The Colas c33.8

c33.8

The history of Vaiṣṇava hymnology in the period was quite similar. Tradition confers upon Nāthamuni the honour of having done for Vaiṣṇava lyrics what Nambi Āṇḍār Nambi achieved for the Śaiva ones. If Śrīnātha who seems to be mentioned in the Anbil plates⁹ may be taken to be the same as the Vaiṣṇava Saint Nāthamuni, his age would be the end of the ninth and the beginning of the tenth centuries a.d., and this accords well with the other testimony we have, meagre as it is, on the subject. However that may be, the contents of the Anbil plates, the strong Vaiṣṇavism of the family of Aniruddha, the minister of Parāntaka II, the life of his father whose glory was his learning and the number of his disciples, the attachment of his mother and grand-father to God Ranganātha, the liberal support extended by his great grand-father Ananta to the poor and the indigent — these furnish a clear idea of the part played by Vaiṣṇavism in the social and religious life of the time. And the age of Nāthamuni's ministry cannot lie far from it, as he was the first of the great succession of Ācāryas who carried forward and completed the work started by the Āḻvārs of an earlier time.¹⁰ The story is that Nāthamuni once heard some visitors to his place from Kurugūr recite a hymn of ten verses from the *Tiruvāymoḻi*, the 1000 hymns composed by Śāṭhakōpa, also called Nammāḻvār. Captivated by the melody of the hymn and noticing from its last verse that it comprised only ten out of a thousand verses composed by Nammāḻvār, Nāthamuni undertook a journey to Kurugūr, the birth-place of Nammāḻvār, in the hope of discovering the whole collection there. At Kurugūr, after worshipping Viṣṇu, Nāthamuni resorted to the foot of the sacred tamarind tree in his desire to meet the Āḻvār; great was his grief and disappointment when he found his yogic powers unequal to the task of invoking a vision of Śaṭhakōpa. He then adopted the plan of reciting 12,000 times the hymn of Madhurakavi on Śaṭhakōpa, his *guru*; pleased by this, both Śaṭhakōpa and Madhurakavi appeared before Nāthamuni and imparted to him the knowledge of the four Prabandhas¹¹ with their full import. Thereafter Nāthamuni stayed in Kurugūr meditating upon the Prabandhas until he was summoned by Vīranārāyaṇa Kṛṣṇa, the god of his native place, to go back to Vīranārāyaṇapuram, where he collected a band of disciples round himself and made them sing these hymns to divine tunes.¹²