not unrelated, perspective, these poems can be viewed as a poetic corollary of a
theology of embodiment. That is to say, just as the presence of divinity is under-
stood to be literally embodied in a properly consecrated stone or metal image of
god, the saint’s communion with divinity is understood to be embodied in the
ritual recitation of his or her poetry. All who participate in the ritual perfor-
mance of the saint’s poem reenact the saint’s experience of communion with
the deity. And this further highlights the close relationship in Tamil tradition
between bhakti poetry and temple worship, in contrast to some later bhakti
traditions that express contempt for temples as a relic of a stale religious
establishment.^2 This contrast can, in part, be explained historically. Whereas
in Tamilnadu the emergence of bhakti coincided with the origins of temple
worship (ca. sixth century ce), proponents of some of the later bhakti traditions
viewed temples as an established religious institution which had lost its vitality.
Learned Literature of the Court and the Temple
While the poems of the Tamil Vais.n.ava and S ́aiva saints nowadays are appreci-
ated for their aesthetic as well as for their religious value, prior to modern times
the saints’ poems were not included in the curriculum of institutionalized liter-
ary study and performance where literati found patronage in courtly and temple
contexts. The period immediately following the age of the can.kam poems wit-
nessed the composition of a number of collections of didactic verses, on the one
hand, and long narrative poems, on the other.^3 The authors of some of these texts
were Buddhists, but an even larger number were Jains. By the twelfth century,
however, the influence of Buddhism and Jainism in the Tamil cultural sphere had
waned considerably, and Vais.n.avism, to some extent, and S ́aivism, to an even
greater extent, had become powerful forces in Tamil literary culture. Beginning
around the ninth century a number of genres came to dominate formal literary
composition and education, and these are commonly grouped in two broad cat-
egories: pirapantam (Sanskrit:prabandha) and ka ̄ppiyam (=ka ̄vyam)/pura ̄n.am
(Sanskrit:ka ̄vya/pura ̄n.a). The latter are long narratives in verse. Many are based
on the story-lines of the Sanskrit epics and pura ̄n.as, but they are often more poet-
ically sophisticated and elaborate than their Sanskrit counterparts. The former
is a very heterogenous collection of genres, some, but not all of which clearly
build on the conventions of can.kam poetry. One common feature of pirapantam
poems is that their constituent verses are sequentially related, and this is one
feature that distinguishes these works from the can.kam anthologies. Another
feature that distinguishes many (but not all) of these poems from the can.kam
poetry is their focus on Hindu deities and sacred places.
Traditionally the poems of the Tamil bhakti saints and medieval learned
literature, even when devoted to religious subjects, inhabited different cultural
terrains; but there is one work that belongs to both domains (much as
Tirumuruka ̄r
̄
r
̄uppat.aiis included both in the can.kam corpus and in the S ́aivatamil hindu literature 149