Thirumoolar’s Life Story

We previously shared a story of Thirumoolar inhabiting the body of cowherd Mulan in a post at https://whitecrowyoga.com/who-was-thirumoolar/. This story is the most widely shared about Thirumoolar’s life story, but another story is sometimes shared. Although most believe it is mythical, it is worth sharing. The story goes like this:

King Vira-cenan ruled over the country of Rajendra-pura of the Pandiya kingdom.  He was returning to his place one day after completing his royal procession through the city, and he saw a fascinating flower in the palace garden, which he plucked and smelled. He immediately fell to the ground dead.

When word of the king’s death reached the people of the kingdom, they were grief-stricken.  The king’s wife, Guna-vati (Sulochana), was inconsolable. Thirumoolar decided to help the grieving people by occupying the body of King Vira-cenan. To protect the safety of his own body, he left it in a cave and asked his discipline Guru-raja-rsi to protect it. In the king’s body, Thirumoolar rose and explained to his wife and the kingdom that a drop of venom from a snake had killed him, but he was brought back to life through the grace of a Siddha.

Over time, Guna-vati noticed differences in his way of moving and moving; Thirumoolar shared with her what he had done and told her he would soon return to his own body. Guna-vati didn’t want to lose him, so she conceived a plan to burn his original body. By this time, Guru-raja had left the body in the cave unattended as he went in search of his master because the long absence concerned him. Because no one was guarding the body, the forest people whom Guna-vati had hired to burn Thirumoolar’s original body could complete the task.

Thirumoolar left the palace to return to his body, and he met Guru-raja along the way. When he found his body was burned to ashes, he returned to the palace and led his life with Guna-vati until eventually, he took off on travels that led him towards the eastern side of Catura-giri. There, he found the dead body of Jambukesvara, a learned Brahmin of Tamil Nadu. He left the body of Vira0cenan and placed it inside the hollow of a tree and migrated into Jambukesvara’s body, retiring to the forest known as Kali-vana. He was soon lost in samadhi. When he came out of samadhi, literally thousands of verses poured out of him.

This story claims that Thirumoolar wrote the 3,147 Tirumandiram verses within a short timeframe, whereas other stories state that Thirumoolar wrote one verse per year. Thirumoolar wrote the verses on palm leaves and that those who wanted to study with him would have done so verbally or would have copied what was on the palm leaves to their own palm leaves during Thirumoolar’s lifetime. This is one area of concern for scholars because there is a likelihood that words and symbols were miscopied or misinterpreted.

Some stories claim that Thirumoolar lived for seven crore (seventy million) yugas (an age/aeon), but it is not believed that we should take this literally. It should be interpreted as living long enough to accomplish his lofty mission of sharing the highest spiritual principles with us.

In our next post, we will look at the time period scholars believe Thirumoolar lived.

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