Thirumaṅgai Āzhvār

Thirumaṅgai Āzhvār: the robber who held up the Lord

At Thirukkuṟaiyalūr in the Chōzha country a boy of a hardy warrior people grew up to command the king's armies, rule a province, and love pleasure as boldly as he fought. For love of a woman he vowed to feed a thousand and eight of the Lord's devotees every day for a year, and when his money ran out he took to the highway to keep his word. One night he robbed a wedding party under a tree, and the bridegroom was the Lord. He is Thirumaṅgai Āzhvār, the last of the twelve.

Nīlaṉ the commander

He was born in the month of Kārthigai, under the star Kārthigai. He was an embodiment of Śārṅga, the Lord's bow, and was born in the fourth caste so that knowledge of God might reach people of every station. His father commanded the armies of the Chōzha king and named him Nīlaṉ, the dark one, after the colour of Kṛṣṇa.

He learned every weapon and all the arts of war, and when he came of age he took over his father's command. He rode with the king on his campaigns and made his name, and besides his command he was given the rule of Āzhi Nāḍu, the country around Thiruvāli. Young, rich and strong, he gave himself to music and dance, drama and poetry, and said of himself afterwards that he had been a target for the arrows of the god of love.

Kumudavalli

At Thiruveḷḷakkuḷam near Thiruvāli there is a pond thick with lotuses. A band of heavenly nymphs once came down to bathe there, and one of them was so busy picking lotus flowers that the others left without her. Alone, in human shape, she did not know what to do. A Vaiṣṇava physician of Thirunāṅgūr came to bathe, asked who she was, and at her plea took her home. He and his wife had no children; they named her Kumudavalli, after the water flower that had kept her behind, and brought her up as more than a daughter, until she was grown and they began to worry where to find a husband worthy of her.

Nīlaṉ's spies told him of her beauty, and he left his duties in disorder and rode to Thirunāṅgūr. Talking with her guardian, he saw her pass, and she flashed on him like lightning. When the physician told him how she had come to them, and that he did not know where to find her a husband, Nīlaṉ offered himself at once, with all the money and jewels they could want. The old couple put it to the girl. She refused outright: she would marry no one but a true Vaiṣṇava who had received the five sacraments.

Nīlaṉ rode straight to Thirunaṟaiyūr and prayed to Nambi, the Lord there, for the sacraments his beloved required. Nambi showed himself as he truly is and gave them to him himself, setting the discus and the conch on his two arms and the twelve marks of the Lord on his body. Nīlaṉ felt himself changed in a way he had no time to think about, and hurried back to show her.

"So far, so good," said Kumudavalli. "Now promise me this: for a whole year, every day, you will feed a thousand and eight holy Vaiṣṇavas. You will go hungry until they have eaten, and then eat what they leave, after sipping the water that has washed their feet." "Agreed," said Nīlaṉ, who would have given his life if she had asked. They were married, and he was now Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ, the lord of Thirumaṅgai. He kept his word, and every day a thousand and eight of the Lord's people sat down at his table.

The king's tribute

The feast drained his treasury, and he could not pay the tribute he owed the Chōzha king. When the king's officers came, he put them off from evening to morning and from morning to afternoon, and when they pressed him he threw them out. The king sent his commander with horse and men, and Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ beat them back. The king came himself with his whole army, and Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ and his men churned his ranks like the mountain churning the sea. The king, admiring his old soldier's courage, called a truce and swore on his gods that no harm would come to him. Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ sheathed his sword and came, and the king had him seized and handed to his ministers to collect the debt.

They shut him up under guard in a temple, and for three days he neither ate nor slept, thinking only of his feast. Then Varadarāja, the Lord of Kāñcī, came to him in a vision. "Take heart," he said. "Promise to pay in my land." So he told the ministers he had treasure hidden at Kāñcī, and was taken there under escort. He showed them a spot at random; they dug and found nothing. In his anguish he dozed, and the Lord came to him again and showed him a place by the river Vēgavati. They dug there and found a great treasure. He paid the king and kept the rest for his feast. When the king heard how the money had been found, he knew this was no ordinary man. He called Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ to court, begged his pardon, gave back what had been taken, and sent him home with honours, and all of it went to feed the holy men.

