Madhurakavi Alvar: The Saint Who Sang Only About His Teacher

The work: Kanninun Siruthambu, eleven verses.

The title comes from its first words, which refer to the small knotted cord with which Yashoda tied Krishna to the mortar.

The opening. The first verse says, in substance:

The one who was bound by the small knotted cord, and whose mouth carried the scent of butter, that wondrous one, I sing of him with my tongue - because my lord Sathakopan made me his own.

What that does. Look at the structure of the sentence.

It begins with Krishna, as any Alvar verse would. It describes him, affectionately, in the domestic image the tradition loves: tied up by his mother, smelling of stolen butter.

And then it turns. The reason he sings of Krishna at all is not Krishna. It is that Nammalvar claimed him.

That is the move the entire work makes, eleven times over.

What the eleven verses say, in summary:

• That he knows no god but Sathakopan of Kurugur
• That he will sing no name but his
• That Nammalvar came and took him without his having done anything to deserve it
• That he does not want Paramapadam if it means anything other than serving him
• That he has given up all other means and all other goals
• That anybody who takes refuge in Nammalvar's feet is his own kin
• And in the last verse, that these ten verses on Kurugur's lord, sung by Madhurakavi, will bring their reciter to the feet of the Lord

The scandal of it. This should be stated plainly because the tradition itself finds it striking.

The Nalayira Divya Prabandham is a canon of four thousand verses addressed to Vishnu. It is the scripture of a theistic tradition with a specific supreme deity.

And inside it sits a work of eleven verses in which the poet says he does not know any god other than his teacher, and does not want anything except to serve him.

Why the tradition kept it. Not reluctantly. It made it central.

Where it sits in practice:

• The Kanninun Siruthambu is recited daily in Sri Vaishnava practice
• It is recited at the beginning of Prabandham recitation in the traditional sequence, alongside Thiruppallandu
• It is the work through which, by tradition, Nathamuni recovered the entire lost Prabandham
• It is one of the first things taught to a child in the sampradaya

The Nathamuni story. Since it is the reason the whole canon exists.

Nathamuni, in the ninth or tenth century, heard some devotees reciting eleven verses ending with the words that they were the ten of Kurugur, sung by Madhurakavi.

He wanted the rest. Nobody had it. The Prabandham had been scattered and lost.

He went to Alwarthirunagari, and there he recited the Kanninun Siruthambu twelve thousand times before Nammalvar.

And Nammalvar appeared to him and gave him the entire four thousand.

What that story is saying. That the way back to the lost scripture was through the verses of the disciple who wrote about nothing but his teacher.

The tradition arranged it so that the recovery of its own canon runs through the smallest and least conventional work in it.

Madhurakavi's position has a technical name in the tradition and it is worth setting out, because it is a real doctrinal position and not simply a sentiment.

Acharya abhimana. The teacher's regard.

The three means, as the tradition sets them out for reaching the goal:

• Bhakti yoga, sustained devotional practice, which requires qualification and capacity
• Prapatti or saranagati, surrender directly to the Lord, which requires only the act of surrender
• Acharya abhimana, in which the disciple does not even perform the surrender, but is simply taken up by the teacher, who does it on their behalf

Why the third exists. Because of a specific worry.

Even prapatti, surrender, is an act. Somebody has to perform it. And a person who feels that they cannot even do that, that they are not capable of a sincere act of surrender, has nowhere left to go.

The tradition's answer is that the acharya can take them anyway.

Madhurakavi's verses are the canonical statement of this. He does not say he surrendered. He says Nammalvar made him his own, without his having done anything.

How the tradition ranks it. This is the striking part.

Several of the later acharyas regard acharya abhimana as the highest of the three, precisely because it involves the least contribution from the person being saved.

The logic follows Nammalvar's own: if any contribution from you is part of the cause, then the outcome is partly your achievement, and the tradition wants it to be entirely gift.

Manavala Mamunigal, the last of the great acharyas, is particularly associated with this emphasis.

The risks, which must be stated. A doctrine of complete dependence on a teacher is obviously open to abuse, and a guide that presents it without saying so would be doing harm.

