Poigai Alvar: The Saint Who Called the World a Lamp

The traditional account of Poigai Alvar's birth is one of the more unusual ones in Indian hagiography, and it is shared in form by the other two Mudhal Alvars.

What is said:

• He was born at Thiruvekka in Kanchipuram
• Not from a womb. He is ayonija, not womb born
• He appeared in a poigai, a pond or tank, in a lotus
• Which is where the name comes from: Poigai, the pond
• His other name is Saroyogi or Sarasa Yogi, from saras, a lake
• Traditionally dated to a Dwapara or very early period, which is far earlier than historians place him

The other two:

• Bhutham Alvar appeared at Thirukadalmallai, which is Mahabalipuram, in a kurukkathi flower
• Pey Alvar appeared at Mylapore, in Chennai, in a red lily in a well

What the story is doing. Three saints, appearing in three flowers, in three places along the same coast, in the same period.

The tradition is saying that these three did not come from lineages, did not inherit their standing, and did not acquire it by training. They arrived.

Whether one reads that literally or as a statement about their poetry having no evident predecessor, it is the same claim: this began here.

How they are described:

• Poigai as an amsha of Vishnu's Panchajanya, the conch
• Bhutham as an amsha of the Kaumodaki, the mace
• Pey as an amsha of the Nandaka, the sword

So the three are the Lord's own attributes, arriving in the world as poets. That is the tradition's way of saying that this poetry is not an ordinary human production.

What is historically recoverable. Very little, honestly.

• The dating is uncertain and the traditional dates and the scholarly ones are far apart
• The three are grouped together by tradition and by the form of their works
• Their verses do not name contemporary kings or datable events in a way that fixes them
• The consensus range is broadly the sixth to seventh century, with disagreement

A guide should say that plainly. What survives is the poetry, which is dense and difficult and very good, and a set of stories about how it came to be written.

The most famous story about the Mudhal Alvars is the one that brings all three together, and it is the origin story of their three works.

The story:

• The three, wandering separately, arrived at Thirukovalur on the same night
• It was raining heavily
• Poigai found a narrow passage, an idaikazhi, in the corridor of a house belonging to a devotee named Mrigandu, and lay down in it
• It was just wide enough for one person to lie down
• Bhutham arrived and asked for shelter. Poigai said one may lie down, two may sit. They sat
• Pey arrived and asked for shelter. They said one may lie down, two may sit, three may stand. They stood
• Standing in the dark in the narrow space, they felt themselves being pressed, as though a fourth had joined them
• They realised somebody was there

What happened then. They needed light to see who it was.

So Poigai made a lamp:

The earth as the lamp, the surrounding ocean as its oil, the burning sun as its flame - and by that light he set down a hundred verses, a garland of words, at the feet of the Lord.

Bhutham made another:

Love as the lamp, longing as the oil, the mind melting as the wick - and lit it with knowledge, and made his hundred.

And then Pey saw:

I saw the golden form, I saw the rising sun's colour, I saw the discus, I saw the conch - and he made his hundred.

The fourth in the corridor was Vishnu, who had come to be among them and who was standing there in the dark.

Why the story is good. Because of the escalation.

The first saint makes a lamp out of the cosmos: the physical earth, the physical ocean, the physical sun. That is the largest thing anybody could think to do.

The second saint makes a lamp out of the interior: love, longing, the melting mind. That is the reply to the first, and it says that the inner light is the one that shows.

And the third saint does not make a lamp at all. He sees. His verse is a list of what is in front of him: the golden body, the colour, the discus, the conch.

The sequence is: the world, the self, and then simply the sight. That is a very sophisticated piece of construction and the tradition has told it for well over a thousand years.

Thirukovalur today. It is a Divya Desam, in Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu.

The deity is Trivikrama, Vishnu in the form that measured the worlds, which is fitting for the place where a saint made a lamp out of the earth and the sun.

The idaikazhi, the narrow passage, is shown at the temple, and the three Alvars have shrines there.

