Nammalvar's Philosophy
• October 1, 1974
< Journey to the Real | Index | Nammalvar's Poetry >
Nammalvar's approach to Reality is that of a mystic and a poet, not that of a formal philosopher. His works show no conscious attempt to present in ordered sequence any systematised philo- sophy. On the contrary, there is often a turning back, a wild, feverish seeking, a desperate urgency that blurs the words, a clouding of thought with emotion, all of which are the hall-mark of a genuine passion for God but are impediments to the clear, abstract speculation, the order and the relentless purpose of the mere philosopher. Nevertheless, from out of the poetry and the experience that it conveys, there emerges a body of philosophical thought that is striking and that, though appearing in fragments in his work, could be gathered together into a coherent whole. It is this that is said to have influenced Sri Ramanuja, the great Vaishnava thinker and preceptor, while he wrote his well-known commentary on the Vedanta Sutras and the Gita.
How much of this philosophy is derived by Nammalvar directly from the Vedas and the Upanishads cannot be precisely ascertained. The great Vaishnava commentators, Nampillai and Periavachan Pillai, have shown a number of parallels between Nammalvar's works on the one hand and the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Itihasa and the Puranas on the other. If the traditional account of Nammalvar's life is accepted, he did not have any contact with the world for years from his birth and besides, he was born in a section of the community to which in those days, the Vedas were not accessible in the original. He could not have had therefore direct personal knowledge of the Vedas and the Upanishads at the time he broke the silence of the first sixteen years of his life with his memorable reply to Madhurakavi's question. It is reasonable to think therefore, that such resemblances as are found between Nammalvar's work and the great Sanskrit scriptures may be due to the fact that both are expressions, the Vedas and Upanishads, in part at least 1, of mystical experience and of an intuitive apprehension of Truth.
Besides, many of the Vedic and Upani- shadic ideas might have been in the air of the Hindu revival of Nammalvar's time; the Puranas and Itihasas enshrining them could have been integrated into the common ethos: and also, Narayana or Tirumal was worshipped among the Tamils long before Nammalvar. I should like, however, to leave the question open and turn to what Nammalvar's works say about Reality, without attempting to seek or define their relationship or their indebtedness to the Vedas, the Upanishads and other Hindu scriptures and the Tamil worship of Tirumal.
To Nammalvar, God is the Ultimate Reality. His thought is absolutely theistic. The world and the individual human soul are also real to him. However, in so far as they do not have an independent existence apart from God but are within Him and He is within them, they are parts of Reality and Reality is there- fore really one :
To Siva who burnt the three cities, his right side. From his navel, He created Brahma facing all the directions of space, That this world and He may be made visible; And He is in its heart, And yet if I were to speak of it, All are within Him, That is His mystery. 2
This phenomenal world, then, is not a mere illusion to Nammalvar as it is to certain Indian idealists. It is transient, no doubt, but it renews itself continuously according to His design, in an endless cycle of growth and decay and revival, of birth and death. It has its origin in the Real and cannot be other than part of it. It exists because of Him, He sustains it, and during Pralaya, the time of dissolution, it is taken into Him, only to be recreated. The dissolution is not absolute, the world is reborn, so He wills, and is allowed to engender and float on another time-cycle.
As Siva, And as Brahma, recreating them, He weaves a mystery Beyond the Ken even of the devas. 3
I made it. And I am that world. I rule over it, I break it, And I swallow it in the end. I am the Lord. 4
The words 'I am that world' are significant. Besides being created, sustained, dissolved and recreated by Him in an endless leela or play, this cosmos as we see it, ever changing, dying and coming to new birth in its innumerable parts, is still the body of the Lord, his Virat swarupa, his infinite form. In this sense, He is the world. In every part of it, great or small, from the tiniest speck of space, a minute drop of water, a way-side wild flower" to the most perfect star, He lives in everything as the antaryamin, the in-dweller. Everywhere and in everything, He has his abode, if only we could see it.
