The Child at Thiruvennainallur
Meykandar, thirteenth century, is the founding acharya of the Tamil school of Shaiva Siddhanta, and the author of the shortest important book in south Indian philosophy.
His name
Mey is truth. Kandar is the one who saw.
The one who saw truth, and it is a title rather than a birth name.
He was born Svetavana Perumal, at Thiruvennainallur in what is now Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, into a Vellala family. His father was Achyuta Kalappalar.
The account of his birth is the standard one for figures of this kind: a childless couple, a vow at the temple, and a son.
How he was taught
By somebody who arrived and did not stay.
Paranjothi Munivar came to Thiruvennainallur, found the child, initiated him, gave him the Sivajnana Bodam, and left.
The lineage he came in is given as: Nandi, who received it from Shiva; Sanatkumara; Satyajnana Darshini; Paranjothi; and then Meykandar.
And the child was very young. The accounts give three, or a little older, and the tradition treats the youth as the point: the knowledge did not come from study.
How to hold that
As the tradition's account of its own origin, and with the observation that a school of technical philosophy claiming that its founding text was given to a small child is making a specific argument.
The argument is the school's own doctrine: that jnana does not come from accumulation, that it arrives when the obstruction is removed, and that the removal is not something the person does.
Whether or not you accept the biography, the biography is consistent with the philosophy, which is not always true of founding legends.
The teacher who became the student
And this is the best story about him.
Arunandi Sivacharya, then known as Sakalagama Pandita, was an established scholar and the traditional teacher associated with the family.
He came to test the boy, and the accounts describe the encounter as adversarial: an accomplished man of learning arriving to examine a child who was being credited with something.
And he became his disciple.
The tradition's phrasing of it is that the teacher asked, the child answered, and the older man recognised what he was dealing with and reversed the relationship on the spot.
And Arunandi went on to write the Sivajnana Siddhiyar, the fullest exposition of the system, which has the next entry in this batch.
Which is a shape this series keeps finding: Thirukoshtiyur Nambi embracing Ramanuja after he broke the rule, Nanjiyar delighted at being improved on, Nampillai approving the book written behind his back, and here, an established scholar taking initiation from a child.
Traditions that record their seniors being overtaken are traditions worth reading.
His death
He died young, and the tradition says so without elaborating.
And what he left is twelve sutras.
Pati, Pasu, Pasam
The Sivajnana Bodam is twelve sutras in Tamil, each with supporting verses and examples, and the whole thing is shorter than most articles.
And the entire Tamil Shaiva philosophical tradition is a commentary on it.
The three eternal realities
Shaiva Siddhanta is a realist pluralism, which is the technical way of saying that it holds three things to be real, distinct, and without beginning.
One. Pati, the Lord. Shiva.
Two. Pasu, the soul. The word literally means cattle, and it is chosen deliberately: the soul is the tethered one.
Three. Pasam, the bond. The tether itself, and it has three strands.
And all three are anadi, beginningless. The soul is not created, the bonds are not created, and the situation the soul is in has no starting point at which somebody chose it.
Which is a specific claim and it rules a great deal out. The soul's condition is not a punishment, because there was no first offence.
The three bonds
One. Anava.
The hardest of the three concepts and the one the system turns on.
Anava is from anu, the atom, the minute. It is the primal impurity, and what it does is make the soul small.
The soul's own nature, in this system, is unlimited knowledge and unlimited will. Anava obscures it, so that a thing whose nature is infinite awareness experiences itself as a limited individual with a particular set of concerns.
The images the texts use: the husk on the grain of rice; verdigris on copper; the film on the eye.
And the crucial point: anava is not something the soul did. It is beginningless and it is the condition of being a soul at all in the unliberated state, and there is no version of the story in which the soul earned it.
Two. Karma.
The consequences of action, in the standard sense, and the mechanism by which the soul's situation is particular rather than general.
Three. Maya.
Not illusion. This is the largest single difference between Shaiva Siddhanta and Advaita and it should be stated clearly.
In this system maya is real. It is the material substrate from which bodies, faculties, worlds and objects are made, and it is provided for the soul's benefit, so that it has instruments through which to act and experience and so eventually to exhaust its karma.
