Surrender to God

Thirumālai

Thoṇḍaraḍippoḍi Āzhvār — “the dust of the feet of the devotees” — tended a garden of flowers for the Lord of Srirangam. In the Thirumālai he speaks plainly of his own failings and of the saving power of the divine name, holding nothing back. It is a hymn of confession and refuge, treasured for its raw honesty about the human condition and the mercy that meets it.

Mudhal Thiruvandhādhi

The first of the three earliest Alvars. Tradition tells that Poigai, Bhūtham and Pey took shelter from a storm in a tiny doorway at Thirukkovilur, one by one, until there was no room even to stand — and felt a fourth presence press in among them. It was the Lord himself. In the dark, Poigai “lit a lamp” of words: “The earth is my lamp, the wide sea its ghee, the blazing sun its flame.” So begins this hundred-verse hymn, each verse linked to the next by its closing word (anthādhi).

Periya Thiruvandhādhi

Nammāzhvār's “great” anthādhi, linked verse to verse, set against the Atharva Veda. The restless mind that cannot stop reaching for the Lord is its theme — the saint speaking almost to his own heart, urging it toward the only refuge that will quiet it.

Thiruvāymozhi

The crown of the whole Prabandham — “the word of the sacred mouth.” Over a thousand verses, arranged in ten hundreds, Nammāzhvār travels the entire landscape of the soul: union and separation, doubt and surrender, the world's beauty and its passing. It is revered as the Tamil Sāma Veda, and generations of teachers have written long commentaries on it. Tradition holds the saint composed it beneath a tamarind tree at Alvar Thirunagari, lost in God.