Mūka Pañcaśatī

At Kāñcī, in a family of astrologers, a boy was born to Vidyāvatī who could neither hear nor speak. They called him Mūka, the mute one. The learning of his house could not pass to him, and he grew up in silence close to the shrine of Kāmākṣī, the Goddess who is the heart of that city.

The tradition of the Kāñci Kāmakoṭi Pīṭha holds that Kāmākṣī's grace gave him speech, and a much loved telling says how it came. As the boy sat in the temple corridor, the Goddess came near in the form of a young woman chewing betel and offered it to the devotee beside him, who would not take it. She turned and gave it to the boy. He received it with folded hands, and speech broke from him as poetry: five hundred verses on Kāmākṣī, poured out in five hundreds. The poem remembers its own beginning when it praises her glances as

मूकात्मनामपि महाकवितावदान्यान् bountiful with great poetry even to the mute.

The ācārya of the Pīṭha in those days, Mārtāṇḍa Vidyāghana, a silent ascetic, saw what grace had done. He asked the boy's parents for him, gave him sannyāsa and set him in his own seat. The mute child became Mūka Śaṅkarendra Sarasvatī, the twentieth ācārya in the line from Śaṅkara, honoured by kings, and he held that seat until he passed on a full moon of Śrāvaṇa.

The five hundreds move as a devotee moves toward the Mother. The Āryā hundred holds her in the mind, in a soft and swaying metre. The Pādāravinda hundred bows at her lotus feet. The Stuti hundred turns to open praise in many metres. The Kaṭākṣa hundred receives her glance, and the Mandasmita hundred rests in her gentle smile, and the last verse brings one who has walked this way up to the terrace of liberation. Through all of it she is the beauty of Kāñcī and, in the same breath, the one Self that the Upaniṣads teach.

The ācāryas of Kāñcī have kept this poem close ever since. In the last century the Paramācārya called it the Goddess's own words spoken through Mūka, and gave it to devotees for every need of this life and for the knowledge that ends all need.