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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA We are told in our inscription that the general, after his return from the Ganges, had his initiation from the cave of Nirañjana-guru, who was the head of affairs at Tiruvorriyūr. From an inscription at Tiruvorriyūr[1] dated in the 19th year of Vijayakaṁpavarman, we learn that a Nirañjana-guru built the Śiva shrine at Tiruvorriyūr naming the shrine after himself as Nirañjanēśvaraṁ. Nirañjana-guru is here stated as playing a prominent part in the Tiruvorriyūr temple. The date of this record is however, not known, for neither the exact identity nor the date of the Pallava Vijayakaṁpavarman is settled. That this Pallava king was connected with the Tiruvorriyūr temple is further evident from the name of another deity at Tiruvorriyūr, Kaṁpīśvaram-uḍaiyār, mentioned in inscriptions.[2] Vijayakaṁpa’s period extended over twenty-six years, and he is taken by some scholars as a contemporary of both Nṛipatuṅga and Aparājita ;3 this may, roughly speaking, place Kaṁpa somewhere round about 875 A.D. Nirañjana-guru, who built the shrine at Tiruvorriyūr in his 19th year, cannot be brought to a date later than 900 A.D. Anyway, he could not have been living at the time of the Chōḷa general’s entry into the holy order. The Takkōlam battle was fought in A.D. 949 and the first inscription mentioning this general as head of a maṭha at Tiruvorriyūr is dated A.D. 957. Even allowing the shortest time for his journey to the Ganges and return to the south, say two years, we cannot suppose that he could have been at Tiruvorriyūr earlier than A.D. 951. Probably he took a longer time to return to Tiruvorriyūr ; for one who had renounced life and had chosen the path of the passionless, there was no particular hurry and his hitting upon Tiruvorriyūr for stay and sādhanā could not have been according to any pre-meditated plan. I reconstruct the conditions under which he became a siddha differently from what they have appeared to be for others.
The important word in the inscription, gahva, meaning guhā, should be properly understood. It may be by subsequent semantic shift, the word guhai in the Tamil Dictionary has come to acquire the general meaning ‘ abode of a recluse ;’ such an abode may be a monastery, a cave or any secluded place ; a cave may be natural, excavated or artificially constructed ; but a guhā especially when it is used in Sanskrit does not necessarily mean a maṭha.[4] Now, in the times of Vijayakaṁpavaraman, there was a great Śaiva at Tiruvorriyūr named Nirañjana-guru who was an important figure in the temple. His habitation, or more probably the place where he had his sādhanā originally, was a cave or cave-like dwelling which during his time and after brahma famous as the Virañjana-guhā. When our general came to Tiruvorriyūr, he was an obscure aspirant ; he saw a guhā there associated with a great siddha and which he therefore took to be highly efficacious for his own sādhanā also ; he entered it, performed sādhanā inside for a considerable time and then emerged one day as a siddha. The guhā then became doubly sacred with the association of two siddhas, and devotees began to esteem it all the more. The new siddha, who had now assumed the name of Chaturānana Paṇḍita, continued to inhabit the same guhā, which by the attention paid by the public gradually grew in importance and was built over into a regular maṭha by the time of the visit of the Mānyakhēṭa merchant in A.D. 957.[5] If we interpret _______________________________________________
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