The Hindu : Messenger with a mission

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Nov 11, 2003

Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous - Religion

Messenger with a mission

CHENNAI NOV. 11 . Worship of God has been broadly classified into four groups by one of the major Hindu religious systems. Devotees can undertake to do service in temples like cleaning their precincts or raising flower gardens. Others may resort to approach God through the observance of rites and rituals. The third can meditate and carry out similar devotional exercises while in the advanced stage they can seek identity with God by acquiring spiritual knowledge. This four-fold path leading to God has been advocated by the Saiva school and its torchbearers had adopted these in their lives. Their devotional lyrics have been held as sacred literature. Saivism, which extols the supremacy of Lord Siva, draws its inspiration from the "Agamas" and the first divine messenger, to take credit, among the galaxy of 63 Nayanmars, to render them in Tamil, was Thirumoolar.

In a lecture (on Periapuranam) Sri D. Gnanasundaram mentioned about the Mantras incorporated in his 3000 stanzas. Several aspects of human life and other extraordinary topics and scientific information and other features on man's behaviour are contained in them. For example the different stages in the growth of the embryo in a mother's womb are illustrated therein. The life of Thirumoolar reveals how leaving his Himalayan retreat he came down to the plains of India to meet Sage Agastya in the Pothigai hills in the South, with a mission. The places he covered en route include Varanasi, Srisailam, Kalahasti and Kanchi. Of his own choice, filled with great compassion for the erring humanity, he was in this country. Literary evidence shows that in those days the names of the towns and the temples therein differed from one another.

One day the Yogi reached the outskirts of Sathanoor village where he found a herd of cows lowing miserably round the dead body of their master. Taking pity on them and with his spiritual powers, he entered the body of the shepherd. When the "corpse" thus came alive, he led the cows to their homes. He continued to remain in the cowherd's cast-off frame and was soon immersed in deep contemplation under a peepul tree at a nearby Saivite centre. Scientific data presents how it exudes greater amount of oxygen and how its leaves oscillate from top to lower level instead of the usual manner of those of other trees moving sideways. People flocked to him and he was credited as having rendered one verse in one year. In spite of the passage of time his work abides with devotees still.

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