Tiru Neelakanta

Tiru Neelakanta Nayanar, the potter-saint of Chidambaram, stands second in the traditional roll of the sixty-three Nayanars. His trade was the humble service of the faith: he shaped begging-bowls for Shaiva ascetics and gave them freely, invoking the god’s blue throat — Tiruneelakantam — as he worked, so constantly that the invocation became his name.

The oath

The Periya Puranam relates that in his youth the potter strayed to a courtesan. His wife, wounded, forbade him to touch her — swearing it by Tiruneelakantam. Because the oath was sealed with the god’s own name, the potter would not breach it in the smallest degree, and of his own accord widened it: if he might not touch his wife, he would touch no woman. The two lived on under one roof in unbroken chastity, telling no one, and grew old together in service of the god.

The bowl in the tank

In their old age Shiva came to test them, disguised as a wandering ascetic. He entrusted a begging-bowl to the potter’s keeping and departed; when he returned to claim it, the bowl had vanished. No replacement, however fine, would satisfy him: the potter must swear his innocence in the temple tank, holding his wife’s hand. Unable to explain, the old couple entered the water gripping a bamboo staff between them instead — and rose from the tank restored to youth, their secret honoured to the last. The ascetic revealed himself, and the pair were taken into the god’s grace. Tradition reads the tale as a study in the weight of a word: an oath made in anger, kept for a lifetime with a fidelity that turned it into worship.