What he wrote. One work, of a hundred verses: the Mudhal Thiruvandhadhi, the First Sacred Antadi.

It is the first item in the Nalayira Divya Prabandham.

What an antadi is. This is a technical matter and it is worth explaining because the form does real work.

Antadi, from antam meaning end and adi meaning beginning:

• The last word or syllable of each verse becomes the first of the next
• And the last word of the final verse returns to the first word of the first verse
• So the whole hundred forms a closed ring

Why that matters:

• It makes the sequence fixed. No verse can be moved, dropped or added without breaking the chain
• It made the work memorisable and transmissible before writing was the normal medium of preservation
• It is a formal image of no beginning and no end, which is the theological point the poems are making anyway
• And it is extremely difficult to do well across a hundred verses while also saying something

The three Mudhal Alvars each wrote an antadi of a hundred verses, and the form is a large part of why the three works are grouped.

What the poems are about. They are dense, allusive and quick.

The recurring subjects:

• The avataras, and particularly Vamana and Trivikrama, the measuring of the worlds
• Krishna at Gokula, the butter, the cart, the calf
• Rama
• Varaha, Narasimha, the Kurma and the churning
• The temples, named and praised
• The name, and the sufficiency of remembering it
• The feet of the Lord, which is the constant image

The style. Poigai is compressed. A verse frequently packs two or three separate avatara references into four lines, expecting the hearer to catch each from a single word.

That is not obscurity. It is a poet writing for an audience who knew the stories completely and would take pleasure in the speed.

A representative move. The opening verse, the lamp, has been quoted above.

What it does technically is worth noticing: he does not say the Lord is like light, or that he sought light. He says he made a lamp, and the components he names are the three largest physical things available.

And the purpose of the lamp is not to see. It is to have light by which to compose, so that the verses can be laid at the feet.

So the entire cosmos is instrumental to the act of praise, which is a very large claim made in four lines.

The theology. Set out plainly, the Mudhal Thiruvandhadhi holds:

• Vishnu is supreme and is the cause of the world
• He is accessible, having come repeatedly as the avataras and having taken residence in temples
• The relationship is one of service and refuge, not of achievement
• The name and the feet are the practical means
• The world is his, so praising him with the world is proper

Those points, in these hundred verses, are already essentially the Sri Vaishnava position, several centuries before Ramanuja set it out philosophically.

The philosophy came later and it was built on this.

The Mudhal Alvars stand at the beginning of something very large, and it is worth tracing what followed.

The immediate sequence:

• The other nine Alvars, over the following centuries
• Nammalvar, whose Thiruvaymozhi became the central text
• Nathamuni, in the ninth or tenth century, who recovered the scattered Prabandham and set it to music
• Yamunacharya
• Ramanuja, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, who gave the tradition its philosophy, Vishishtadvaita
• The Sri Vaishnava tradition as it exists

What Nathamuni did. It deserves its own note because without it none of this would survive.

By his time the Prabandham had been scattered and largely lost. He heard eleven verses of Nammalvar being recited, sought the rest, and by tradition recovered the whole four thousand through the repetition of Madhurakavi's Kanninun Siruthambu at Alwarthirunagari.

He then arranged them, set them to music, and instituted their recitation in temple worship.

So the entire corpus, including Poigai's hundred verses, survives because one man went looking.

The Ubhaya Vedanta position. This is the distinctive Sri Vaishnava claim and it comes from the Alvars.

Ubhaya means both. The tradition holds two Vedantas as authoritative:

• The Sanskrit scripture: Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Brahma Sutras
• The Tamil Prabandham of the Alvars

Both are treated as revelation. Both are recited in temples. Commentaries are written on both.

That is a genuinely unusual position. Very few traditions anywhere have elevated vernacular devotional poetry to the status of scripture alongside their classical canon.

Araiyar Sevai. The performance tradition of the Prabandham, in which the Araiyar recite, sing and enact the verses with gesture before the deity, at Srirangam, Alwarthirunagari and Srivilliputhur.