Fire, air, the waters and the earth, He is all these And all that spread innumerable on them, And in all these Like life in a body, He dwells hidden, everywhere, And yet, He, the glory of the Vedas, Is their eternal abode. Verily, all the worlds are within Him. 5
And so it follows that He has his secret shrine in the heart of man too, in the innermost depths of the human spirit. Thus
How else do I exist? 7
And got into my heart, secretly, And stands one with my flesh, And has become entwined in my being. 8
The Tamil equivalents of the words 'within' and 'outside' are consciously used by Nammalvar :
He is, And all these are His forms. If you question it, Why, all these shadows Are His shadow. But He is, He is, With these twin attributes, Being within, being not within, He is. 10
These twin states of being as qualities, all-pervading and beyond, He is. At a later stage, when Nammalvar had reached the end of his quest and had realized the Absolute, he speaks more vividly:
Wily thief that He is, Has come in the guise of a strange unknown poet, Has entered, unseen by any, And become one with my heart and life. Oh, but He has eaten them up, Allowing only Himself To remain, nothing but Himself, An infinite fulfilment, 11
God is thus within man and outside him in the world of ear and eye, where His servitors, the natural forces he has unleashed, the amaras, the deathless ones, are untiringly at work fulfilling His design. He is also the past, the present and the future, the time element that His creation unfolds :
That is gone and that is yet to come. 12
In another and entirely different sense too, He is 'within' and 'without', to use the phrase of Eckhart, within all cosmos, the unseen eternal witness having His seat in every animate and inanimate thing and so within man too; and yet He is without, transcending all and untouched by any. He is the Real beyond time, space and the flux of things and so, beyond the limited intellect of man and his still more limited speech.
And in every one's. He is body and life, Air and fire. He is near, Yet He is far, Beyond thought Untouched, immaculate. 13
To know, to know and still to know, However you try, This depth unplumbable, This breadth and this height immeasurable, This state transcending form, How can you know? You will never know. 14
Reality, though one, has two aspects to Nammalvar, the immanent and the transcendent. At the same time, from the point of view of individual man, it appears as three, man, the universe and God. Man's soul has an apparently individual existence, so has the universe. But God is within both and both are within Him. Man and the universe exist but not independently, they are entirely His. Nammalvar speaks of all this in abstract terms, defining Reality in the only way human speech can, negatively, as immeasurable, inscrutable, beyond definition and the human ken, beyond space and time, unreachable even by the immortal gods whom He has created.
Who can know Him? Siva and the four-faced Brahma, Who are only His forms, Can even they Know my Lord? 15
Incomparable. He is the origin of all that are. If the cosmos falters And tends to turn to topsy-turvy, He, by Himself, can recreate it. Who on the earth can measure Him? 16
That all idea of height and good fades? It is He. 17
He has this, Or has not that, Of form and formless, on earth and sky, Beyond the reach of the senses, He is, an eternal abiding good. Can we ever near Him? 18
Nammalvar tries in places to express the all-inclusive inexpressible nature of Reality through paradox:
Is poverty and wealth, Hell and Heaven. Foe and friend, Poison and ambrosia... Thus, He spreads in manifold ways.
Confusion and clarity, Punishment and compassion, Heat and shade. He is inscrutable.
He is meeting, He is parting, Remembrance and forgetfulness, That which is, that which is not, Not this, nor that, Nor anything else.
Red, black and white, He is truth, He is falsehood, He is Youth and age, The old and the new...
He is fame and obloquy...
He is littleness, He is greatness, Narrowness, spaciousness... He is those that move and those that stand still, He is all, and not of all. 19
And yet, Nammalvar believes in a personal God. It is not as though he is not aware of the truth that God-head is indefinable and that 'calling It good or great or blessed is included in the words, He is.' 20 But when he thought of God and yearned for Him, it was to a personal God, Sriman Narayana that he turned, Narayana of whom the Taittiriya Upanishad speaks, He with His discus and His conch, His fragrant tulasi garland and the golden robe and crown, dark-hued, lotus-eyed, an apotheosis of beauty. The worship of Narayana or Tirumal as The Tamils called Him, is mentioned in the Vedas and also in the oldest works of Tamil letters, the poems of the Sangam age. 21 Nammalvar held Narayana as the Absolute and speaks of Him often, under- standably enough, in a mixture of the abstract and the concrete, of the impersonal and personal.
Warrior supreme, My Lord, four-armed, Wearing the cool tulasi garland... My dark gem-like Lord. 22
Thus he begins, and follows it up with
He is beyond our ken, He is this and not this, He comes in the form one desires If only one turns to Him. And yet that may not be His form. 23
But it is of the personal God, Narayana, of whom Nammalvar sings, though here and there the concrete vision merges into the abstract indefinable.
