Amaraneedi

Amaraneedi Nayanar was a prosperous merchant of Pazhaiyarai in the Chola country who settled at Tirunallur, where his service to the faith took a characteristically practical form: he fed Shaiva ascetics and supplied them with clothing, above all the kovanam, the simple loincloth of the renouncer, which he gave to any who asked.

The vanished loincloth

The Periya Puranam relates that Shiva came to test him as a young brahmachari, who left a spare loincloth in the merchant’s safekeeping against the rains and went to bathe. The cloth vanished. When the youth returned to claim it, Amaraneedi offered replacements of the finest quality; all were refused — the ascetic wanted his own cloth or its exact worth. Let it be weighed, he said, and placed a loincloth in one pan of a balance. The merchant heaped the other pan with cloth, then with silver, then with gold, then with everything he possessed; the little cloth outweighed it all. Ruined and undaunted, Amaraneedi understood what was being asked. With his wife and son he mounted the pan himself, calling on the god — and the scales came level. The ascetic revealed himself, and the family, tradition holds, was taken whole into Shiva’s grace.

The weighing

The image of the balance is the story’s whole argument: against the god’s claim, goods weigh nothing and the giver everything. Among the sixty-three, Amaraneedi is the merchant-saint whose ledger was closed by putting himself in the scale.