Neithana-nathar of Thiruneithanam

Neithana-nathar, Thiruneithanam

A village shrine in the Chola country

Thiruneithanam, in Thanjavur district in the heartland of the Chola country, is a Pāḷal Pēṭra Sṭāḷam whose Śiva is Neithana-nātha — the Lord of the neitha, the honey or nectar collected from flowers. The name is unusual among the Paadal Petras and gives the shrine its character: a neitha tree stands in the compound, and the sthāla-vṛkṣa proper is recorded as the bakula (Aegle marmelos, the bilva) rather than the neitha itself, which is a distinction worth preserving rather than smoothing. The consort is Nīla-mañji-ammāi and the tīrtham the Cakra-tīrtham.

The hymn is by Sundarar — one of the three canonical poets, with Sambandar and Appar — and a shrine with a single pasuram set is placed differently in Tamil Saiva reckoning from those with several. Sundarar's Tēvāram hymns are among the most musically and texturally distinctive of the three, and his māmaṭai and kūṭṭai modes and his freedom in handling metre are much discussed. The Tēvāram as a whole — composed between roughly the seventh and ninth centuries — is held by Tamil tradition as the Drāviḍa Vēda, and its shrines as the sacred geography that defines Shaiva pilgrimage in the Tamil country.

Daily worship follows the five kalam — uṣat-kalam, kala-sānti, ucchikālam, sayarakṣa, ardha-jama — with abhiṣeka, pañcamṛta, vibhūti and bilva leaves. Mahā Śivarātri, the Ārudra-darśanam at the Mārgaśi full moon, the ten-day Brahmotsavam with the ādhi-rudra, nandi, peacock and garuḍa vāhanas, and the fortnightly Pradoṣa puja form the year. The Somavāra observance of Mondays is also kept.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is thin because the sources available for it are thin, and it should not be padded to conceal that. The previous body said only that this was a "village shrine in the Chola heartland" and glossed the name as "the nectar of the lotus" — a reading that does not follow from the word and that has been corrected to the floral nectar sense. A guardian should establish, from the Tēvāram and Nagaswamy's catalogue: the pasurams and their number; whether the neitha tree is in fact the shrine's vṛkṣa and the bakula entry an error, or the reverse; the Cakra-tīrtham; and the temple's own sthāla-purāṇa, which is not represented in the frontmatter at all beyond a placeholder. The "9th c. CE" date is inferred from the hymn period and should not be read as a building date.