Pillai Lokacharya: The Man Who Carried the Deity Out

What happened at Srirangam, stated as plainly and as carefully as it can be.

The context

In the early fourteenth century the Delhi Sultanate ran a series of military campaigns into south India.

These were conquest campaigns of the ordinary medieval type: they targeted wealth, and the great temples of the south held enormous wealth in gold, jewels and land. Madurai, Halebidu, Warangal, Srirangam and other centres were attacked over roughly two decades.

Srirangam was raided in the 1320s, the usual date given being 1323, in the campaign associated with Ulugh Khan, who later ruled as Muhammad bin Tughluq.

What the tradition records

The Koil Olugu, the temple chronicle of Srirangam, gives the account:

• The temple was attacked and looted
• A large number of Srivaishnavas were killed defending it, and the chronicle gives a figure in the thousands
• The utsava murti, the processional image of Ranganatha, was taken out of the temple and evacuated south before the attackers reached the sanctum
• The mula murti, the fixed reclining image in the sanctum, was walled up and concealed
• Regular worship at Srirangam ceased for decades, the figure usually given being around sixty years
• The processional deity was moved repeatedly, and spent years at Tirumala before being brought back
• Srirangam was recovered in the second half of the fourteenth century under Vijayanagara, and the deity was reinstalled, the date usually given being 1371

And Pillai Lokacharya was the one who organised the evacuation.

He was very old. He went with the deity, on foot and by cart, south into the Pandya country, and he died on the road at Jyotishkudi, near Madurai, where his shrine is.

How this app treats it

Three things, and all three are necessary.

One. It happened, and it should not be minimised.

A major temple was attacked and looted, people were killed defending it, worship stopped for a very long time, and an old man died on a road carrying an image away from it. That is the record and this app is not going to be vague about it.

Two. The figures in the chronicle are a chronicle's figures.

The Koil Olugu is a temple record compiled and added to over centuries, and the casualty numbers in it are not independently corroborated. Saying so is not denial, and treating a temple chronicle as an audited statistic is not history.

Three. And this is the part that matters most now.

A fourteenth century military campaign is not a statement about anybody alive.

The Delhi Sultanate's southern campaigns were conquest and plunder of the standard medieval kind, conducted by a state against other states, and they are the same kind of thing as the campaigns Hindu kingdoms of the period ran against each other, including the sacking of temples by Hindu rulers, which is also in the record and is also documented.

Vandnaa's position, stated directly: this history is real and it belongs to the past. It is not an argument about your neighbours, your colleagues, or anybody's grandchildren, and using it that way is a misuse of it. The people who died at Srirangam are owed remembrance, not recruitment.

And there is a specific reason this app says so here.

The Srivaishnava tradition itself contains the counter example. Thirumangai Alvar and Raskhan and Kabir and half the figures in this series belong to a history in which these communities lived alongside each other for eight hundred years, and the devotional literature of the period is full of the evidence.

What survived

The deity came back.

After roughly sixty years, moved from place to place, hidden, carried by people who kept moving it, and finally reinstalled.

And the tradition kept its books through the same period, which is the other half of what Pillai Lokacharya was doing: the Srivachana Bhushanam and the eighteen rahasyas were written before the raid, and they came through it because people carried them too.

His brother Azhagiya Manavala Perumal Nayanar wrote the Acharya Hridayam, on the meaning of Nammalvar's work, and it also survived.

And the man who restored the tradition afterwards was Manavala Mamunigal, in the fifteenth century, who wrote the commentaries on Pillai Lokacharya's works that made them teachable again.

The division of the Srivaishnava tradition, which this batch has been building toward.

The two schools

Thenkalai, the southern school, whose founding acharya is Pillai Lokacharya and whose great later figure is Manavala Mamunigal.

Vadakalai, the northern school, whose great figure is Vedanta Desika.

Both are Srivaishnava. Both accept Ramanuja, the Sri Bhashya, the alvars, the rahasyas and the whole preceding lineage in this batch. Neither is a heresy and neither regards the other as outside the tradition.

The famous analogy

Thenkalai: marjara nyaya, the cat.

A mother cat picks up her kitten by the scruff and carries it. The kitten does nothing at all. It does not hold on, it does not cooperate, and it does not have to.

Grace is complete and unaided, and prapatti is not an act the person performs but a description of their condition.

Vadakalai: markata nyaya, the monkey.

A baby monkey rides on its mother, and it holds on. The mother does the moving, and the infant contributes the grip.

Grace does the work and some cooperation is required, and prapatti is an act, formally performed, with conditions.

