One face spreads its many rays, so that the dark, wide world is lit without a flaw.
·
One face, as those who love him praise him, gladly and lovingly grants their boons.
·
One face watches over the sacrifices of the priests who keep faithfully to the rules of mantra.
·
One face searches out the meanings still hidden and, like the moon, makes the directions bright.
·
One face, its heart set against the enemy, crushes those who oppose him and takes the field.
·
One face smiles with Valli, the young daughter of the hill people.
Shanmukha, the six-faced one, is the form most people picture. Of all the ways the faces have been explained, the oldest is the plainest: the Thirumurugatruppadai simply says what each one is doing.
Read the list slowly and something striking appears. The faces are not six versions of one thing. One gives light, one gives gifts, one guards ritual, one teaches, one fights, and the last does nothing but smile with the one he loves. The poem puts tenderness on the same footing as war and wisdom.
Later tradition built a great deal on these six. The faces have been matched to the six abodes, to the six directions including up and down, and in philosophical writing to the divine powers of creation, preservation, dissolution, concealment, grace and transcendence. These readings are meaningful and widely taught; they are readings, and the poem underneath them is more concrete.
With the six faces come twelve arms, which the same poem goes on to describe, each hand at its own work. The image is not of a god with too many features but of attention turned in every direction at once.
WHAT THIS RESTS ON
Early Tamil poetry
The work of each face is stated in the Thirumurugatruppadai, in the passage shown here. Later readings of the six faces, as the six abodes, the six directions, or six divine powers, are devotional interpretation built on it.
Stated in the Sangam-era poems, above all the Thirumurugatruppadai. The oldest layer of what is written about Murugan in Tamil.