Appar (Tirunavukkarasar)

Marulneekiyar was born at Tiruvamur. When his parents died, his elder sister Tilakavathiyar, whose betrothed had fallen in battle, gave up the thought of marriage to raise him. He left home as a young man, became a Jain monk under the name Dharmasena and rose high in their monastery at Pataliputra, today's Tiruppadirippuliyur.

Then a pain seized his stomach that no medicine could touch. He went back to his sister at Tiruvadigai. She gave him holy ash and the Panchakshara and led him to the Veerattaneswara temple, and there he sang his first padigam, Kootrayinavaaru: you have not kept away the pain that came on me like death. The pain left. Shiva named him Tirunavukkarasu, king of speech. Sambandar, much younger, would later call him Appar, father, and the name stayed.

The Periya Puranam tells that the Pallava king Mahendravarman I had him shut in a lime kiln, fed poison, set before a mad elephant and thrown into the sea tied to a stone. He came out of the kiln cool, and the stone floated him to the shore at Tirupathiripuliyur. The king himself turned to Shiva.

Appar walked from shrine to shrine carrying a small hoe, the uzhavarappadai, to clear grass from temple courtyards. His path is dasa marga, the way of the servant. His padigams fill the fourth, fifth and sixth books of the Tirumurai. He merged into Shiva at Tiruppugalur in the month of Chittirai, on the Sadayam nakshatra, which is kept as his day.