The traditional account of how Arunagirinathar began to sing.
A SAINT'S TRADITIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Arunagirinathar is remembered at Tiruvannamalai, and the story told about him begins in despair. In the traditional account he spent his youth and health on pleasure, lost the support of everyone who had cared for him, and at last climbed a gopuram of the temple at Tiruvannamalai intending to end his life.
He threw himself from the tower. And in the telling he was caught, by Murugan, who set him on the ground, touched his tongue with the vel, and gave him the first words of a song: muthai tharu.
Those are the opening words of the Thiruppugazh as tradition knows it, and the song beginning with them is in this app's library. From there, the account says, he travelled to shrine after shrine and sang at each of them, and more than a thousand of those songs survive.
Whatever one makes of the account, the poems are real and they are remarkable. Their rhythms are intricate enough that musicians still study them for the rhythm alone, and their voice is intensely personal, a man speaking to the god who saved him, again and again, about his failings.
The story matters because the poems are so often about exactly this: not about deserving grace, but about receiving it from the bottom of a fall.
A REFLECTION IN OUR OWN WORDS
Grace met him not at the top of the tower, but at the bottom.
WHERE THIS STORY COMES FROM
A saint's traditional biography
This is the traditional biography of Arunagirinathar, told for centuries. His poems, the Thiruppugazh, Kandar Alankaram and Kandar Anubhuti, are historical works that can be read in their own right; the account of his transformation belongs to devotional biography.
Stories told about historical or semi-historical poets and saints. The person is real or remembered as real; the miraculous episodes belong to devotional biography and are kept distinct from what the person's own writing establishes.
Connected in this app
More from A saint's traditional biography
An original retelling in our own words. Devotional traditions keep different versions of many episodes.