Tirugnanasambandar

Sambandar was the son of Sivapada Hrudayar, a Brahmin of Sirkazhi. When he was three his father took him to the temple tank and went under the water to bathe, and the child, left alone on the steps, cried for his parents. Mahadev and Mata Parvati appeared, and at Shiva's word Parvati fed him milk from a golden cup: the milk of divine knowledge. When his father came up and saw milk on the boy's lips and angrily asked who had fed him, the child pointed to the sky and sang his first padigam, Todudaiya seviyan: he of the ear with the woman's earring, who rides the bull.

From that day he was Tirugnanasambandar, one bound to Shiva by sacred knowledge. Shiva gave him golden cymbals at Tirukkolakka to keep time, and a pearl palanquin. He walked from temple to temple with the musician Tirunilakanda Yazhpanar, who played his songs on the yazh.

At Madurai the Pandya king, called Koon Pandiyan for his hunched back, had turned from Shiva, though his queen Mangayarkkarasi and his minister Kulachirai still worshipped in secret. They called the boy. The king fell into a burning fever. Sambandar sang the Tiruneetru padigam on holy ash and rubbed ash on him, and the fever left and the hunch straightened, and the king was called Nindraseer Nedumaran.

At sixteen, on his wedding day at Nallur Perumanam, a light opened in the temple and Sambandar entered it with his bride and the whole wedding party. His padigams fill the first three books of the Tirumurai.