Arunachaleshwara Thiruvannamalai

Arunachaleśvara of Tiruvannamalai

The fire mountain, and a saint who sat under it

Tiruvannamalai's Arunachaleśvara is the fire (agni) temple of the Pañca-bhūta sthalas, the five South Indian shrines at which Śiva is worshipped as one of the five elements — the others being prthvī at Ekāmbareśvara in Kanchipuram, jala at Jambukeśvara in Kanchipuram, vāyu at Śrīkalahasteśvara at Kalahasti, and ākāśa at Chidambaram. Here the peculiarity is that the mountain itself is the deity: the lingam is the summit of Arunachala, 1,266 metres above the plain, and the temple at its foot is the deity's dwelling rather than the deity's body. That is why the hill, not the sanctuary, is carried on processional routes and why pilgrims circumambulate the hill rather than only the shrine.

The hill is a granite mass of great antiquity, and the tradition that it is the oldest mountain in the world — a claim repeated constantly, including in the corpus frontmatter — is devotional, not geological. The temple's kalṣepa (age tradition) and the chronology of its successive additions (Pallava, Chola, Vijayanagara, Nayak) have not been established from an inscription for this entry, and the frontmatter's ninth- century foundation is a tradition rather than a dated fact. The two stone basins on the hilltop, one of them associated with the vāmpā cave where water is said to come out of the rock, belong to the shrine's sacred geography.

The hill's second history is the twentieth-century one. Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) came to the hill as a boy of sixteen in 1896, sat against the rock face, and is traditionally held to have attained self-realisation there within a short time; he lived and taught in Tiruvannamalai for the rest of his life, and his samādhi shrine is at the foot of the hill, below the temple, with his memorial on the summit. The presence of a samādhi shrine inside the precinct of a Pancha-bhūta temple is unusual — it is an Advaita śrī-vāspa on a Śaiva hill — and the resulting institutional arrangement, with the temple on one side and the samādhi on the other, is locally managed and locally significant. The Kārttigai deepam, in which the hill is lit, is the festival that draws the largest crowd of the year.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Tēvāram and Tirumurai — the Śrī Vaiṣṇava–Śaiva hymn corpora, at work level; no hymn cited.
• K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Cōḻas — for Chola temple patronage, work level.
• Tiruvannamalai District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the hill shrine, the two basins and the temple administration.
• Life of Ramana Maharshi by an approved biographer (Arthur Osborne's biography exists; it should be weighed against the sādhana literature); no page citations supplied.
• Unverified: the "oldest mountain" claim, the ninth-century foundation, and every festival date in the frontmatter.