Murthiyar

Murthiyar, or Murti Nāyanār, belongs to the sixty-three Nāyanārs of Tamil Shaivism. His service was a merchant's: he supplied the ground sandal paste with which the image of Shiva at Madurai was anointed each day. The Periya Puranam turns that modest office into one of the tradition's starkest images of devotion tested.

The story

Sekkilar tells that Madurai fell to an invading king from the north who favoured the Jain ascetics and set himself against the Shaiva faith. To break the temple's worship he cut off the supply of sandalwood. When Murthiyar's last stock was exhausted, the saint would not let the anointing lapse: he set his own elbow to the grinding stone and wore it down in place of the wood, offering flesh where timber failed. Shiva, the telling goes, stayed his hand and declared the persecution ended.

The usurper died without an heir, and the ministers, following old custom, loosed the state elephant to choose a ruler. It garlanded Murthiyar. He accepted the throne as one more form of service, ruling — tradition says — not in silk and crown but in sacred ash, matted hair and rudraksha beads, the insignia of a devotee rather than a king.

What the tale carries

The legend compresses two recurrent themes of the Nayanar canon: the body itself offered when material means run out, and worldly power conferred unsought on those who never desired it. It also preserves, in hagiographic colour, the memory of real sectarian conflict between Shaivas and Jains in the early medieval Tamil country.