Is it the glory of Thy face That has flowered into thy golden crown? Has the effulgence of Thy feet Blossomed into the lotus on which thou standest? Did the light of Thy body, gold-rich, Become Thy golden robe And the bright jewels Thou wearest ? 24
Thus far the concrete, then the abstract enters:
Neither blossoming nor drooping, Thou art wisdom pure and endless. Thou art all, fullness, fulfilment. 25
Nammalvar expresses the faith that in addition to being connected with the earth as antaryamin (dweller within), God came to the earth in visible form at various times, placing Himself within the bounds of the physical body, of space and time and the dark web of transience. This coming of the Transcendent to the world of birth and death is avatara, literally, descent. All such voluntary descents of the Supreme One are out of His boundless compassion for man, and for the purpose, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, and as Nammalvar affirms, of uprooting evil and the establishment of righteousness.
Thy glorious original form in Heaven And took birth here To destroy Kamsa Who harassed the righteous. 26
Who takes birth as a man, Accepts this life filled with sorrow, Coming here before our eyes To lift us through sorrow To his divine state. 27
There are some who consider these avataras as a symbolic representation of biological evolution and a few others like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Aldous Huxley who consider them as a special order of symbols, expressing eternal truths of psychology and metaphysics. 28 To Nammalvar, the avataras are historical truth and at the same time, they have an ever-recurring metaphysical validity. He refers to them in a number of places in his work as events that took place and occasionally, with a touch of sadness, that it was not given to him to be alive when they occurred. But they are also realizable by the mind, even though He is invisible today to the physical eye. The avataras are thus real to him in two ways. They did happen at a certain point of time and they are ever happening within the human spirit and transforming it. He lingers on the concrete details of the avataras, on the gracious aspects, as in Krishna, the playful child of Gokula; and on the terrible, as in Trivikrama 29 and in the lion-faced slayer of Hiranya. 30 What strikes Nammalvar most and moves him deeply is the infinite extent of God's descent as an avatara, the Highest beyond the highest coming down to the lowliest and the lost, taking on Himself the burden and toil and suffering of common men-the Lord of all the worlds, for instance, living as the child Krishna among the simple cowherds of the jungle and allowing himself to be tied to a wooden mortar for, of all things, stealing butter 31. The effect of this on Nammalvar's poetry has been referred to elsewhere in this book.
Most of these shrines about which Nammalvar sings are in the south of India, many in Kerala. One wonders whether he visited these places himself. But the traditional account of his life declares that he never left the tamarind tree at Tirunagari (or Kuruhoor as it was known) and that from the various temples, God came to give him darsan. However that may be, Nammal- var's references to the shrines are full of descriptions of nature which to him is the body of the Lord, and of the avatara or state in which God is represented in a particular image. Thus speaking of Tiruppulingudi on the banks of the Tamraparni in the Tirunelveli district, he addresses the image in the temple with the
To Nammalvar every shrine is the abode of the living God. Here is how he speaks of Venkatam 33 :
Thou dwellest, Thy tulasi garland shedding fragrance, In cool Venkata. 34
While Nammalvar speaks in moving terms of his struggle to realize God, he concludes that his effort by itself is of no avail and that complete surrender to God is the only way to reach Him:
Whose praise is beyond compare, Lord of the three worlds, Thou who rulest me, Oh Thou Sought by immortal devas and the rishis, Lord of Tiruvenkatam, I have no refuge And so I turn to Thy feet And find sanctuary there. 35
The sanctuary is according to Nammalvar, the result not of our deserving but of God's boundless grace. To throw ourselves open to it is to love Him and this love, when it grows into a passion that has no place for anything else, is to Nammalvar more rewarding and blissful than even the Vaikunta or Heaven which is God's final gift. He turns to Him with these words:
To say to Thee, my Lord. Thou art thinking Of what to do to those who love Thee, Of what to give them. Why, is that Heaven, Vaikunta, That Thou in Thy Grace May bestow on them, Is it sweeter, more blessed Than their thought that dwells ever On Thy Praise? 36
To Nammalvar, love of God and surrender to Him are the pathway and the City of Truth to which it leads.
