Artist rendering of Tamil Siddhar Thirumular.
In the previous installment of the Spiritual Odyssey series, we paused after Ramaswamy’s time at Sri Ramanasramam to explore another voice from the Tamil spiritual world that had helped form him: the beloved poet-sage Avvaiyar. Before following Ramaswamy on his journey north, there are still other currents from his South Indian inheritance we’ll delve into.
One of the most intriguing currents flows through a mysterious Shaiva yogi named Thirumular and his great Tamil work, the Thirumantiram.
Thirumular is traditionally remembered as both one of the sixty-three Nayanars, the poet-saints whose ecstatic devotion to Shiva transformed Tamil religious culture, and as one of the great Siddhars, the accomplished yogis associated with mystical spiritual practice. His life is wrapped in legend, and even his historical period is uncertain. But the extraordinary place of the Thirumantiram within Tamil Shaivism is unmistakable. It became the tenth book of the Thirumurai, the twelve-volume Tamil Shaiva canon.
Its more than three thousand verses range across ethics and devotion, Yoga and the subtle body, the relationship of Shiva and Shakti, and ultimately the realization of the Divine. It brings together worlds that we often encounter separately: the love of the Tamil saints, the disciplines of Yoga, and the inner mysteries of the Siddhar and Tantric traditions.
For our exploration, however, an even more important question arises: What did Thirumular mean to Swami Satchidananda?
A Sage Swami Satchidananda Never Left Behind
We know that the Thirumantiram was among the Tamil scriptures Swami Satchidananda began teaching soon after arriving in New York in 1966. Sadasivam Greenstone, one of his earliest American students, had a particular attraction to the text.
But something happened.
Swami Satchidananda noticed that the young Americans sitting before him were not really following these teachings. Sadasivam later remembered asking why the classes no longer focused on the Thirumantiram. Swami Satchidananda explained that the students needed more preparation. The teaching should not be watered down; instead, the teacher had to present it in a way the student was ready to receive.
It would be easy to hear this story and assume that Swami Satchidananda simply left Thirumular behind. His later talks tell a very different story.
A preliminary search through only a portion of Swami Satchidananda’s recorded teachings reveals him returning to Thirumular again and again over the decades. And what is especially revealing is the kind of teaching for which he invokes him.
Photo: Class at the Integral Yoga Institute, New York, late 1960s.
When discussing the senses, Swami Satchidananda recalls Thirumular insisting that they are not to be destroyed but disciplined. He compares them to good horses: they must be trained and guided by the reins rather than allowed to run the chariot into a ditch.
When explaining the intimate connection between mind and breath, Swami Satchidananda cites Thirumular: “Wherever the mind goes, the breath runs.” Elsewhere he gives the teaching in reciprocal form: where the mind goes, prana follows; where prana goes, the mind follows.
When emphasizing the spiritual importance of caring for the body, Swami Satchidananda again turns to Thirumular. He recounts the sage’s realization that he had once regarded the body as unimportant until he discovered that the Divine dwells within it. From then on, the body was to be cared for as the dwelling place of the Divine.
These are not incidental quotations. They tell us something about the spiritual language Swami Satchidananda carried within him.
Patanjali—and Something More
One of the most fascinating features of the Thirumantiram is that it contains the same eight limbs of Yoga familiar from Patanjali: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi.
Yet the experience of encountering the two texts is very different. Patanjali gives us the bones of an extraordinarily clear spiritual path. Ethical living lays the foundation. Body and breath are steadied. The senses turn inward. Concentration deepens into meditation and samadhi. The presentation is spare, precise, and systematic.
Thirumular takes us into a much more expansive spiritual landscape. The same eight limbs are there, but they unfold within a devotional and Tantric world in which body, breath, subtle energy, sacred practice, and divine grace all participate in spiritual transformation.
His treatment of pranayama, for example, goes far beyond Patanjali’s brief instructions. Breath and mind move together. Prana can be gathered, directed, and raised. The body itself becomes part of the spiritual mystery—not something to be discarded, but a sacred instrument in which the Divine is discovered.
This helps us understand something important about Swami Satchidananda’s own teaching.
Integral Yoga drew deeply from Patanjali, but the Yoga Sutras were never the whole of what Swami Satchidananda taught. Alongside the eight limbs, his teaching embraced mantra, japa, and yantra; prana and the subtle body; chakras and nadis; puja and the Goddess; Guru and grace; and the body itself as an instrument of spiritual realization.
These were not simply additions to an otherwise Patanjalian system. They belonged to a much larger spiritual inheritance—one that had helped form Swami Satchidananda long before he came to America. The Thirumantiram offers a remarkable glimpse into the Tamil Siddhar and Shaiva-Tantric world that helped form Swami Satchidananda.
Photo: Swami Satchidananda teaching pranayama, late 1960s.
