AS WE ALL KNOW ALWARS' PRABANDHAS ARE IMBUED WITH PURELY UPANISHADIC SIDDHANTAS.
IN THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT FROM #"NAMMALWAR"# A. SRINIVASA RAGHAVAN EXPLAINS THE INTERCONNECTION OF JNANA-TINTED UPANISHADIC SIDDHANTAS AND EMOTIONAL BHAKTI CONTEMPLATIONS WHICH CAN BE FOUND IN SHRI NAMMALWAR'S "TIRUVOIMOZHI":
"Nammalvar tries in places to express the all-inclusive inexpressible nature of Reality through paradox and writes in "Tiruvoimozhi":
"My Lord, He who rules me,
Is poverty and wealth,
Hell and Heaven.
Foe and friend,
Poison and ambrosia...
Thus, He spreads in manifold ways.
He is the joy and sorrow that we feel,
Confusion and clarity,
Punishment and compassion,
Heat and shade.
He is inscrutable.
He is virtue, He is sin,
He is meeting, He is parting,
Remembrance and forgetfulness,
That which is, that which is not,
Not this, nor that,
Nor anything else.
He is sin, He is righteousness,
Red, black and white,
He is truth, He is falsehood,
He is Youth and age,
The old and the new...
He is joy and anger...
He is fame and oblivion...
He is the hot sun, and the cool shade,
He is littleness, He is greatness,
Narowness, spaciousness...
He is those that move and those that stand still,
He is all, and not of all".
And yet, Nammalvar believes in the Personal God. It is not as though he is not aware of the truth that Godhead is indefinable,
But when he thought of God and yearned for Him, it was to the Personal God, Shriman 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.
Nammalvar held Narayana as the Absolute and speaks of Him often, understandably enough, in a mixture of the abstract and the concrete, of the impersonal and personal.
"He of the golden crown,
Warrior supreme,
My Lord, four-armed,
Wearing the cool Tulasi garland...
My dark gem-like Lord." ["Tiruvoimozhi", 2.5.8-9]
Thus NammAlwar begins, and follows it up with:
"He is neither man nor woman...
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". ["Tiruvoimozhi", 2.5.10]
But it is of the personal God, Narayana, of whom Nammalvar sings, though here and there the concrete vision merges into the abstract indefinable:
"Tell me, Lord,
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?" ["Tiruvoimozhi", 3.1.1]
Thus far the concrete, then the abstract enters:
"Thou art a glory eternal,
Neither blossoming nor drooping,
Thou art wisdom pure and endless.
Thou art all, fullness, fulfilment". ["Tiruvoimozhi", 3.1.8]
Cited from
pages 64-66
OCR by Vishnudut1926, Moscow, January 2018
