MANIKKA VASAHAR

(Sanskrit form MANIKYA VACHAKA)

IN the days when the powerful Pandyan Kings flourished in Madura, there was once a prime minister who early became convinced of the transitoriness of this world's life and its riches. When on a visit to Perundurai, now Avudaiyarkoil in the Tanjore District, he suddenly and completely came under the influence of a Brahman religious teacher, who for him was the manifestation of the very God Himself. Then and there he began to sing the "Sacred Utterance" (Tiruvasaham), and was named by his preceptor "Utterer of Jewels" (Manikka Vasahar). Returning to Madura, he forsook his high office with all its rewards, to become a religious poet wandering without earthly attachments from shrine to shrine. The stories clustering around his religious experience can be read by English readers in Dr. Pope's great edition of his work. We find him practising austerities at Chidambaram, or miraculously giving the gift of speech to the dumb daughter of the Chola king, or defeating in disputation a band of Buddhists from Ceylon, but of certain historical information about him we have practically none. Even the question of the century in which he lived is a battleground of the antiquarians. Tradition places him in the fifth century, earlier than the writers of the Devaram;

but the opinion of scholars seems to be converging on the view that he lived in the latter half of the ninth, or the first half of the tenth century of our era. Another of his works is the Tirukkovaiyar, an erotic poem of four hundred stanzas. Among Tamil Saivite writers none makes a stronger devotional appeal than Manikka Vasahar. There is a common Tamil saying that nothing can melt the heart of the man who is not melted by the Tiruvasaham.

Stanzas 80-92 are samples from an opening poem of one hundred stanzas, each ten of which has its own metre and is fairly complete in itself. They fairly reflect the saint's varying moods. Notice the importance he attaches to emotion; his worst self-reproach is for feeling no frenzy. As to his conception of God, see how the word 'grace' recurs in nearly every stanza. And yet that God of grace is called (in No. 84) both being and non-existence.