The highway

In time the Lord's treasure too was spent, and he would rather die than break his promise to Kumudavalli. So he turned robber. He took four masters of the craft into his service, one who could walk on water, one who could hide in a shadow, one whose breath could open any lock, and one who could never be beaten in an argument, and every coin they took on the roads went to the feast.

The Lord had been watching this soul grow: love, courage, an iron will, endurance and strong faith. But the means were against the law, and the Lord resolved to set it right himself, by being robbed.

The wedding party

Thirumaṅgai Maṉṉaṉ lay in wait near Thirumaṇaṅgollai, hidden in an aśvattha tree with his men. The Lord of Thiruvayalāli took the form of a young Brahmin bridegroom, made himself a bride, and came down the road in a grand wedding procession, the couple covered in jewels and the retinue laden with treasure. At the signal the robbers fell on them, and no one resisted. They stripped the couple and the whole party. The bridegroom's ring would not come off his finger, so the robber bent and pulled it off with his teeth. "Are you not our Kaliyaṉ?" cried the bridegroom in admiration. Kaliyaṉ, the mighty one.

Kaliyaṉ bundled up the spoil, but the bundles would not leave the ground. "You are a wizard," he shouted. "You have put a spell on them." "I will teach you the spell," said the bridegroom. "Bow your head and lend me your ear." "Bow my head to you?" Kaliyaṉ drew his sword. "Out with it, Brahmin, or I'll use this." "Here it is, my good fellow," said the Lord, and spoke the holy mantra of eight syllables. Kaliyaṉ said it after him, and the bundles rose easily.

"Stay," said the Lord. "There is more." All four Vedas, he told him, are held in that mantra as in a nutshell; it is the essence of the Upaniṣads, the raft across the sea of birth and death, the secret of secrets. "Long ago I found no one worthy of it, and had to split myself in two as Nara and Nārāyaṇa at Badari to teach it to my own other half. I grieved that I had no second soul to give it to. You have taken that grief away, for you have wrung it out of me by force."

As Kaliyaṉ listened, his savagery left him, and penitence and love for his teacher took its place. Then the bridegroom and bride changed before his eyes, and he saw the Lord with Lakṣmī, the mother of mercy, riding on golden-winged Garuḍa in his yellow robe, like a dark cloud lit with lightning on the peak of a golden hill. At that sight he was wholly converted.

"I found the name Nārāyaṇa"

Songs poured out of him, the six works that stand beside Nammāzhvār's four as the six limbs of the Veda: the Periya Thirumozhi, the Thirukkuṟuntāṇḍagam, the Thirunedundāṇḍagam, the Thiruvēzhukūṟṟirukkai, the Siṟiya Thirumadal and the Periya Thirumadal. Grace had rained on him, and he was called Aruḷmāri, the rain cloud of grace. His first song begins:

vāḍiṉēṉ vāḍi varundhiṉēṉ maṉaththāl

perunthuyar iḍumbaiyil piṟandhu

kūḍiṉēṉ kūḍi iḷaiyavar thammōḍu

avar tharum kalaviyē karudhi

ōḍiṉēṉ ōḍi uyvadhōr poruḷāl

uṇarvu eṉum perum padham therindhu

nāḍiṉēṉ nāḍi nāṉ kaṇḍukoṇḍēṉ

nārāyaṇā eṉṉum nāmam

"I withered, and withering I suffered in my mind, born into deep sorrow. I ran with young women, thinking only of the pleasure they gave. I ran and ran, and then, by the one thing that saves, I woke to the great state of knowing, and I searched, and searching I found the name Nārāyaṇa."

Through the ten verses of that song he told what the name gives: good birth and plenty, an end to the sufferings of the Lord's servants, heaven and the service there, strength, more love than a mother's, and bliss.

