The Man Who Wrote a Verse a Year

Somewhere on a road in southern India, in a century that nobody can fix with certainty, a yogi from the Himalayas was walking south.

His name was Sundaranatha. He was a Shaiva adept, originally from the Kailash region, who had been initiated by - depending on which source you consult - either the god Shiva himself, or a teacher named Nandinatha who held a direct transmission from Shiva. He had spent years in austerity at Kailash, and Shiva had instructed him to travel to the Pothiya Mountains in what is now Tamil Nadu, to meet his contemporary, the sage Agastya, and stay with him for a time.

So Sundaranatha was walking. South through the subcontinent. On foot. Alone.

Near a village called Sathanur - in the modern Aaduthurai region - he came upon a herd of cattle standing around the dead body of their cowherd. The cowherd’s name was Mulan. He had collapsed in the field. The cattle, in the version preserved in Sekkilar’s Periya Puranam - the great Tamil hagiography of all sixty-three Tamil Shaivite saints, composed under the patronage of the Chola king Kulottunga II (r. 1133–1150 CE) and completed between 1139 and 1140 CE at the Thousand Pillared Hall of the Chidambaram temple - were lowing in distress, refusing to leave their dead master, refusing to be led home.

Sundaranatha stopped.

The yogi who entered a cowherd

What he did next is the moment from which everything in this chapter descends, and it is the moment that has caused Hindu scholarship more difficulty than almost any other in the Tamil tradition. According to Periya Puranam, Sundaranatha placed his own body in the hollow of a nearby tree, and through the yogic siddhi called parakaya pravesha - entering another body - left his own body and entered the body of the dead cowherd, Mulan.

The cowherd, now inhabited by the yogi from Kailash, rose up.

The cattle, satisfied, were led home.

When Sundaranatha returned to the tree later that day to retrieve his own body, it was gone.

It had disappeared. The tradition does not say how. Some accounts say a passing wind carried it elsewhere. Some say Shiva himself removed it, because the yogi’s work was now to be done in the cowherd’s form. Whatever the explanation, the yogi who had walked south from Kailash now had no Kailash body to return to. He was Sundaranatha inside Mulan. The body of a Tamil cowherd. The mind of a Himalayan Shaivite adept.

He took the name Thirumoolar. Thiru - sacred. Mulan - the cowherd whose body he now wore. The Sacred Mulan. He walked to a village called Tiruvavaduthurai, on the bank of the Kaveri river in what is now Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu. He sat down under a tree - an arasa-maram, the peepal tree, the same species the Buddha had sat under at Bodh Gaya about half a millennium earlier. He went into samadhi.

Three thousand years under the tree

This is where the legend goes from strange to almost unimaginable.

According to Periya Puranam and the other early Tamil sources - the Tiruttondar Tiruvandadi of Nambiyandar Nambi, the Tiruttondar Purana Saram of Umapathy Sivacariyar, the Tiruvavaduturaip Puranam of Swaminatha Thambiran - Thirumoolar did not get up.

He sat under that tree, in continuous meditation, for what the tradition records as three thousand years.

At the end of each year of meditation, he would come out of samadhi for a few hours. He would take a stylus. He would scribe a single verse on a palm leaf. The verse would capture the sum of one year’s contemplation. Then he would return into samadhi.

This is how the Tirumantiram was written.

Three thousand verses. Three thousand years. One verse per year.

The text exists. Anyone can read it. The most authoritative modern critical edition is B. Natarajan’s three-volume Tirumantiram: A Tamil Scriptural Classic, published by Sri Ramakrishna Math, Madras, 1991 (revised and expanded by the publisher in subsequent printings), with the full Tamil original, English translation, and commentary. The text runs to 3,047 verses in Natarajan’s edition, divided into nine tantirams (sections). It is the tenth book of the Tirumurai - the twelve-volume canonical scripture of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta, the equivalent in Tamil of what the four Vedas are in Sanskrit.

Verse 74 of the Tirumantiram makes the claim itself, in Thirumoolar’s own voice: that he lived through seven yugas - seven ages - before composing the work. Seven yugas is, in the standard Hindu calculation, far longer than three thousand years. It is millions. The author of the verse is asserting his own functional immortality.

Trying to date the undateable

Modern scholarship has spent over a century trying to date Thirumoolar, and the dates assigned cover a range of two thousand years. The British Tamil historian Camille Bulcke considered him pre-Christian. The Indian scholar K.A. Nilakanta Sastri placed him in the 7th–8th century CE. S. Vaiyapuripillai, in his History of Tamil Language and Literature (Madras: New Century Book House, 1956), suggested the 6th century. The Nandinatha Sampradaya, the lineage that holds Thirumoolar as its founder, places the work at approximately 200 BCE.

The Tirumantiram itself does not help adjudicate. It refers to the gold-thatched roof of the Chidambaram temple - which was first gilded by the Pallava king Simhavarman in the 5th century CE - and it refers to so many distinct currents of Indian religious thought that scholars use it to date other texts rather than the other way around. Verse 74’s claim of seven yugas is read by every modern scholar as poetic, not literal. But the legend of three thousand years of unbroken samadhi is what the tradition preserved as the real measure of how long it takes to compose a work of this depth.

The oldest Tamil book on yoga

What is undisputed is the work itself.

