This popular Murugan temple is inside the Alagar Malai hills. It is about 4 km from and very close to the Kallazhagar Vishnu temple. It is one of the 6 Abodes or Aru Padai Veedugal of Murugan. It is the 6th Abode. Tamil legend says that Murugan tricked Auvvayar - the wise old poetess of Tamil folklore - at this site. One day Auvvayar was walking through the forest, on a hot sunny day and sat down under the shade of a Naaval berry or Rose apple tree to to rest. The tree had a lot of ripe fruit and she was hungry. There was a little boy on the tree and he asked her whether she wanted some fruit and she said yes. He wanted to know whether she wanted roasted and hot fruit or cold and raw fruit. She was annoyed and ignored him. The little boy (who was Murugan) shook the branches of the tree and some of the fruit fell on the ground. The old woman promptly picked up a few fruit and blew on them to get rid of the sand that had got stuck on the fruit and the boy told her that she had wanted the hot fruit after all. There is a tree here that people claim is a descendent of the original tree.
The temple structure itself is quite small and not as impressive as some of the other Siva and Vishnu temples we have seen. You can see that it has been recently rebuilt with many structures built in the 20th century. Murugan temples in general, in spite of the antiquity of the sites, are small affairs perhaps because the deeply Vaishnavite and Saivite kings and queens who built the great temples likely did not pay much attention to Murugan the most popular deity of the common people. But some temples like the Palani Murugan had royal patronage. There is also a dispute whether this is the original site of Pazhamuthircholai.
Visited August 2109. Base Madurai
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