Nayanars
நாயன்மார் nāyaṉmārThe sixty-three Tamil poet-saints devoted to Shiva (6th-9th c.), whose passionate vernacular hymns (collected in the Tevaram) helped launch the bhakti movement in the south. Their Vaishnava counterparts were the Alvars.
Where this term appears
- The Bhakti Movement History
The Alvars, twelve in number, were lost in love for Vishnu. The Nayanars, sixty-three of them, were on fire for Shiva.
- The Chola Age and the Temple as Institution History
…mns to Shiva composed centuries earlier by the poet-saints called the Nayanars.
- The Tamil Stream: Sangam, Bhakti, and the Temple South History
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 Bhakti Saints Philosophy
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.
- The Four Streams of Hinduism Essentials
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.
- The Pancha Bhuta Sthalam: Five Element Temples Temples
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.
- What is Shaivism? Lineages
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.
- The Sound That Remains Treatise
Namdev, the Alvars and Nayanars of the Tamil country whose hymns to Vishnu and Shiva, studied by scholars like Carman and Narayanan as a veritable "Tamil Veda," made the Name a poetry the people could carry.