Stories of Murugan

The fruit of true wisdom

A race around the world, and why Murugan went to Palani.

TEMPLE TRADITION

In the most common telling, the sage Narada brings a single fruit to Kailash, a fruit of wisdom, which cannot be divided. Shiva and Parvati have two sons. The fruit will go to whichever of them first goes around the world.

Murugan sets off at once on his peacock. Ganesha, who is slow and heavy and rides a mouse, does something else. He walks around his parents and says that they are the world. The fruit is his.

When Murugan returns, the race is already over. He is not consoled. He puts aside his ornaments and his fine clothes, takes up nothing but a staff, and leaves for the south, to the hill that is now Palani. There he stands as Dhandayuthapani, the one who holds the staff: a renunciate, with almost nothing.

His parents follow him. In the Palani tradition Shiva tells him, 'Pazham nee', you are yourself the fruit, and that phrase is read as the source of the hill's name, Pazhani.

The story is often told as a lesson for Murugan, and sometimes as a lesson about quick thinking. At Palani it is something else. The temple dresses its deity six times a day, from the ascetic at dawn to the king at dusk, and the whole cycle is a meditation on this one choice: to give up what you believed was owed to you, and to be found, anyway, to be the fruit.

A REFLECTION IN OUR OWN WORDS

Some journeys take us across the world. Others bring us closer to what we already hold dear.

WHERE THIS STORY COMES FROM

Temple tradition

This is Palani's own story and among the most widely told of all Murugan episodes. It is not found in the early Tamil poems, and it is told in several versions, who brings the fruit and exactly what is said vary from telling to telling.

A sthala puranam is a temple's own account of why it stands where it does. These accounts are handed down at the temple and retold in many versions; they are devotional tradition rather than a single fixed text.

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