That age-long evil burden, will die. There will be no want, Nothing imperfect, If only you wash your mind and inner self Of all dirt, And worship every day The Gracious feet of the Lord of Sri, 37 Even if death comes, To die worshipping, That is your strength and triumph. 38
And the Truth itself is all Love and envelopes us everywhere in the world around us, comes to us as avatara, touches us as we lay aside our little selves in worship, for however inscrutable and unattainable to others, 'He is indeed easy of reach to those who love Him.' 39
Nammalvar's philosophy, in spite of the struggles of the spirit and the deep questioning that he records, is one of affirmation and hope. God is. Man's redemption is certain for if he but lift a little finger, 40 Grace leaps across infinity bringing final solace and light and love.
The dark curse on life is lifted. Decay is decayed, And hell is in ruins. There is nothing here for Death. Even Kali, the dark age, will end, Behold, the servitors of the Lord, Of our Lord, dark as the sea, Are crowding, ranging everywhere over the earth, Dancing and singing His praise. 41
Nammalvar's attitude to the gods of the Hindu pantheon is significant. It varies but his faith in Sri Narayana as the Absolute is unwavering. He speaks of the other gods as having been created by Him, as worshipping Him and though gods, unable to know him quite. 42 Maintaining Sri Narayana as the Supreme One, he refers to the puranic account of His having saved Siva from the heinous sin that dogged him because he had plucked one of the heads of Brahma. 43 He wonders why the blind world turns to other gods while Sri Narayana, the Origin, waits to save it. 44 He calls on all men to worship Sri Narayana for He made them and the gods before whom they now bow. 45 He speaks specifically to Linga worshippers (Saivites), the Jains and the Buddhists and ' all those who go about arguing endlessly about it and about', to realize that whomsoever they consider as God, He is ultimately Sri Narayana. 46
Yet, he calls on people to praise the Trimurtis, Vishnu, Brahma and Siva and to go on praising them and trying to know them more and still more. 47 He says that all the gods are so many forms that Sri Narayana has taken.
Made His own form stand As so many different gods. 48
Shall I call Him the emerald-hued one To whom all praise rises, Or as the god Who wears the cold moon on his matted locks? Or as the four-faced Brahma ? 49
Here, Nammalvar's Absolute, Sri Narayana, appears to his vision as Vishnu, Siva and Brahma, the Trimurtis. 'Praise ye', he says, 'Praise equally and together, Siva, Brahma, Indra and the hosts of the Devas. They are the Lord's Form, spread out over the worlds. Praise them all and the dark age will end. 50 Again, he sees the body of the Lord as being apportioned among Siva, Brahma and Lakshmi 51 He goes further. He calls Sri Narayana as the 'three-eyed one', a name generally given to Siva. 52
Theology-centred commentators have been at great pains to reconcile these differing statements and to affirm that to Nammalvar, Sri Narayana is the origin of origins. There is no doubt that Nammalvar's faith is that Sri Narayana is the Absolute. But when his faith broadened into mystical comprehension, everywhere and in every-thing, even in the gods that others worshipped and the religions that they held, he saw Sri Narayana :
Turns to his god and reaches him. Flawless these gods are. And all those who seek them, Each one in his way, Reach the Lord's feet. 53
Many and many a way of worship, And through the variation in men's minds Many and many a religion In conflict with one another, And many gods in every one of them. And thus hast thou Multiplied innumerably Thy form. O Thou peerless, With whom none can compare, I kindle my yearning for Thee. 54
Thus Nammalvar speaks in what is considered his early work 'Tiruviruttam'. In the end, at the height of his realization, he speaks in images that shade into the abstract, leading us to the
That stretches all around, Depth beyond depth, Height beyond height. Thou art the supreme glory that flowers, Surpassing and lighting it up. Thou art more, infinite ecstasy, Encompassing me, Quenching my insistent yearning Ending my questing I. 55
But the name and the form that he gave to this void, this glory, this ecstasy were those of Sri Narayana and the way to Him that he showed and followed is the way of an abounding love that discards everything else, and a surrender that invests the querulous, seeking little 'I' with an awareness infinite and eternal.
