Tirumazhisai Alvar

Tirumazhisai Alvar, named for the town of Tirumazhisai near Chennai and known in Sanskrit as Bhaktisara, 'the essence of devotion', stands apart among the twelve Alvars as the seeker who arrived by elimination. Hagiography gives him a harsh beginning: born, tradition tells, to the sage Bhargava's wife as an unformed lump and abandoned, he was made whole by Vishnu's grace and raised by a childless woodcutter. Before his conversion he is said to have worked through the rival systems of his age — yoga, Shaivism, the Jain and Buddhist teachings — testing each and moving on, until the elder saint Pey Alvar turned him to Vishnu. Shrivaishnava tradition holds him to be an embodiment of Sudarshana, the Lord's discus — aptly, for his verse cuts.

The god who obeyed

His most cherished legend belongs to Kanchipuram. When the king banished the Alvar's devoted disciple Kanikannan, the saint would not stay in a city that expelled his own; he turned to the reclining Vishnu of the Tiruvekka shrine and bade the Lord roll up his serpent bed and come along. The god did as he was told, and the city, deprived of its deity, fell dark until king and citizens begged all three back. The deity of Tiruvekka is worshipped to this day as Yathothkari — 'he who did as he was told' — the shrine's own name preserving the tradition that God obeys his devotee.

The works

Two of his poems stand in the Nalayira Divya Prabandham: the Nanmukan Tiruvandadhi and the Tiruchanda Viruttam. They carry the stamp of his road to faith — argumentative, doctrinally combative, insisting on the supremacy of Narayana against every school he had tried and left. Among the Alvars of ecstasy and surrender, Tirumazhisai is the polemicist: the saint who reasoned his way to rapture, and kept the reasons in the verse.