Body, Breath, and the Divine Within
The Tamil Siddhar tradition places unusual emphasis on embodiment. Rather than treating the body simply as an obstacle to transcend, it uses body, breath, and mind as instruments through which spiritual transformation can occur.
That orientation permeates the Thirumantiram.
Again, Swami Satchidananda’s repeated use of Thirumular becomes significant. When Swami Satchidananda taught about regulating prana, conserving vital energy, awakening subtler capacities, or understanding the body as a vehicle for spiritual realization, Thirumular was one of the authorities he invoked. In several talks, he cites highly esoteric verses concerning the regulation and raising of prana and the resulting transformation or radiance of the body.
That understanding was not confined to Swami Satchidananda’s quotations from Thirumular. In a recorded practice from the 1980s that he called “Pranic Healing Visualization,” he guided students in combining breath, concentration, and visualization of prana and light. He taught them to imagine prana moving through the body, to direct it with thought and attention, and to combine the practice with sacred imagery and mantra. The practice echoes aspects of the larger yogic world we encounter in the Thirumantiram: breath and mind working together, prana consciously directed, sacred imagery and mantra, and the body itself participating in spiritual practice.
These teachings belong to the larger world of the Tamil Siddhar and Tantric traditions, in which the human body becomes a microcosm of spiritual reality and the energies ordinarily flowing outward are gathered, refined, and turned toward realization.
Love Itself Is Siva
Another teaching of Thirumular stands remarkably close to the heart of Swami Satchidananda’s message. In one of the best-known verses of the Thirumantiram, Thirumular says that only those who do not understand regard Love and Shiva as two. When their unity is known, one discovers Anbe Sivam: Love itself is Shiva—the Divine.
Swami Satchidananda returned continually to the same essential understanding in his own language: God is Love. Love was not merely an emotion directed toward God; it expressed the very nature of the Divine. “You love because you are made of love, not because you have to love.”
The same was true when he spoke of peace. Shanti was not something we had to acquire from somewhere outside ourselves. Peace was already our true nature. Again and again, he led prayers toward that universal vision: “May the entire universe be filled with peace and joy, love and light.”
Here too, Thirumular helps us hear something beneath Swami Satchidananda’s later teaching. The Light within, the Divine dwelling within the body, Shiva discovered as the deepest truth of our being, and Love itself are not separate realizations. They belong to one vision of spiritual life.
Photo: Sample page from the Thirumantiram.
Where Spiritual Worlds Meet
Tamil bhakti is there—the passionate love of God that animated the Nayanar saints. The Tamil Siddhar tradition is there, with its intense concern for body, breath, subtle energy, and transformation. The world of the Shaiva Agamas and Tantra is there as well, with its rich tradition of inner practice and sacred symbolism. And running through many of the Thirumantiram’s verses is a strikingly nondual vision in which the Divine is not ultimately somewhere else.
This vision comes very close to the one Swami Satchidananda taught throughout his life. Spiritual realization does not give us a new Self or make us into something we were not before. The True Self is already our essential nature. Yoga removes what obscures that realization.
Here there is also an important difference from the philosophical framework underlying Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Classical Yoga rests on a dualistic philosophy: it distinguishes Purusha, the Self, from Prakriti, the entire realm of nature, including body and mind. Liberation comes through realizing their complete distinction. In that sense, its underlying philosophy is dualistic.
Swami Satchidananda embraced Patanjali’s extraordinary system of practice, while teaching from a larger nondual vision in which the True Self and Divine Reality are not ultimately two. That distinction helps us understand why the Yoga Sutras could become so central to Integral Yoga without defining its whole philosophical vision.
Why Patanjali Became the Doorway
We can now return to that Manhattan apartment in 1966. Imagine what Swami Satchidananda was carrying with him and attempting to communicate. Patanjali offered another way to begin. The Yoga Sutras did not require these students first to understand the larger spiritual universe that shaped Swami Satchidananda’s teaching as a whole. They could give his students a clear architecture of practice: ethical foundations, body, breath, mastery of the senses, concentration, meditation, samadhi. The workings of the mind could be examined directly. Practice could begin immediately.
Because the Yoga Sutras became so central to Integral Yoga study, it can be easy to overlook how much larger the tradition Swami Satchidananda transmitted actually was. Thirumular helps us recover something of that larger horizon. The eight limbs were there—but within a spiritual vision that embraced the whole human being, joined disciplined practice with devotion and grace, understood Love itself as Divine, and pointed ultimately toward nondual realization.
And Thirumular was not the only Tamil voice that remained alive in Swami Satchidananda’s teaching. Before we explore the next stage of Ramaswamy’s journey, there are other saints and sages from his Tamil culture whose words continued to echo through his life and his Integral Yoga teachings many decades later.
