The chapter on the transitoriness of the body from the Tamil treatise “Tirumantiram”

Abstract

   The problematics of corporeality is one of the central issues in the medieval Tamil philosophical treatise “Tirumantiram” by Tirumular (c. 10 th – 12 th centuries). It offers a yogic understanding of the body as consisting of several shells (kośa) and having its own subtle body anatomy (sūkṣma śarīra). Such understanding of corporeality was completely new for Tamil culture, where until that time the dominant concepts of corporeality were the one, dating back to ancient Tamil poetry (“Sangam literature”), and another, influenced by the Jain asceticism (as, for example, reflected in the early medieval didactic anthology “Naladiyar”). The article proposes a commented translation from the Old Tamil language of the chapter “Transitoriness of the Body” from the first tantra of the “Tirumantiram”. In that fragment, the author recalls the imminent death of the gross body, which becomes the starting point for explaining the need for its transformation with the help of yogic practice.