It is very old, it is now practised by very few families, and it is the living form of what Nathamuni instituted.

The Divya Desams. The 108 temples the Alvars sang.

• Most in Tamil Nadu
• Some in Kerala, Andhra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand
• Including Badrinath, Muktinath in Nepal, Ayodhya, Mathura, Dwaraka and Srirangam
• Two are not on earth: Thiruparkadal, the ocean of milk, and Paramapadam, the supreme abode

That last detail is worth pausing on. The canonical list of temples the saints sang includes two that cannot be visited, and the tradition kept them in the list.

Where Poigai sits in it. First. His hundred verses open the Prabandham, and the lamp he made of the earth and the sun is the first thing anybody reciting the four thousand says.

How to encounter the work now:

• Editions of the Nalayira Divya Prabandham with Tamil text and translation are available, in print and online
• Recitation recordings exist and the Prabandham is chanted daily in Sri Vaishnava temples
• Thirukovalur can be visited
• Kanchipuram, where he appeared, has the Yathothkari temple at Thiruvekka, which is a Divya Desam

And if you want one thing to take away, it is the opening image: that a person who wanted to praise God thought first about what he could use for a lamp, and answered the earth, the sea and the sun.

For a reader who wants to do something with this rather than only know it, here is what is practical.

Start with what is short. The Prabandham is four thousand verses. Nobody begins there.

Good entry points:

• Thiruppallandu, Periyalvar's twelve verses, which open the Prabandham's recitation order and are sung at the start of almost everything
• Kanninun Siruthambu, Madhurakavi's eleven verses
• Thiruppavai, Andal's thirty verses, which very many households already recite in Margazhi
• The opening verse of each of the three Mudhal Thiruvandhadhis, which are the three lamps

On reading in translation. Necessary for most people and worth saying honestly.

Alvar Tamil is old, dense and highly allusive. A translation gives you the sense and loses the compression, the sound and the antadi chain.

That is a real loss and it is not a reason to avoid translations. Read the translation, and if you can, listen to the Tamil recitation alongside it, because the sound is a large part of what the poems are.

A simple daily practice:

• Light a lamp in the evening
• Recite or read one verse, in whatever language you have it in
• Sit with it for a few minutes
• That is enough

The Vaishnava daily forms, if you want the fuller frame:

• Vishnu Sahasranama, the thousand names, on any day and particularly Ekadashi
• Thiruppallandu and a portion of the Prabandham
• The Dwaya mantra and the Ashtakshara, Om Namo Narayanaya, for those who have received them from a teacher
• Tulsi offered
• Ekadashi observance

On initiation. Some parts of Sri Vaishnava practice, particularly the mantras and the pancha samskara initiation, are traditionally received from an acharya and are not simply picked up from a book.

That is worth respecting. Reciting the Prabandham and the Sahasranama needs no initiation and is open to everybody. The specific mantras of the sampradaya are held differently, and if you want them, the way is to approach a teacher.

Where to hear it:

• Srirangam, the foremost Divya Desam, where the Prabandham is recited daily and the Araiyar Sevai survives
• Alwarthirunagari, Nammalvar's birthplace, in Tirunelveli district
• Srivilliputhur, Andal and Periyalvar's town
• Thirukovalur, for the corridor
• Any Sri Vaishnava temple during Adhyayana Utsavam, the twenty one day festival in Margazhi at which the whole four thousand is recited

Adhyayana Utsavam is the thing to see if you can arrange it. Over roughly twenty one days in December and January, the entire Prabandham is recited before the deity, in order, at Srirangam and elsewhere, with the ten days of Pagal Pathu and ten of Ra Pathu, the day ten and night ten.

The day it concludes, at Srirangam, is Vaikunta Ekadashi, when the northern gate is opened.

So the four thousand verses that begin with Poigai Alvar making a lamp out of the earth end, once a year, with a door being opened.