Appaya Dikshitar (fwd)

[Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian]

Sankaran Panchapagesan <panchap at ICSL.UCLA.EDU> wrote:

> Aushadheesvara must be Skt. for 'Marundeesvarar', right? So that
agrees
> with  your info too. Thanks for your post.

Hi Ganesh,

Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, it seems to be the same. I got curious
about this myself and finally managed to obtain a biography of appayya
by N.Ramesan titled "Sri Appayya Dikshita". It's a fairly
comprehensive book with even charts of lineages of appayya till the
present time. There are many interesting incidents narrated in this
book, but at least some of them seem apocryphal. The author mistakenly
thinks that the book shivarahasya foretells the birth of appayya, but
to me it seems more probable that this verse or that chapter was a
very late addition. Of course we have no reliable dates on the
shivarahasya itself, which might itself be a recent text.

Unfortunately, the author does not seem to be aware of the statue of
appayya in the marundisvarar temple in Thiruvanmiyur. He actually says
that appayya probably did not travel very much beyond his native
village (adayapalam) which does not seem to be near Madras.  The
author Ramesan claims to have researched all traditional biographies
of Appayya.  So we are left in the dark about the Madras visit of
appayya! But, it seems to me that the temple tradition should be given
some weightage, especially since there is a statue of appayya there.
Anyway, the book also has some stotra-s composed by appayya in the
appendix, which are very pleasing to recite.

BTW, many famous persons have descended from appayyas line (or his
brother). Famous personalities include the famous historian Nilakantha
Sastri, C.P.Ramaswamy Iyer (his son has written a foreword to the book
I mentioned above), the famous poet Nilakatha Dikshitar, so on and so
forth.

Rama