Sundarar (Sundaramurti Nayanar)

Nambi Arurar was born to an Adi Shaiva family at Tirunavalur and raised by the local chieftain Narasinga Munaiyaraiyar, who saw the beautiful child and asked to bring him up. On the day of his wedding an old Brahmin walked into the hall holding a palm-leaf deed and declared that the bridegroom's grandfather had bound his line to him as slaves. Arurar laughed and called the old man pittan, madman. The case went to the elders at Tiruvennainallur, the deed was found genuine, and the old man walked into the temple and vanished. It was Shiva. Arurar wept, and Shiva told him to sing, and to begin with the very word he had used: pittan. So the first padigam of the seventh Tirumurai begins Pittha pirai soodi, madman who wears the crescent moon.

Sundarar is the Lord's friend, Tambiran Tozhan. He spoke to Shiva as a comrade, sent him as messenger to his wife Paravai at Tiruvarur, asked him for gold and grain and got them. When he broke a promise made to his second wife Sangili, he lost his sight, and sang until it came back.

At Tiruvarur, ashamed to stand among the devotees, he sang the Tiruthondathogai, which names the Nayanmars one by one; Sekkizhar's Periya Puranam grows from it. His friend was the Chera king Cheraman Perumal. At Tiruvanchikulam in Kerala, the tradition says, a white elephant came down from Kailash for him, and he rode it to Shiva at eighteen, with Cheraman following on a horse.