The Tamil Shaiva Tradition
திருமுறை
Tirumurai, the Nayanmars and the five-element temples
Tamil Shaivism is a distinct tradition with its own twelve-book canon, the Tirumurai, and its own saints, the Nayanmars. This is an outline only; the texts themselves are not yet on this site.
The Tirumurai
The canon has twelve books. The Tevaram is books 1 to 7: books 1 to 3 are Sambandar's hymns, books 4 to 6 are Appar's, and book 7 is Sundarar's. Book 8 holds Manikkavasagar's Tiruvasakam and Tirukovaiyar, book 10 is Tirumular's Tirumandiram, and book 12 is Sekkizhar's Periya Puranam, the life stories of the sixty-three Nayanmars. The compiler, Nambiyandar Nambi, is dated variously between the 10th and 12th century.
Panchabhuta Sthalam
Five temples are traditionally tied to the five elements: Thiruvanaikaval (water), Kanchipuram (earth), Thiruvannamalai (fire), Kalahasti (air; in Andhra Pradesh, not Tamil Nadu) and Chidambaram (space). One scholar notes the five-temple grouping is not ancient: its earliest known reference is a 14th-century text by Umapati Sivacharya, not the Tevaram. Treat it as a later traditional framing.
Do not confuse the two Siddhantas
Shaiva Siddhanta in the Tamil devotional tradition and the Sanskrit philosophical label are related but not identical. See the Shaiva Siddhanta page.
What is missing
No complete modern English edition of the Tevaram hymns exists in print; the only complete English rendering found is on a 2007 CD-ROM. G. Vanmikanathan's Periya Puranam translation exists and is partly free online, but neither text has been read for this site.
Read the source chapters
Source note
This outline comes from earlier research notes for this project, not from a text read for this page. It should be treated as a signpost, not a source.