fell at their feet, and begged them to come back. The sage relented. He turned to the Lord and sang the same verse turned round: Kaṇikaṇṇaṉ was going back, he too was going back, and the Lord should spread his serpent bed again. The Lord went back as he was told, and light and good seasons and plenty returned to the humbled king's country. Ever since, the Lord of Thiruvekkā has been called Sonnavaṇṇam Seydha Perumāḷ, Yathōktakāri, the Lord who did as he was told. Bhaktisāra sang of it himself, how God becomes the servant of those who love him.

The grain of black paddy

Some time later he set out to worship the Lord at Thirukkuḍandhai, the Ārāvamudhaṉ, the nectar that never cloys. On the way he stopped to rest on the veranda of a house in the village of Perumpuliyūr. Inside, some Brahmins were reciting the Veda. When they saw a stranger of no caste sitting outside, they broke off, and when they tried to take up the thread again, none of them could remember where they had been. The sage saw their trouble. He took a grain of black paddy, split it with his fingernail, and dropped it on the floor. At once they remembered: the passage they had lost was the one that speaks of the grains of paddy husked with the fingernails for the offering. They were astonished. "He may look like a man of low birth," they said, "but a man like this is not low." They came out, fell at his feet and begged his pardon.

As he went round the village begging his food, the worshippers at the temple saw that the image of the Lord turned its face to follow him wherever he went. Perumpuliyūr Aḍigaḷ, master of the sacrifice then being held there, heard of it, came running out, and led the sage into the sacrificial hall to the seat of highest honour. The priests of the sacrifice were furious. "You have ruined our rite," they told their master, "by bringing this fellow in to defile the place," and they abused the sage in such words that the master's heart ached. "Holy father," he said, "I cannot bear to hear this."

Then the sage, to teach them, sang to the Lord: who can find the Lord hidden in the heart, except the man trained in yoga, the man fixed in loving worship, the man whose only goal is liberation? Let the Lord with the discus silence their pride in their rules, and show his hidden face. And there appeared, shining in the sage's heart, the Lord lying on his serpent on the sea of milk, with Śrī and Bhū serving him, and the same form seemed to rest on the head of every one of them. Their abuse fell silent. They prostrated themselves before him and carried him through the village in a great car to make amends. He taught them the truths of God and went on his way.

The Lord who began to rise

At Thirukkuḍandhai he drank his fill of the sight of the Lord, and out of what he saw there came his two works, the Nāṉmugaṉ Thiruvandhādhi and the Thiruchchanda Viruttam. In offering them he said to the Lord, who lies there on the bank of the Kāvēri: you who sleep at Kuḍandhai, let me see you rise and speak.

As he asked, the Lord began to rise. "No, forgive me," cried the sage, seeing how ready the Lord always is to do what his servants ask. "Lie back on your serpent as you were," and he sang a blessing over him. The Lord is seen there to this day half lying and half risen. The sage made that form the object of his meditation, and stayed there absorbed in it for many years, taking no solid food, living on a little milk.

At last, leaving his two songs behind him, Bhaktisāra passed from the world into the presence of the Lord whose face he had seen first of all, as a newborn child under a clump of bamboo.