Sakkiya

Sakkiya Nāyanār bears the strangest devotional signature of the sixty-three: his daily worship of Shiva was to throw a stone at the liṅga. His name preserves his path — Sakkiya, from Sakya, the Buddhist order he had joined before his turn to Shiva.

The story

The tradition tells that he was born in the Tamil country and went to Kanchipuram in search of truth, entering the Buddhist order and mastering its doctrine. His inquiry, the Periya Puranam says, led him beyond it: he became convinced that Shiva was the ultimate refuge. Yet he kept the monk's robe, holding outward garb to be indifferent — what mattered was within. His worship began almost by accident: coming upon a liṅga, he cast a stone at it, and, recognizing in the act a strange upwelling of love, resolved to repeat it daily. Each day, before he would eat, one stone thrown to the liṅga — his flower, offered in the only gesture that had come to him. One day he sat to his meal and remembered the stone still unthrown; he ran fasting to the liṅga and made the offering, and at that instant, tradition holds, Shiva appeared and took him to himself.

What the tale carries

The hagiography is a deliberate paradox: an act that in any other hand would be desecration is received as worship because of the love behind it. It also carries a quieter point about the porous religious world of early medieval Kanchipuram, where a seeker could pass from the Buddhist order to Shaiva sainthood without shedding his robe. Form, the story insists twice over, is nothing; intent is everything.