________________
JUNE, 1896.)
THE AGE OF TIRUNANASAMBANDHA.
151
amploring his attendant, Tattan by name, to spare the life of his murderer out of veneration for the form of a Saiva devotee the assassin had assumed. The date of the inscription is the third year of Rajëndra-Chôļa's reign; and there can be no question that this Rajendra was the immediate successor of the now well known Chôla emperor Rajaraja, since the person who sets up the image is the temple-manager Poygai-nadu Kilavan Adittan Sûryan alias Tennavan Mûyêndavēļân, figuring so frequently in the published inscriptions of that great monarch. It is not unlikely that the shrewd temple-manager found his new youthful sovereign anxious to exercise a rather inconveniently strict supervision over the management of the temple endowments so profusely made by his predecessor on the throne, and in consequence, wanted to read to him a practical sermon by thus setting up the image of a king, who held it profane even to touch the hair of his own assassin, because he had come covered in Saiva garments! However that be, the question of absorbing interest to us here is, whence did our clever manager borrow his text to be thus utilized for his purposes ? Is it or is it not from the Periyapurdnan ? If it is, it must unquestionably establish the priority of that treatise to the third year of Rajendra's reign. The words of the legend appear temptingly similar to those in the Purana. Dr. Hultzsch himself observes, "The words Tattá namaré kán' bear a close resemblance to those of the verse 'namar Tattá.' ” The resemblance, however, is really closer. The line in the Periyapuranam reads not namar Tatta,' but Tattá namar' exactly in the order given in the inscription. Probably the mistake arose by referring to the Tiructondar-Purárasáram,65 or the abstract of the Periyapuranam by Um&pati, instead of to the Purana itself. In the face of the identity, I am not sure that Dr. Hulteseh's inference about the relative age of Sêkkilar and Rajaraja will be accepted by all as conclusive. For, it is possible to contend, in the first place, whether there lived but one Anapaya, as the argument assumes, and in the next place, whether South Indian palæography is yet in a position to be dogmatic about dates, independent of corroborative evidence aliunde. Nevertheless I am not inclined to contest tho point, partly out of deference to the opinion of so careful & writer as Dr. Hultzsch, but more because I think I have a better hypothesis as to the source of the Tanjore temple-manager's text, than ascribing it to the Periyapuránam.
For I find in the Andádi of Nambi Åndar Nambi, upon which the Periyapuráram is avowedly based, the identical expression, letter for letter, with the simple omission of the expletive 'kan' at the end of it. It is not impossible that the temple-manager added this word, 'kán, meaning 'look' or behold,' not as a part of the dying exclamation of the pious king whose image he was then setting up, but as a warning of his own, & word in terrorem, to such impudent profanity as would venture to subject to the secular law the acts of the holy servants of god. But whether we regard it as a pure expletive or as a sly hint, the absence of 'kun' will not stand in the way of our tracing the text to Nambi's andadi. The principal word in it is 'namaré;' and no Tamil scholar can feel any scruple as to its being a classical term, unknown to colloquial Tamil, even of the age of Rajaraja, if we may judge from the style of the many voluminons inscriptions of his, now placed before the public through the indefatigable labours of Dr. Haltzsch. The only question possible, to my mind at least, is whether Nambi Andâr and Rajaraja's temple-manager might not have both borrowed the expression from some common prior source in verse. But, even in the days of Sêkkilar, there was no work extant on the subject except this Andddi of Nambi and the famous padigam of Sundara. The expression not being found in the latter, the Anda di is the only classical source from which the temple-manager could have borrowed his text, unless, of course, we indulge in the assumption that there existed a poem of which Sekkilär himself was not aware, and imagine also at the same time, that so practical a man as the temple-manager could have been foolish enough to believe that so rare a text could have carried home to the reader of his legend the lesson he was intent on teaching. I, for one, am
64 See South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. II. Parts I. and II.
Verse 7. *[This is improbable, as the word kan precedes the relative participle enca, 'who said,' and thus forms part of the dying king's own words.-E. H.]