< Journey to the Real | Index | Nammalvar's Poetry >
1 'Isa vasyam idam sarvam' (All this is the abode of the Lord) is not arrived at logically; it is the opening statement of 'Isopanishad'. Similarly, that Sriman Narayana is the Absolute is not argued out, but simply affirmed in Taittiriya Upanishad'. (↑)
2 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.3.9. (↑)
3 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.1.8. (↑)
4 ibid. 5.6.1. (↑)
5 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.1.7 (↑)
6 ibid. 2.5.3. (↑)
7 ibid. 1.7.6. (↑)
8 ibid. 1.7.7. (↑)
9 ibid. 1.3.2. (↑)
10 ibid. 1.1.9. (↑)
11 Tiruvoimozhi: 10.7.1. (↑)
12 ibid. 3.8.8. (↑)
13 ibid. 1.9.6. (↑)
14 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.3.6, (↑)
15 ibid. 2.7.12. (↑)
16 Peria Tiruvantati: 24. (↑)
17 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.1.1. (↑)
18 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.1.3. (↑)
19 ibid. 6.3. (1,2,4,5,6 and 10.). (↑)
20 St. Bernard. (↑)
21 The Sangam age is generally considered to extend from the second or third century B.C. to the second century A.D. (↑)
22 Tiruvoimozhi: 2.5.8,9. (↑)
23 ibid. 2.5.10. (↑)
24 Tiruvoimozhi: 3.1.1. (↑)
25 ibid. 3.1.8. (↑)
26 ibid. 3.5.5. (↑)
27 ibid. 3.10.6. (↑)
28 'The worshipper of Krishna is warned in the Vaishnava scriptures that the Krishna Leela is not a history, but a process for ever unfolded in the heart of man'-Hinduism and Buddhism. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. 'The play of Krishna is... the symbol of an everlasting truth of psychology and metaphysics, the fact that, in relation to God, the personal soul is always feminine and passive' - 'The Perennial Philosophy'.----Aldous Huxley. (↑)
29 God as Trivikrama (one of the avataras) measured all the earth with one footstep and all the sky with another. (↑)
30 Hiranya, the Asura king, was slain by Lord Narasimha, a terrible form of a man, lion-faced. (↑)
31 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.3.1. (↑)
32 Tiruvoimozhi: 9.2 (↑)
33 Tirumalai-Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. (↑)
34 Tiruvoimozhi: 2.6.10. (↑)
35 ibid. 6.10.10 (↑)
36 Peria Tiruvantati: 53 (↑)
37 The divine consort of Sriman Narayana, the embodiment of His Grace. (↑)
38 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.3.8. (↑)
39 ibid. 1.3.1. (↑)
40 There are two interpretations of Nammalvar's view of surrender. The one given by Sri Pillailokacharya (13th century A.D.) and followed by Sri Manavala Mamuni (1373-1443) is that Divine Grace is not dependent on man's effort at all and that its infinitude envelopes all souls and shall redeem them on its own volition and that surrender is not a means to an end but that attuning of man's spirit to its true nature which is that of absolute dependence on God. The other interpretation is given by Sri Vedanta Desika, a younger contemporary of Sri Pillailokacharya. He maintains that surrender is a duty enjoined on man (Cf. Gita: 'Sarva dharman' et seq) and that Nammalvar himself adopted it. He, however, admits that surrender is not the cause of God's Grace. His view is that surrender is a vyaja or occasion that immediately throws open to man the flood-gates of Grace. According to him, surrender and Grace, the first by man and the second from God, should not be considered as two separate events one following the other. They are simultaneous and form one curve of man's redemption. A great deal of controversy has shaken the Vaishnava world of the South after Sri Ramanuja's time over the subtle difference between these two interpretations. (↑)
41 Tiruvoimozhi: 5.2.1. (↑)
42 ibid. 2.2.10; 2.7.12; 4.10.4. (↑)
43 ibid. 2.2.2. Tiruviruttam: 86 (↑)
44 Tiruvoimozhi: 4.10.1 (↑)
45 ibid. 4.10.2 (↑)
46 Tiruvoimozhi: 4.10.5 (↑)
47 ibid. 1.3.6. (↑)
48 ibid. 5.2.8. (↑)
49 Tiruvoimozhi: 3.4.8. The emerald-hued one' is Vishnu or Narayana, and the god who wears the cold moon on his matted locks' is Siva. (↑)
50 ibid. 5.2.10. (↑)
51 ibid. 4.8.1. (↑)
52 ibid. 10.10.1. (↑)
53 Tiruvoimozhi: 1.1.5. (↑)
54 Tiruviruttam 96. (↑)
55 Tiruvoimozhi: 10.10.10. (↑)