Kannappa

Kannappa is the most celebrated of the Nayanars after the three Tevaram poets: the hunter whose worship broke every rule of ritual and was accepted above all correct offering. His story, told in Sekkilar’s Periya Puranam and cherished across the whole Shaiva world, is set at Sri Kalahasti in the Andhra country, and tradition holds him to have been the Pandava Arjuna reborn — the archer who had once wrestled Shiva in the guise of a hunter, returned to finish his devotion in a hunter’s body.

The hunter’s offering

Thinnan, son of a chieftain of the hunting tribes, came upon a Shiva linga on the hill at Kalahasti and was seized by a love he had no training to express. He served the god as a hunter could: water carried from the river in his own mouth, wild flowers plucked from his own hair, and the best of his kill, roasted and tasted first to be sure it was good. Each morning the brahmin priest Sivagochariar arrived to find the shrine defiled — meat, spat water, trodden ground — and cleansed it in horror; each evening the hunter returned and worshipped again. To the priest, tradition says, Shiva declared in a dream that what defiled the shrine was dearer to him than any rite: the hunter’s tasting was love’s testing, his mouth a vessel purer than any pot. The priest was told to hide and watch.

The eyes

Next day the god staged his proof. One eye of the linga began to bleed. The hunter, frantic, tried herbs in vain — then, remembering that like cures like, gouged out his own eye with an arrowhead and set it on the god’s. The bleeding stopped; and at once the second eye of the linga began to flow. Thinnan did not hesitate: he set his foot on the linga to mark the spot he would no longer be able to see, and raised the arrow to his remaining eye. Shiva’s hand shot out of the stone and caught his wrist — stay, Kannappa — and the hunter stood whole, healed, and named: Kannappa, he who gave his eyes. Tradition counts his whole career of worship at six days, against the priest’s lifetime of correct service, and draws the moral without embarrassment. He stands enshrined at Kalahasti, and his story has been retold wherever Shaiva devotion has argued that love outranks purity — the tribal hunter with an arrow at his own eye, the tradition’s sharpest image of what it means by bhakti.