Maya is a hospital, not a hallucination.
What Shiva does
Five acts, the panchakritya:
- Srishti, creation
- Sthiti, preservation
- Samhara, dissolution
- Tirobhava, obscuration
- Anugraha, grace
And the fourth one is the surprise. Shiva also conceals, deliberately, and the concealment is not opposition. It is what keeps the soul in the world long enough for the process to work, and the system treats it as an act of care rather than of withholding.
And this is what the Nataraja image is.
The drum in the upper right hand: creation. The fire in the upper left: dissolution. The lower right hand in abhaya: preservation, do not fear. The foot on the dwarf Apasmara: obscuration, the ignorance being held down. The raised foot: grace.
The five acts are the five limbs of the figure at Chidambaram, and a person standing in front of it is looking at the Sivajnana Bodam in bronze.
How grace comes
A sequence, and it is technical, and it matters:
One. Malaparipaka, the ripening of the impurity. Anava wears thin over immense time, through the soul's experience in bodies.
Two. Iruvinai oppu, the equipoise of the two deeds. A state in which good and bad karma cease to pull the soul in either direction, and it stops being propelled.
Three. Shaktinipata, the descent of power. Grace falls. And the word is deliberate: it descends, and the soul does not fetch it.
Four. The guru appears.
And this is the striking part. At the moment of shaktinipata, Shiva takes human form as the teacher and comes to the person.
Which is why the guru matters so much in this school and why the accounts of Paranjothi arriving at Thiruvennainallur, doing one thing and leaving, are told the way they are.
What Liberation Is, and How It Differs From Advaita
This is the question the whole school exists to answer differently, and it is worth setting out fairly.
The Advaita position, stated properly
Brahman alone is real. The individual self is not different from Brahman, and the appearance of difference is due to ignorance. Liberation is the recognition that what you took to be an individual never was one, and nothing is gained because nothing was ever missing.
Shankara's position, and it is formidable, and this app has entries on it.
The Shaiva Siddhanta position
Three things are real and remain real. The soul is not Shiva, does not become Shiva, and does not discover it was Shiva all along.
So what is liberation
And the answer is the subtlest thing in the system.
The soul's defining property, in the Sivajnana Bodam, is that it takes on the nature of whatever it is joined to.
The technical term is sat asat: the soul is neither purely existent nor purely non existent, and it becomes like what it associates with.
Joined to pasam, it experiences itself as a limited worldly thing, because that is what it is attached to.
Joined to Shiva, it takes on the divine nature, and experiences as Shiva experiences.
And it is still not Shiva.
The images
Salt in water. The salt is entirely dissolved, the water is salt throughout, and the salt has not become the water.
Iron in fire. The iron glows, burns, and behaves as fire, for as long as it is in the fire. And it is iron.
And the word advaita is used, which confuses people, so it should be explained.
Shaiva Siddhanta calls its own position advaita, non dual, and means something specific by it: not two, and not one either.
Not two, because the soul in union has no separate experience, no separate will, and nothing of its own left.
Not one, because the relation persists, and a relation requires two terms.
The technical formula is that the union is inseparable but not identical.
Why this matters devotionally
Because it preserves the relationship.
If liberation is identity, then love ends at liberation. There is nobody left to love and nobody left to love them, and every devotional tradition that has taken the Advaita position seriously has had to work hard on this point.
Shaiva Siddhanta refuses the problem by holding that the union is total and the two terms remain, and therefore that what a devotee wants and what liberation is are the same thing rather than opposites.
Which is why the Nayanars fit inside it.
The sixty three Nayanars, whose stories this app covers, are not philosophers. They are potters, washermen, hunters, kings, farmers, a woman who asked to be made a ghoul, a man who built a temple in his mind. And Shaiva Siddhanta is the system built to explain what they were doing.
Which is the right order. The devotion came first, over centuries, in Tamil, and the philosophy was built afterwards to account for it.
And the fourteen texts
The Meykanda Shastras, the fourteen works of the school, of which the Sivajnana Bodam is the first and shortest.
The Santana Acharyas, the four who founded it:
- Meykandar
- Arunandi Sivacharya, his own former teacher
- Marai Jnana Sambandhar
- Umapati Sivacharya
And the next two entries in this batch are the second and the fourth.
