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The Divya Prabandham is the collective corpus of the passionate hymns of the Alvar mystics (5th-8th centuries A.D.). It was the scholar-saint Nathamuni who, in the 10th century, retrieved and compiled this bhakti treasure which is the pride of Tamil classical literature. The Sri Vaishnava guru parampara (inheritance order of the preceptors) is held to commence from Lord Sri Narayana himself, and to centre, rightly so, around Sri Nathamuni and his grandson Sri Yamuna. The Alvars represented all the caste-groups of the society and their works enjoy the status of "dravida" or Tamil Veda, on par with the "girvaana" Veda in pre-Panini Sanskrit. The Divya Prabandham is in the form of adoration of the deities of 108 temples (divya desams) situated in different parts of the country, and employs every form of poetics (aNi) and prosody (chandam) available in Tamil. The version presented here was typed in by a small group of volunteers in 1994. To download the entire collection of poems, click here for the DOS version (zipped) or here for the Unix version (tarred and gzipped).
MUDHAL
AYIRAM
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Mani Varadarajan Last modified: Fri Dec 17 17:44:50 PST |