Pey Alvar

Pey Alvar is the third of the mudhal alvars, the earliest three of the twelve Tamil poet-saints of Vishnu. His name is the boldest in the canon: pey means a ghost or one possessed, and the tradition wears it proudly — he was so drunk with God that the world thought him mad. Hagiography gives him, like his companions, a flower-birth: he was found, it is told, in a red water-lily in a well at Mylapore, now within Chennai, where tradition still marks the site near the Kesava Perumal temple. Shrivaishnava tradition holds him to be an embodiment of Nandaka, Vishnu's sword.

The one who saw

In the founding legend of the three saints — the rain-swept night at Tirukkovilur when they stood pressed together in a narrow passage and felt a fourth presence crowding in — it is Pey who names the vision. His Moondram Tiruvandadhi opens with the cry the tradition treasures: today I have seen Tiru — the goddess Lakshmi — and seen the golden form of the Lord who bears her; I have seen the sun-bright discus and the conch, here, in this sea-coloured body. Where Poigai lit the cosmos as a lamp and Bhutham lit the heart, Pey simply reports what the light revealed.

Place in the canon

His hundred venba verses complete the trio of antadis that open the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, and his vision of Vishnu together with Shri set a keynote for Shrivaishnavism, the tradition that would come to bear the goddess's name. Tradition also makes him the master who turned Tirumazhisai Alvar to Vishnu — the ecstatic, in his one recorded act of sober instruction, recruiting the philosopher.