What the tradition itself requires of an acharya:

• That they are established in the sampradaya and its texts, and are not making it up
• That they live by what they teach
• That they take nothing for themselves from the relationship
• That they direct the disciple to the Lord and to the tradition, not to themselves as an endpoint
• That they are available and actually teach

Warning signs that somebody is not an acharya:

• Money. Escalating demands, fees for access, pressure to give beyond your means
• Isolation. Being told to cut off family or friends
• Control over decisions that are properly yours: your marriage, your work, your medical care, your finances
• Prohibition on questions, or punishment for asking
• Sexual conduct of any kind toward a disciple
• Claiming that leaving will bring harm to you or your family

None of that is the tradition. The tradition's own acharyas taught in public, wrote everything down, submitted their positions to argument, and are on record objecting to teachers who exploited disciples.

If you are in a situation like that. Leaving is permitted. The tradition has no doctrine that requires you to stay with somebody harming you, and anybody who tells you otherwise is protecting themselves rather than teaching you.

What Madhurakavi is actually describing. Something much simpler and more ordinary than a cult.

He is describing what it is like when somebody genuinely shows you something, and you cannot afterward pretend you have not seen it, and your gratitude to the person who showed you is not separable from your relation to the thing itself.

Most people who have had a real teacher recognise this. It does not require anything strange. It requires that the teacher was actually good.

Since this is the Alvar of the teacher, the wider tradition of the guru is worth setting out, with its strengths and its failure modes both.

The word. Guru, from gu meaning darkness and ru meaning remover, in the standard traditional etymology. The one who removes darkness.

The classical position:

• Knowledge is transmitted, not merely acquired from books
• The transmission involves a relationship and not only information
• The Upanishads are structured as teacher and student in conversation, and the word upanishad is itself read as sitting down near
• The Gita is a teaching given by one person to another in a specific situation
• Guru Purnima, in Ashadha, is the day of the teacher

Where it goes right:

• A living teacher can see what you specifically are getting wrong, which a book cannot
• Practice traditions carry a great deal that is not written down
• Correction from somebody you trust is worth more than any amount of reading
• Having a person answerable for what they teach raises the standard

Where it goes wrong. This has to be said as clearly as the other part.

India has a very substantial record of religious teachers who exploited disciples financially, sexually and psychologically, including recent and well documented criminal cases.

The structure that makes a good teacher effective, trust, dependence, deference, is exactly the structure that makes a bad one dangerous.

What the tradition itself says about bad teachers:

• The texts distinguish the true acharya from the kuguru, and the distinction is old
• A teacher who seeks wealth, followers or reputation from the relationship is disqualified in the tradition's own terms
• The Bhagavata and the acharyas are explicit that one should leave a teacher who is leading one away from dharma
• Vishvamitra, Parashurama, Drona and others appear in the epics as teachers whose conduct is criticised within the texts themselves

Drona and Ekalavya. Since the tradition includes it, it should be named.

Ekalavya learned archery by himself before a clay image of Drona, and became better than Arjuna. Drona asked for his right thumb as guru dakshina, and Ekalavya gave it.

The Mahabharata does not present this as admirable behaviour by Drona. It presents it, and readers have argued about it ever since, and the argument is the point.

A tradition that keeps that story in its central epic is not a tradition that asks for uncritical deference to teachers.

Practical guidance, plainly:

• A good teacher makes you more capable of thinking, not less
• A good teacher points past themselves
• A good teacher can be questioned and does not punish it
• A good teacher has a teacher, and a lineage, and will name them
• A good teacher's other students are doing well in ordinary life, not falling apart
• Money, sex and control are the three places it goes wrong, and any of them is enough to leave over

And if you have no teacher. Most people do not, and the tradition has always accommodated that.

The daily practice does not require one. The texts are available. The temples are open. Nama sankirtana requires nothing.

Madhurakavi's own position is not that everybody must find a Nammalvar. It is that he found one, and that it was decisive for him, and that he did not want to talk about anything else afterward.

Which is a report, not an instruction.

Thirukolur is Madhurakavi's town, and it holds one of the best pieces of writing in the whole tradition, which is not by him.

The town:

• In Thoothukudi district, on the Tamiraparani, close to Alwarthirunagari
• The Divya Desam is Vaithamanidhi Perumal, the Lord who is the treasure laid by
• One of the Nava Tirupathi
• Madhurakavi Alvar's birthplace, with his shrine

The Thirukolur Penpillai Rahasyam. The secret of the woman of Thirukolur.

The story:

• Ramanuja, having left Srirangam, was travelling
• He met a woman walking out of Thirukolur
• He asked her why she was leaving
• She said: because I did not do what these people did

And then she gave a list of eighty one items.

What the list is. Each item names a figure from scripture and the thing they did, and states that she did not do it.

