Kungiliya Kalaya

Kungiliya Kalaya Nayanar, a brahmin of Tirukkadavur in the Chola country, took his name from his service: the unbroken burning of kungiliyam — fragrant benzoin resin — before Shiva. The Periya Puranam remembers him for two acts, one of ruinous devotion and one of impossible strength.

The necklace and the incense

His daily offering of incense outran his means until the household had nothing left. His wife, to buy rice for the family, gave him her tali — the marriage necklace, a wife’s last and most guarded possession. On the way to the market, tradition relates, he met a trader with a store of fine kungiliyam, and the choice did not detain him: the necklace bought incense, and the incense went to the god, while the family starved on. Shiva, the hagiography says, would not be outdone in such an exchange; the empty house was found filled with grain and gold, and the god appeared to his servant in a dream to seal the gift.

The leaning linga

The second story is set at Tiruppanandal, where the linga in the temple had come to lean and could not be righted. Teams of men and elephants, tradition holds, hauled on ropes in vain. Kungiliya Kalaya wound the rope about his own neck and pulled — staking his life on the effort — and the linga rose upright of itself, yielding not to force but to the devotion behind it. The two tales frame a single figure: a man for whom nothing, from a wife’s necklace to his own neck, outweighed the service of the god.