Nayanar

The Alvars, twelve in number, were lost in love for Vishnu. The Nayanars, sixty-three of them, were on fire for Shiva.

…mns to Shiva composed centuries earlier by the poet-saints called the Nayanars.

In the Tamil south, the Āḻvār and Nāyaṉār poet-saints, between the sixth and ninth centuries, poured out an intense personal love of Vishnu and of Shiva in their own language, the first great surge of bhakti in…

This was the bhakti revolution, and it came in two great waves of poet-saints. The Nayanars , sixty-three of them, sang to Shiva .

The first singers: Alvars and Nayanars The movement crystallised first in the Tamil south, in two parallel streams that ran from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries.

In the Tamil country there is again a bhakti flowering, the Nayanars , the sixty-three Shaiva poet-saints whose Tevaram hymns pour the same devotional heat over Shiva that the Alvars poured over Vishnu.

Each of these temples is genuinely old, and each was sung, centuries ago, by the Tamil Shaiva poet-saints, the Nayanars, in the great age of southern devotion between the seventh and ninth centuries.

This is the philosophy that gathered up the devotion of the Nayanars , the sixty-three Tamil poet-saints whose hymns, the Tevaram , sang Shiva into the daily life of the south.