Bhagavan, Manikkavachagar and theTiruvachakam

 

Manikkavachagar was a distinguished Tamil poet-saint who lived around the ninth century AD. His most famous work, the Tiruvachakam, is one of the most loved and most widely read works in Tamil literature. In a series of long poems Manikkavachagar sings of his ecstatic love for Siva and describes the various emotional traumas he went through while pursuing this passionate obsession with the divine.

     The Tiruvachakam was one of Ramana Maharshi’s favourite devotional works. In this article we have retold Manikkavachagar’s life, mostly through Bhagavan’s own words, and we have made new translations of all the Tiruvachakam poems that Bhagavan loved or frequently referred to.