A sample of the kind of thing it contains:

• I did not give everything away like Bali
• I did not come over to the other side like Vibhishana
• I did not do service like Lakshmana
• I did not wait like Bharata, holding the sandals
• I did not weep like the Gopis
• I did not obey like Prahlada
• I did not sell myself like the servant of the temple
• I did not lose everything like the Pandavas and still hold on
• I did not stay under a tree like Nammalvar
• I did not sing about my teacher like Madhurakavi

Why it is remarkable. Several reasons.

One, it is an entire scriptural education delivered as a list of personal shortcomings. She knows every one of these stories in detail and can name what each figure did that mattered.

Two, it is spoken by an unnamed woman leaving a village, to the greatest acharya of the tradition, on a road.

Three, its rhetorical form is self accusation, and its actual content is a complete syllabus of what devotion looks like.

Four, Ramanuja turned around. The tradition holds that he went back, on the strength of what she said.

How the tradition treats her. As a teacher.

The Rahasyam is a text in the sampradaya, it is studied, and there are commentaries on it. An anonymous woman's eighty one sentences on a road are part of the curriculum.

What it teaches. Read straight, it is a list of everything you have not done.

Read the way the tradition reads it, it is the opposite: it is a demonstration that the standard is impossibly high, that nobody meets it, and that the only remaining position is the one Madhurakavi took, which is to be taken up without deserving it.

The woman's list ends with her leaving because she cannot qualify. And the tradition's answer, which the whole of Sri Vaishnavism exists to give, is that nobody qualifies and that this was never the mechanism.

Visiting Thirukolur:

• Part of the Nava Tirupathi circuit, done in a day by car from Tirunelveli
• The Vaithamanidhi Perumal temple
• Madhurakavi Alvar's shrine
• Very close to Alwarthirunagari
• Around 30 kilometres from Tirunelveli

It is a small place and it is on a river, and two of the tradition's most striking documents come from it: eleven verses about a teacher, and eighty one sentences by a woman who was walking away.

Of everything in the Prabandham, this is the most practical starting point, and here is why.

It is eleven verses. Not four thousand, not eleven hundred. Eleven.

A person can learn eleven verses. Children in the sampradaya do, routinely, and it is generally the first thing they learn after Thiruppallandu.

How to approach it:

• Find a text with Tamil, transliteration and translation. Several are freely available
• Find a recitation recording. The Kanninun Siruthambu is recited daily and recordings are easy to find
• Learn the first verse first, the one about the small knotted cord
• Add one verse at a time. There is no hurry
• The eleventh verse states the phala, the fruit, which is the traditional way a Prabandham work closes

Where it is used:

• Daily recitation in Sri Vaishnava households and temples
• At the beginning of Prabandham recitation, with Thiruppallandu
• On Guru Purnima and at acharya observances
• During Adhyayana Utsavam
• At Alwarthirunagari and Thirukolur particularly

On Guru Purnima. Since this is the Alvar of the teacher.

• The full moon of Ashadha, generally July
• Traditionally the day of Vyasa, hence also Vyasa Purnima
• Observed across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions
• Marked by honouring one's teachers, in whatever form

What honouring a teacher actually looks like, practically, and this need not be religious at all:

• Getting in touch with somebody who taught you something and saying so
• Continuing the thing they taught you
• Teaching it to somebody else
• Not claiming their work as your own

Those are ordinary and they are the substance of it.

A caution repeated, because it belongs with this saint above all others:

The doctrine of the teacher is the doctrine most open to abuse in Indian religion. If a teacher in your life is asking for money beyond your means, isolating you from family, controlling your decisions, punishing your questions, or behaving sexually toward disciples, that is not a guru, and leaving is permitted.

The tradition's own texts distinguish the acharya from the kuguru, and the Mahabharata itself keeps the story of Drona and Ekalavya in the record so nobody can pretend the question does not arise.

What Madhurakavi is finally saying. Something quite small and quite complete.

Somebody came, and asked him nothing, and took him anyway. He had not earned it. He did not have to arrange it. He was walking somewhere else entirely and a light turned him around.

And afterward, given a whole canon addressed to God and every subject available, he wrote eleven verses about the person who had shown him, and the tradition put them at the front where everybody would have to say them first.

The last line of the work says that those who take up these ten verses on Kurugur's lord will reach the feet of the Lord.

So the poem about the teacher ends by promising the thing itself. Which is what a good teacher does.