Saints of Arunachala · The foremost Siddhar

Agastyar: the foremost of the Siddhars

If the eighteen Siddhars are the mystic root of Tamil spirituality, Agastyar is the root of the root ~ Vedic sage, father of the Tamil tongue, founder of Siddha medicine, and, tradition insists, a deathless one still living in the southern hills.

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If the eighteen Siddhars are the mystic root of Tamil spirituality, then Agastyar ~ Agathiyar ~ is the root of the root. He stands first among them, the foremost and most ancient of the Siddhars, and few figures in all of Indian tradition are woven through so many threads at once: sage of the Vedas, father of the Tamil language and its grammar, founder of Siddha medicine, master yogi, and, the tradition insists, a chiranjivi ~ a deathless one, still living, in secret, in the hills of the south. To know something of Agastyar is to touch the very source of the Tamil spiritual world.

The Vedic sage

Agastyar’s story reaches back into the oldest layers of Indian sacred tradition. He appears in the Rig Veda itself ~ he and his wife Lopamudra are credited as the authors of a set of its hymns ~ and he is one of the great rishis (seers) of the Vedic age, a figure of immense antiquity honoured across the whole of Hindu tradition. Legends cluster thickly around him: that he was born of a pot (giving him the name Kumbhamuni); that he drank the ocean dry; that he humbled the mighty Vindhya mountains, which bowed before him and, at his word, remained bowed so that he might pass south ~ a story that marks him, symbolically, as the great sage who brought the Vedic and spiritual heritage of the north into the Tamil south, which became forever his home.

Father of the Tamil tradition

It is in the south that Agastyar becomes uniquely, profoundly Tamil. He is honoured as the father of the Tamil language ~ traditionally the author of the first Tamil grammar, the Agattiyam, and the head of the first great Tamil Sangam (academy of poets). He is associated above all with the Podhigai (Pothigai) hills in the far south, held to be his abode. And he is revered as the fountainhead of the Tamil Siddha tradition itself ~ the first and greatest of the Siddhars, the guru from whom the lineage of the eighteen flows. In him, the Vedic and the Tamil, the northern and the southern, the scholarly and the mystic, meet and become one.

Sage of the Vedas, father of the Tamil tongue, founder of Siddha medicine ~ in Agastyar the northern and the southern, the scholarly and the mystic, meet and become one.

Founder of Siddha medicine

Agastyar is credited, more than any other, with founding Siddha medicine ~ one of the oldest continuous systems of healing on earth, still practised across Tamil Nadu today. A vast body of Tamil medical, alchemical and yogic texts is attributed to him (though, as with all the Siddhars, authorship across the centuries is a tangled and traditional matter). In these he set down knowledge of herbs and minerals, of the transformation of the body, of yoga and the breath and the subtle channels ~ the whole science by which the Siddhars pursued not only liberation but the mastery and even the immortalisation of the physical body. To this day, practitioners of Siddha medicine and devotees across Tamil Nadu revere Agastyar as their founding master and living patron.

The deathless one

And, the tradition insists, he has never died. Agastyar is counted among the chiranjivis ~ the immortals ~ and is believed to be still alive, dwelling unseen in the Podhigai hills and appearing, across the centuries, to those siddhas and devotees ready to receive his grace. Many later Siddhars name him as their guru though they lived ages apart; many devotees today report his guidance. Whether one takes this literally or as the tradition’s way of saying that Agastyar’s wisdom is a living, ever-available reality, it places him outside ordinary time ~ the deathless sage at the source of the Tamil spiritual world, of which Arunachala’s hidden siddhas are one shining branch.

Last updated 15 February 2026. Following the documented record preserved by Sri Ramanasramam and his devotees; where an account is traditional, it is told as such.