Manikkavasagar

Vadavurar of Tiruvadavur near Madurai was chief minister to the Pandya king. The king sent him to the coast with a great store of gold to buy horses for the cavalry. On the way, at Tirupperunturai, he heard Shiva's names being chanted and found, under a kurunda tree, a guru sitting among his disciples. One look from the guru and Vadavurar's life turned over. He spent the king's gold on the temple there, the one now called Avudaiyarkoil, and stayed.

The king had him seized and tortured in the sun. Then Shiva's leelas began, the ones the Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam tells. Shiva turned the jackals of the forest into horses and rode in himself as a horse-dealer; that night the horses turned back into jackals and howled in the royal stables. The Vaigai rose in flood and every household had to send a man to the embankment. An old woman named Vandhi had no one, and Shiva came as a labourer to work in her place, ate her pittu and slept instead of working. The king struck him with a cane, and the blow fell on every living being in the world, the king included.

The king freed his minister. Vadavurar walked from temple to temple singing, and came at last to Chidambaram. His hymns, the Tiruvasagam, are counted in the eighth Tirumurai. Tradition says Nataraja himself wrote them down as he sang and signed the palm leaves Tiruchitrambalam. The Tamil saying goes: one whose heart does not melt at the Tiruvasagam will not melt at any word.