From shrine to shrine

Then he set out for the holy shrines, singing at each. In the north he sang of Thiruppiridi, Badari, Sāḷagrāmam, Naimiśāraṇya, Singavēzhkuṉṟam and Thiruvēṅkaḍam. In the south he worshipped at Thiruvevvuḷ and came to Thiruniṉṟavūr, but the Lord there paid him no attention. He went on to Thiruvallikkēṇi, Thiruneermalai and Thirukkaḍalmallai, singing everywhere and leaving Thiruniṉṟavūr without a song. The goddess of Thiruniṉṟavūr was indignant with her Lord. "Unless this poet sings of you too, you are not glorified," she said. So the Lord followed him to Thirukkaḍalmallai and showed himself there, and the Āzhvār sang of both shrines together.

By the time he reached the Chōzha country his fame had gone before him. They called him Nālu Kavi Perumāḷ, master of the four kinds of poetry, and a great following went with him through the towns crying out his names: here comes our Kaliyaṉ, our lord of Āzhi Nāḍu, our Aruḷmāri, our Parakālaṉ, foe of false teachings.

At Sīrkāzhi, where the Śaiva poet Sambandhar was then living, Sambandhar's disciples came out and forbade them to sing their master's praises in their own poet's town. Parakālaṉ offered to debate with Sambandhar. Walking through Sīrkāzhi, he found not one Vaiṣṇava house and no image of Viṣṇu, and felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. Then a Vaiṣṇava woman passed, and he borrowed her little image of Kṛṣṇa, and his tongue was loosed. Sambandhar composed a verse, and Parakālaṉ found fault with it; then Parakālaṉ sang ten verses on Rāma of Sīrkāzhi. Sambandhar was delighted, owned himself beaten, declared him worthy of the name Nālu Kavi Perumāḷ, and gave him his own lance in homage. In every temple where Parakālaṉ is enshrined, he carries that lance.

He went on through Thiruvāli and Thirunāṅgūr to Thiruvindaḷūr, where the Lord showed himself and vanished at once. The Āzhvār sang reproaching the Lord of Indaḷūr for being so sparing of himself, and the Lord's heart melted; he came back in all his glory and let him look as long as he liked. At last he came to Śrīraṅgam and sang song after song to Raṅganātha, who appeared to him and said: "Beloved son, wander no more. Stay with us, and spend your days strengthening our temple with walls and towers and halls."

The golden Buddha

To find the means, his sister Āṇḍāḷ's husband Yatirāsaṉ told him of a priceless golden image of the Buddha at Nāgappaṭṭinam. A woman there told them in secret where it was kept, and that its chamber was guarded by contrivances only its builder knew, and he lived on an island out at sea. They sailed to the island and sat down outside the builder's house like travellers swapping news. When he sat down to his betel after his meal, they began loudly lamenting that raiders had sacked the temple at Nāgappaṭṭinam and carried off the golden Buddha. The builder rushed out weeping. "Who could have shown them the whirling wheel at the gate," he wailed, "or the chain that hangs from the top of the tower, fastened to a pin under the paving stone where the water drops?" So they learned every secret, and took their leave.

They begged a free passage back on a ship carrying areca nuts. On the way Parakālaṉ cut a nut in half, dropped one half, and asked the merchant to give him his half when they landed, and to write it down; the merchant wrote, half the nut is yours. At Nāgappaṭṭinam Parakālaṉ claimed half the cargo, and the merchants' council held that the writing was plain. The merchant paid him half its value, telling himself it was a debt from some former life.

At midnight they lifted the stone, freed the chain, climbed the tower and opened its top. The image shone below like the sun. They jammed the wheel with plantain trunks and let Yatirāsaṉ down. The image ran from him round the chamber until, at Parakālaṉ's word, he spat on it and broke the spell. He handed it up, but when they tried to draw him out he would not fit through the hole. "How can I leave you?" cried Parakālaṉ. "And yet I must live, to do Raṅga's work. What good is this image if I must cut off your head and make my sister a widow?"