The Tirumantiram is the oldest surviving Tamil text on yoga, tantra, and the worship of the Divine. It is the first systematic treatment in any Indian language of the eight-limbed yoga (ashtanga yoga) that the Sanskrit tradition would later canonise through Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras; in fact, where the Yoga Sutras are terse, the Tirumantiram on yoga is detailed, with verse-by-verse instruction on posture, breath, the energy channels (nadis), the centres of consciousness (chakras), and the rising of kundalini. The third tantiram - the longest of the nine sections - is the great yoga manual.

The text is also, embedded inside the yoga material, a manual of goddess-worship.

Thirumoolar’s deity is Sakti in Tamil - the same Divine Feminine the Sanskrit tradition called Tripurasundari, Lalita, Rajarajeshvari. Thirumoolar gave her another name as well: Sivasakti, the inseparable union of Shiva and his power. The famous declaration of Tirumantiram verse 2104 - anbe sivam - “Love is Shiva” - is one of the highest aphorisms in any Indian devotional tradition. The same text contains, in verses scattered across multiple tantirams, the construction and worship of the Navakkari Chakra - the Nine-Letter Wheel - a mantric diagram specific to the Tamil Siddha tradition. The Navakkari is not the Sri Yantra. It is a different geometry, with different deities, with a different nine-letter mantra. But the underlying goddess is the same goddess.

The same goddess, two idioms

This is one of the great unresolved questions of South Asian religious history. The Tirumantiram and the Sanskrit Vamakeshvara Tantra are dealing with the same goddess. They are doing so in completely different idioms, using different geometries, different mantras, different ritual structures. The two texts may have been composed within centuries of each other, possibly even contemporaneously. There is no evidence of direct contact between the lineages. The Tamil Siddha tradition that traces itself to Thirumoolar did not, until much later, read Sanskrit tantric texts. The Kashmiri Shakta tradition that produced the Vamakeshvarimata did not read Tamil. And yet both arrived at the same fundamental architecture: a feminine deity, worshipped through a geometric diagram, contacted through a mantra, realized through internal yogic practice.

The standard scholarly explanation is that both streams drew on a shared, much older substrate of pan-Indian goddess worship - the Shakta substrate visible in the Devi Sukta of the Rig Veda (10.125), in the Sri Sukta (a khila appendix to the Rig Veda), in the Devi Mahatmya of the Markandeya Purana (5th–6th century CE) - and then developed in parallel without contact, each producing its own systematic architecture out of the shared material. The mystical explanation, given inside both traditions, is that the goddess is one, and she revealed herself in the form appropriate to each language. The scholarly and the mystical explanations are not, on closer inspection, incompatible.

Why one tradition survived and the other broke

What is striking about Thirumoolar’s Tirumantiram is its survival. Where Ishvarashiva’s Rasamahodadhi was lost within four centuries of its composition, the Tirumantiram has been continuously transmitted, recited, copied onto fresh palm leaves every generation, sung in Shaiva temples, and used as the foundational text of Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta for at least fifteen hundred years and possibly longer. There has never been a moment when no one was reading it. The text has had its dark periods - during the Vijayanagara collapse and the early Mughal incursions, palm-leaf libraries across South India were destroyed, and many Tamil texts were lost in those centuries - but the Tirumantiram survived because it was in use. Cantor priests at Tamil Shaiva temples chanted from it. Householders memorised verses. The Nandinatha Sampradaya treated it as canonical scripture. The Tirumurai compilation, made between the 10th and 12th centuries CE by Nambiyandar Nambi under the patronage of the Chola king Rajaraja I, formalised the Tirumantiram as the tenth volume of the Tamil Shaiva canon. Once that compilation was made, the text was institutionally protected. Copies multiplied. Manuscripts proliferated. Loss became, for all practical purposes, impossible.

Recited, not guarded

The contrast with the Kashmir story tells us something the encyclopedia accounts of Sri Vidya never quite say.

The Sanskrit Tantric stream, the Kashmir stream, the stream that produced the Vamakeshvara Tantra and Ishvarashiva’s Rasamahodadhi and Jayaratha’s Vivarana and eventually Bhaskararaya’s Saubhagya Bhaskara, is a tradition that has always been guarded. Tantric material was esoteric. Texts were transmitted to initiates only. Libraries were small. Books were rare. When the political upheaval came - Muslim sultanates in the north, the destruction of Kashmir Shaivite institutions in the 14th century, the migration of surviving Pandits south to Banaras and Maharashtra - the textual chain was thin enough to break in many places. Ishvarashiva’s book broke.

The Tamil Siddha stream is a tradition that has always been recited. The Tirumantiram was not held by an elite of initiates. It was sung. It was carried in the body of the people who knew it by heart. When the political upheaval came south - and it did come south, in waves, with the Delhi Sultanate’s southern campaigns in the 14th century, with the establishment and fall of Vijayanagara, with the eventual British colonial period - the recitation continued. There was no centralised library to burn. The text was distributed across millions of mouths.

This is the structural reason Sri Vidya is not one tradition but several. The lineages survived through different mechanisms. They had different fragilities. They had different strengths. The modern composite we now call “Sri Vidya” inherits all of them, but it inherits them through paths that left different things intact.

The next chapter takes the two rivers seriously. They had a moment, in the 14th century, when they almost became one tradition under a single man’s hand. They did not. Why they did not is the next chapter.