What to Take From Him
One. Your condition is not a punishment.
Anava is beginningless. There is no first offence, no moment at which the soul chose wrongly, and nothing the soul did to acquire it.
Which removes a very heavy thing that a great deal of popular religion puts on people: the idea that your circumstances are a verdict, that suffering is a bill, and that if things are hard you must have done something.
Meykandar's system says the situation is prior to any act of yours.
Two. The world is not an illusion and it is not a trap.
Maya is real and it is provided. Bodies, senses, instruments, worlds: given so that the soul has something to act and experience through, because that is how the impurity wears thin.
Which means the ordinary life is the mechanism, not a distraction from it, and a person doing their work and raising their family is not doing something other than the practice.
Three. Concealment is one of the five acts.
Shiva also hides, deliberately, and the system calls it an act of grace rather than of withholding.
Which is worth having available during the periods when nothing is happening, when practice feels empty, and when the absence seems like a verdict on you.
The system's answer is that the fourth act is running, that it is being done on purpose and for you, and that it is the same hand.
Four. Grace descends and you do not fetch it.
Shaktinipata. The word means the falling of power, and the sequence before it, the thinning of anava and the equipoise of karma, is not something you can drive.
Which is not an argument against practice and the school does not take it as one. Practice is what a soul in that condition does, and it is not the cause.
Five. The salt and the water.
Liberation is total union in which the two terms remain. The salt dissolves entirely and does not become the water; the iron glows as fire and is iron.
And the reason the school insists on it is that it wants to keep the relationship: if liberation is identity, there is nobody left to love and nobody left to love them.
Six. And the teacher who became the student.
An established scholar came to test a child, was answered, and reversed the relationship on the spot, then wrote the fullest exposition of the child's system.
A daily practice from this entry:
- Om Namah Shivaya, the Panchakshara
- Nataraja, looked at once with the five acts in mind: drum, fire, abhaya, the foot on the dwarf, the raised foot
- The Tevaram or Tiruvachakam, a verse, in Tamil or translation. The philosophy came from these
- And the anava thought, when things are hard: this is not a bill
Where to go
- Thiruvennainallur, Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, where he was born and taught
- Chidambaram, for the Nataraja and the five acts
- Thiruvarur, Thiruvaiyaru, and the Tevaram temples of the Kaveri delta
- The Dharmapuram and Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenams, the Shaiva Siddhanta monastic centres, which still teach this material
The Short Version
Who: Meykandar, thirteenth century, the founding acharya of the Tamil school of Shaiva Siddhanta. Born Svetavana Perumal at Thiruvennainallur in what is now Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, into a Vellala family. Meykandar means the one who saw truth and is a title rather than a birth name. He was initiated as a very small child by Paranjothi Munivar, who gave him the Sivajnana Bodam and left, and he died young.
The teacher who became the student: Arunandi Sivacharya, then known as Sakalagama Pandita, an established scholar associated with the family, came to test the boy, was answered, and reversed the relationship on the spot. He went on to write the Sivajnana Siddhiyar, the fullest exposition of the system.
The three eternal realities: pati, the Lord, Shiva; pasu, the soul, from a word meaning cattle, the tethered one; and pasam, the bond. All three are anadi, beginningless, so the soul's condition is not a punishment, since there was no first offence.
The three bonds: anava, from anu, the minute, the primal impurity that makes the soul small, obscuring a nature of unlimited knowledge and will so that it experiences itself as a limited individual, like husk on rice or verdigris on copper, and it is not something the soul did; karma, the consequences of action; and maya, which in this system is not illusion but the real material substrate provided for the soul's benefit so that it has instruments through which to act and exhaust its karma.
The five acts of Shiva: creation, preservation, dissolution, obscuration and grace. The fourth is the surprise, since Shiva also conceals deliberately, and the system treats it as care rather than withholding. The Nataraja image is these five: the drum, the fire, the abhaya hand, the foot on Apasmara, and the raised foot.
How grace comes: malaparipaka, the ripening of the impurity; iruvinai oppu, the equipoise of good and bad karma so the soul stops being propelled; shaktinipata, the descent of power, which falls and is not fetched; and then the guru appears, since at that moment Shiva takes human form as the teacher.