"Is not the Lord's service first?" said Yatirāsaṉ. "This life is as short as lightning. My time has come to go and serve him in heaven. It is dawn; if we are caught, all is lost. Cut off my head and make me Raṅga's offering. I will wait for you there." "If anyone deserves heaven, it is you," cried Parakālaṉ, and calling on Raṅga's name, he cut off his head with one stroke. They carried the head out of the town on a bier, with fire pot and mourning, like a funeral, laid it in a thicket far away, and went on.

Raṅganāyakī, the mother of mercy, pleaded with her Lord. "You raised Sugrīva's whole army to life, and brought back your teacher's son from the sea. Yatirāsaṉ gave his life only for your service. I cannot let him be dead and my daughter Āṇḍāḷ widowed." The Lord sent Garuḍa, who joined body and head, breathed life into them, and carried Yatirāsaṉ to Parakālaṉ, though Yatirāsaṉ wept to be sent back from heaven. Parakālaṉ and his men embraced him and danced for joy. "So you wanted heaven all to yourself?" said Parakālaṉ. "What is heaven's joy beside serving the Lord here, where his servants are few? In heaven they are numberless. The need is here."

The road home

At Thirukkaṇṇaṅguḍi the village watchman followed them. "Holy sir," he said, "we have no good water here." Parakālaṉ threw a stone. "There is your water." The man ran and found a pool of sweet water before the temple, and the people drink from it to this day.

At daybreak they buried the image in a muddy field. When the owner came to plant it, they claimed the field and told him to bring his deeds next day; while he fetched them, they dug up the image and went on to Uttamar Kōyil. A search party from Nāgappaṭṭinam tracked them there and demanded the image. Parakālaṉ coolly promised to give it back, "no less than our little finger," next year in Paṅguni on the day of Rōhiṇi, and gave them a note to say so.

At Śrīraṅgam the gold was melted, and with it and the money from the areca nuts he began the towers and ramparts of the temple. Where one rampart's line ran across the garden in which Thoṇḍaraḍippoḍi Āzhvār grew flowers for the Lord, Parakālaṉ reverently moved the wall, and the old gardener blessed him for it. When the men of Nāgappaṭṭinam came with their note on the appointed day, he cut off his own little finger and threw it to them: the image, no less than the little finger. They saw there was no dealing with such a man, and went home.

When the work was nearly done the money ran out, and the workmen demanded their wages. He promised them treasure on an island and put them in a boat; in midstream of the northern branch of the Kāvēri he and the boatman moved to a raft and overturned the boat. The workmen's sons surrounded him and would not let him move until their fathers were brought back. He lay down among them and cried silently to Raṅga that he had done none of this for himself. Raṅganātha told him in a vision to send the sons to bathe in the Kāvēri, put on the Vaiṣṇava marks, and come to the hall before the shrine and call their fathers by name. They did, and from behind the image of Raṅganātha their fathers' spirits answered: "We are safe. We have reached the other shore by that saint's grace, and rest at the feet of the Lord. Obey him, and by his grace you will join us."

The last boons

When his work was nearly done, he sang his Thirunedundāṇḍagam to Raṅganātha and offered himself with it, and the Lord bade him ask a boon. He asked two. The first was that every year, at the festival of recitation, Nammāzhvār's four works, which stand for the four Vedas, should be recited beside the Sanskrit scriptures, with Nammāzhvār himself brought from Thirunagari to hear them. It was granted, and every year he escorted Nammāzhvār to Śrīraṅgam and back. The second was to see the Lord's ten descents. The Lord sent him to his southern house, Thirukkuṟuṅguḍi.

So he went there with Kumudavalli, the wife who had saved him, worshipped the five Nambis under the Mahēndra hills, and lived beside the mountain stream as a recluse with her, absorbed in meditation, until in the stillness of samādhi he passed from the earth into the presence of the Lord.

Then Raṅganātha called Yatirāsaṉ. "Our Kaliyaṉ is your master," he said. "Go to his birthplace, Thirukkuṟaiyalūr, build him a temple, set up his image, and keep his worship daily, monthly and yearly for all time." Yatirāsaṉ did so, and in due time joined his master.