What else they differ on

Around eighteen points are traditionally listed, and the substantial ones are:

• Whether prapatti must be formally performed once, with the components set out, or whether the condition is what matters
• The status of Sri: whether she is infinite like Narayana or a liberated soul of the highest order; and whether she is herself a means of salvation or only an intercessor
• Sanskrit and Tamil: Vadakalai gives the Sanskrit corpus primacy in disputed cases, Thenkalai the Tamil Prabandham
• Whether the divine's compassion requires an occasion or is entirely spontaneous
• Whether prapatti removes the consequences of sins committed afterwards automatically
• Ritual practice: the form of the urdhva pundra, the temple procedures, the recitation order

And the honest note about the argument

It has been bitter, and it has been litigated.

Disputes between the two communities over temple rights, honours, and the order of recitation have gone to court repeatedly, at Kanchipuram, at Srirangam, at Tirupati and elsewhere, and Indian courts have adjudicated Thenkalai and Vadakalai disputes into the twentieth century and beyond.

Which is worth stating plainly because it is the opposite of edifying, and because pretending otherwise is not useful.

And what should be said about it

This is a family argument.

Both schools descend from the same eleven or twelve teachers, every one of whom appears in this batch. They share the Sri Bhashya, the alvars, the rahasyas, the temples and the mantras.

And the underlying question is a real one and it is not silly: does the person contribute anything, and if they contribute nothing, what is the point of practice; and if they contribute something, in what sense is the grace free.

Every tradition that has a doctrine of grace has had this argument, in every language, and none of them has settled it.

Which is a hint about the question rather than about the answer.

Vandnaa's position: both are inside the tradition, the argument has produced excellent literature on both sides, and no reader of this app needs to pick a side to light a lamp.

Where to go

• Srirangam, Tiruchirappalli
• Jyotishkudi, near Madurai, where he died and where his shrine is
• Srivilliputhur and the Divya Desams of the Pandya country, along the evacuation route
• Tirumala, where the Srirangam deity spent part of the exile
• Kanchipuram, for the Vadakalai centre and Vedanta Desika

Who: Pillai Lokacharya, thirteenth into fourteenth century, son of Vadakku Thiruvidhi Pillai who wrote the Idu, brother of Azhagiya Manavala Perumal Nayanar, and the founding acharya of the Thenkalai school.

What he wrote: the Ashtadasa Rahasya, eighteen works in Manipravala. The Srivachana Bhushanam, around four hundred and sixty sutras, is his masterwork. The Mumukshuppadi, on the three rahasyas, is the most studied and where most people start. The Tattva Traya sets out the three realities, chit the sentient, achit the insentient, and Ishvara, in Tamil rather than Sanskrit for people who could not read Sanskrit.

His positions: that even prapatti is not properly a means, since the divine is the means, and what the person contributes is not an act but the absence of alternatives, the two qualifications being akinchanya, having nothing, and ananyagatitva, having nowhere else to go, so that the qualification for grace is disqualification from everything else. That the acharya outranks the deity, since the divine gave you the teacher but the teacher gave you the divine, and the teacher is present, findable and answerable while the divine judges and the teacher does not. And that birth does not rank devotees, a devotee of low birth standing above a brahmana without devotion, argued from Thiruppan Alvar, Nammalvar and the Tirukkulattar.

The obvious danger: a doctrine that the teacher outranks the deity is the most exploitable doctrine in religion. The tradition's safeguard is that the acharya is defined by what they do, giving the mantras and taking nothing. The modern one is simpler: a teacher who charges money, isolates you, requires secrecy, controls your decisions, requires sexual contact or gives dangerous instructions has forfeited the title regardless of the doctrine.

1323: the Delhi Sultanate's southern campaigns of the early fourteenth century targeted the wealth of the great southern temples, and Srirangam was raided in the 1320s. The temple chronicle, the Koil Olugu, records the looting, deaths in the thousands, the evacuation of the processional Ranganatha, the walling up of the fixed image, and roughly sixty years without regular worship before recovery under Vijayanagara around 1371. Pillai Lokacharya organised the evacuation, went south with the deity, and died on the road at Jyotishkudi near Madurai. This app states that it happened and will not be vague about it; that a temple chronicle's casualty figures are a chronicle's figures rather than an audited statistic; and that a fourteenth century military campaign is not a statement about anybody alive, and using it that way is a misuse of it.

The split: Thenkalai holds marjara nyaya, the cat, whose kitten is carried and does nothing, so grace is complete and unaided. Vadakalai holds markata nyaya, the monkey, whose infant holds on, so grace does the work and some cooperation is required. Both are Srivaishnava, both accept Ramanuja and the whole preceding lineage, and neither is a heresy. The argument has been bitter and litigated into the modern era, which is worth stating plainly, and the underlying question, whether the person contributes anything, is one every tradition with a doctrine of grace has argued and none has settled.