Liberation: not identity. The soul takes on the nature of whatever it is joined to, so joined to Shiva it experiences as Shiva experiences and is still not Shiva. Salt dissolved in water is not water; iron glowing in fire is iron. The school calls this advaita and means not two and not one either: not two because nothing separate remains, not one because a relation requires two terms. It matters devotionally because if liberation is identity there is nobody left to love and nobody left to love them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Meykandar?+
The founding acharya of the Tamil school of Shaiva Siddhanta, of the thirteenth century. He was born Svetavana Perumal at Thiruvennainallur in what is now Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, into a Vellala family, and his name Meykandar means the one who saw truth. He was initiated as a very small child by Paranjothi Munivar, who came, gave him the Sivajnana Bodam, and left, and he died young. His twelve short sutras in Tamil are the founding text of the school, and the whole of Tamil Shaiva philosophy is a commentary on them.
What are pati, pasu and pasam?+
The three eternal realities of Shaiva Siddhanta. Pati is the Lord, Shiva. Pasu is the soul, from a word literally meaning cattle, chosen deliberately because the soul is the tethered one. Pasam is the bond itself, which has three strands: anava, karma and maya. All three realities are anadi, beginningless, and remain real and distinct, which makes the system a realist pluralism rather than a monism. An important consequence is that the soul's condition is not a punishment, since it is beginningless and there was no first offence at which somebody chose it.
What is anava mala?+
The primal impurity, and the concept the whole system turns on. The word comes from anu, the atom or the minute, and what anava does is make the soul small. In this system the soul's own nature is unlimited knowledge and unlimited will, and anava obscures it so that a thing whose nature is infinite awareness experiences itself as a limited individual with a particular set of concerns. The images used are husk on the grain of rice, verdigris on copper, and a film on the eye. The crucial point is that anava is not something the soul did: it is beginningless and it is the condition of being an unliberated soul at all, so there is no version in which the soul earned it.
How does Shaiva Siddhanta differ from Advaita?+
Advaita holds that Brahman alone is real, that the individual self is not different from Brahman, and that liberation is the recognition that what you took to be an individual never was one. Shaiva Siddhanta holds that three things are real and remain real, so the soul is not Shiva, does not become Shiva, and does not discover it was Shiva all along. It also treats maya as real rather than illusory, as the material substrate provided for the soul's benefit so that it has instruments through which to act, which is the largest single difference between them. Liberation in Shaiva Siddhanta is total union in which the two terms remain, illustrated by salt dissolved in water, which is not water, and iron glowing in fire, which is iron.
What are the five acts of Shiva?+
The panchakritya: srishti or creation, sthiti or preservation, samhara or dissolution, tirobhava or obscuration, and anugraha or grace. The fourth is the surprise, since Shiva also conceals deliberately, and the system treats this not as opposition or withholding but as what keeps the soul in the world long enough for the process to work, so it counts as care. The Nataraja image is these five acts in bronze: the drum in the upper right hand is creation, the fire in the upper left is dissolution, the lower right hand in abhaya is preservation, the foot pressing the dwarf Apasmara is obscuration, and the raised foot is grace. A person standing before the Chidambaram Nataraja is looking at the Sivajnana Bodam.
Who are the Santana Acharyas?+
The four founding teachers of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta: Meykandar, who wrote the Sivajnana Bodam; Arunandi Sivacharya, who was Meykandar's own former teacher before becoming his disciple and who wrote the Sivajnana Siddhiyar, the fullest exposition of the system; Marai Jnana Sambandhar; and Umapati Sivacharya of Chidambaram. Their works together with others form the Meykanda Shastras, the fourteen texts of the school, of which the Sivajnana Bodam is the first and shortest. The devotion came first, over centuries, in the Tamil hymns of the Nayanars, and the philosophy was built afterwards to account for it.
About the author
Pandit Ravindra Sharma · Vedic Rituals & Bhakti, 22+ years
Pandit Ravindra is the Vandnaa editorial team's resident specialist on aarti, chalisa, and daily devotion. He has performed home and temple pujas across Varanasi and Delhi for over two decades and contributes the bhakti-focused articles on this site.
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