Place · Ramanuja birthplace village · India
Shrīperumbudūr
The village in Kanchipuram district, Tamil Nadu, where Ramanuja — the 11th-12th-century founder of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta — was born in 1017 to a Vaishnava Brahmin family. The Adi Kesava Perumal temple at the site holds a shrine to Ramanuja alongside the main deity, and the Statue of Equality — a 216-foot bronze image of Ramanuja consecrated here in 2022 — makes it the largest sitting statue in the world. Ramanuja's 120-year life (traditionally dated 1017-1137) remade South Indian Vaishnavism around the Divya Desams and the Alvar hymns. His successors established mathas at Melkote, Ahobilam, Mysore and Srirangam, extending the Shrivaishnava network across the peninsula.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Tradition
- Shrivaishnava hagiography; temple tradition
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The place is documented; its associated historical or cultural record and its named tradition are distinct layers.
- Location
- 12.967, 79.943
Connections (3)
- Life routeRamanujacharya
Rāmānuja was born at Shrīperumbudūr near Kānchī about 1017. The temple there is a birthplace shrine rather than one he built, and it is the first of the Rāmānuja kshetras — the chain of places a Śrīvaishnava pilgrim visits to walk his life rather than to see a deity. The chain runs Shrīperumbudūr, Kānchī, Srirangam, Melukote and Tirumala, and Śrīvaishnavas walk it as a biography, which is a different kind of pilgrimage from visiting a deity's places.
- Site adjacencyKānchī / Kānchīpuram / Kanchipuram
Shrīperumbudūr is forty kilometres from Kānchī, so his birthplace and the city he was educated in sit inside one stretch of the Palar valley. The Rāmānuja kshetras begin as a local circuit and only become a subcontinental one after the flight to Karnataka. Kānchī is also where the Varadarāja temple stands, in which he is said to have served drawing water before leaving for Srirangam, so the early circuit is a day's walk end to end.
- Teaching lineageShāradā Peeth
Śāradā Pīṭh drew scholars from across the subcontinent — Rāmānuja is said to have gone there for a manuscript and the Tibetan translator Vairotsana to have studied there — and it gave its name to the Sharada script in which Kashmiri Sanskrit was written for a thousand years. It now stands on the Line of Control, inaccessible from the Indian side since 1947, and nobody knows what was in its library.
On these journeys
Sources
Ramanuja — Shrivaishnava sources; Srirangam Andavan Ashramam
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