The young maids of the pastoral regions pray to Tirumaal to obtain for them the husbands of their choice, and to Tirumaal also go married women temporarily separated from their husbands to pray for speedy reunion, and to worship him with offerings of the regional white mullai flowers and paddy grains. The inhabitants pray to him in the hour of danger, as for instance, before the ancient Tamil version of bull baiting.17 Tirumaal was worshipped in the pastoral regions but his shrine of pilgrimage in the Cankam period was Tirumaal-iruñcoolai (the dark, dense, or large grove of Tirumaal) situated on a sober range of low evergreen hills to the north of Maturai. This locality combines proximity to Maturai with accessibility and natural beauty, and was probably in origin a temple of the shepherds of the region. Iḷamperuvaḷutiyaar, the author of the fifteenth Paripaaṭal, in his remarkable poem on this hill of Tirumaal, describes its beauties and invites men and women who cannot climb up to the shrine to worship even from afar the hill when visible to them. Even those who live so far away as not to be able to see it, might profitably worship the direction in which it is situated. Many are the mountains and hills, he says, whose greatness it is impossible to recount in verse. Of these, those which are instrumental in conferring blessings both permanent and transient are few indeed, but of these few the most outstanding is Tirumaal-iruñcoolai. It is of the same colour as Tirumaal himself, and therefore may be the object of worship. To reside at the foot of the hill is a privilege that might well form the motive for interpretation.18 The immanence of God in Nature is a truth that is often expressed in very poetic language in the Paripaaṭal. Some of the most beautiful concepts are couched in very delicate language. Tirumaal is everything, the moon, the sun, the cloud, the sky, the earth, and the Himālayas. In the third Paripaaṭal occurs this passage, whose simple beauty no translation can ever hope to reproduce: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 17 See the concluding lines of Kali; 103-108; Mullaippattu, 8-10; Netunal; 43. 18 See Pari; 15. |