Manikkavacakar

01Jackals into horses

Born at Tiruvadavur near Madurai, he rose to be chief minister of the Pandya king. Sent to the coast with gold to buy horses, he met Shiva in the form of a guru under a kurundam tree at Tiruperunturai, gave himself up to him, and spent the gold building a temple there, today’s Avudaiyarkoil. Imprisoned and punished by the king, he was saved by the Lord, who turned jackals into horses and led them to Madurai, and later carried earth for the Vaigai embankment as a labourer in exchange for an old woman’s pittu. These leelas are told in the Tiruvilaiyadal Puranam and acted at the Madurai temple festivals.

02Tiruvasagam and Chidambaram

The Tiruvasagam has fifty-one hymns. It opens with the Sivapuranam and holds the Tiruvempavai, twenty verses sung before dawn in Margazhi alongside Andal’s Tiruppavai. He also sang the Tirukkovaiyar, four hundred verses of love poetry turned to Shiva. The Chidambaram tradition tells that the Lord came as a Brahmin, wrote the hymns down as Manikkavacakar sang them, and signed the manuscript “Manikkavacakar said; the Lord of Tiruchitrambalam wrote”. The saint merged into the Nataraja at Chidambaram. He is not among the 63 Nayanars, yet he is honoured with them in every Shiva temple of the Tamil country.

Dynasty · c. 4th century BCE – late 16th century CEPandya dynastyThe Pandyas ruled from Madurai for close to two thousand years, longer than almost any house in the world. Megasthenes and Ashoka knew them; they broke the Kalabhras in the 6th century, lost Madurai to the Cholas in the 10th, and under Jatavarman Sundara Pandya in the 13th century became the strongest power in the south.Read →