Apputhi Adigal

Apputhi Adigal, a brahmin of Tingalur in the Chola country, is among the sixty-three Nāyanārs, and his story is the canon's most winning study of devotion at second hand. The object of his reverence was not a god but a man: Tirunavukkarasar — Appar — the elder of the great Tevaram hymnists, whom Apputhi knew only by report.

The story

So complete was his admiration that he effaced his own name from his life. The water-stalls he endowed for travellers were named for Tirunavukkarasar; so, the Periya Puranam tells, were his cattle, his household goods and his own sons. One day an old ascetic passing through Tingalur stopped at a water-stall, read the name, and asked who this Apputhi was who gave away his charity under another man's name. Apputhi, summoned, rebuked the stranger for speaking lightly of the great Appar — and then discovered that the stranger was Appar himself.

The saint consented to eat at his house. The elder son, sent to cut a plantain leaf for the meal, was bitten by a cobra and died; the parents hid the body rather than let grief interrupt hospitality to a devotee. Appar sensed the concealment, had the boy brought, and sang before the shrine at Tingalur; the tradition holds the boy rose, and a Tevaram hymn on Tingalur is linked to the episode. Only then did the household sit to the interrupted meal.

What the tale carries

The story sanctifies self-erasure: a man who put another's name on everything he owned, and hospitality above his own dead son. In the canon's terms, Apputhi's devotion to the devotee was itself worship of Shiva — the doctrine the Nayanar tradition states more often than any other, here given its most domestic form.