Pasu-pateeswarar of Karur

Pasupateeswarar of Karur

Lord of the beasts, in the old Chera country

Pasupateeswarar is a Padal Petra Sthalam in Karur, in the Kaveri delta region of Tamil Nadu. The name means Lord of the beasts — pasu, the domestic animal — and it identifies the shrine with a form of Shiva whose concern is the living creatures of the field rather than the human worshipper. That is the shrine's character, and it is why it should be given as a pasupateeswarar shrine in its own right rather than only as one of Karur's temples.

Its credentials are the Tevaram. The shrine is sung by Appar (Tirunavukkaracar) and by Sundarar (Sundaramurti), and it is counted among the 275 Padal Petra Sthalangal — the temples sung in the seventh- to ninth-century Tamil Saiva canon. Being sung in the Tevaram places a temple in the liturgical core of Tamil Shaivism, which the tradition treats as the Drvida Veda; the number of pasurams a shrine carries and which poet sang them are the specific facts of its standing. The shrine has a consort shrine to Soundara Nayaki, a tirtham known as the Amrita-tirtham, and the bilva as its sthala-vriksha.

Karur is an ancient town of the Cera (Chera) country and of the Kaveri's southern delta, and the temple sits in a landscape that is much older than the shrine's present structure. The Kaveri in this part of Tamil Nadu is the river that the Tevaram hymns describe, and the region around Karur — the Chola heartland of the lower delta — carries a dense concentration of Tamil Saiva shrines. Pasupateeswarar is one of them, and it belongs to that geography.

Worship follows the Tamil temple round: the five daily puja offices — ushat-kalam at dawn, kala-santi, ucchikalam at noon, sayaraksha at dusk, ardha-jama at night — with the abhisheka, the panchamrita, the vibhuti, the bilva leaves, and the arati. The Pradosha, the fortnightly evening puja, the Somavara observance on Monday, and the Shivaratri are kept here as across Tamil Shaiva country. The great annual occasions are the Maha Shivaratri and the Brahmotsavam, the temple festival at which the utsava murti is carried out on its vahana and returned over several days.

A caution on dates. The "9th c. CE" in this entry's frontmatter is the period of the Tevaram hymns, not a construction date. Pasupateeswarar has been rebuilt, and the standing fabric is not of one period. No construction date should be asserted without an epigraphic or archaeological source, and the earlier version of this entry stated one as though it were established. The same caution applies to the "9th c." frontmatter dating on other Kaveri-delta shrines in this corpus.

Sources and what is still unverified

This entry is grounded in the Tevaram as the primary text, in R. Nagaswamy's work on early Tamil temples, in the Karur district gazetteer, and in the temple's own sthala tradition. A human guardian from a Tamil Shaiva tradition should supply and check: the temple's own sthala-puranam in Tamil, which has not been consulted for this entry; the number of pasurams and the singing saints as the temple records them; the purohit and the devasthanam administration; and the present form of the Brahmotsavam and the vahana procession. The frontmatter's dating should be replaced with the temple's own record or removed. The pasu (beast) form and the Kuzhal (water) of this shrine — the local name Kuzhalai Easwaran is in wide use for the deity — should be given from the temple's own record. No verse is quoted here by number.