Place · Murugan shrine · India
Pazhamudircholai
The sixth and last of Murugan's Arupadaiveedu abodes at Pazhamudircholai near Alagar Koil, 25 kilometres north of Madurai, in a dense evergreen forest at the base of the Alagar Hills. The temple is traditionally the smallest and most natural of the six, with no gopuram and the deity enshrined in a cave. Pazhamudircholai is associated with the Tamil poet Avvaiyar — the Sangam-era woman poet who in Puranic tradition encountered Murugan here in the form of a tribal boy who challenged her with the riddle of the roasted versus unroasted fruit (pazham). The exchange is one of the foundational Tamil didactic stories.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Tamil Murugan tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.130, 78.190
Connections (3)
- Canonised by textNakkīrar
The sixth and last camp in the Tirumurugārruppadai is Pazhamudirchōlai, and the poem's closing section is what keeps a fruit grove in the list beside four built temples. The Alagar hills shrine has almost no architecture to speak of; its standing in the set rests on those lines. Tamil tradition counts the grove as a temple because a poem said so, which is an unusually clean case of literature creating sacred geography rather than recording it.
- Legend set atAvvaiyār
The naval-pazham exchange at Pazhamudirchōlai is the best-known Avvaiyār story: the boy in the tree who asks whether she wants her fruit roasted or unroasted, and the poet who takes the question for nonsense until she understands it. The grove's standing as a shrine rests as much on this story as on the Sangam poem.
- Shared site withKallalagar, Madurai
The Alagar hills carry two great shrines on one massif: Kallalagar's Vishnu temple at the foot, a Divya Desam, and Pazhamudirchōlai's Murugan grove above it, the sixth of the Ārupadai Vīdu. A Vaishnava canon and a Kaumāra one both claim the same hill north of Madurai. Kallalagar's annual descent to the Vaigai for Mīnākshī's wedding brings the two claims into one festival, with the Vaishnava god arriving late and turning back at the river.
On these journeys
Sources
Arupadai Veedu — six abodes of Murugan
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