Padmanabhaswamy Temple

About

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple rises at the heart of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, southern India, where Vishnu reclines as Anantha Padmanabhaswamy upon the great serpent Adi Sesha in yogic sleep. The presiding deity is the tutelary lord of the Travancore royal family, whose titular Maharaja serves today as trustee of the temple.

In the garbhagriha the image of Padmanabha rests upon the five-hooded coils of Shesha, the hoods turned inward in contemplation. His right hand lies over a Shiva lingam, and beside him stand his consorts Sridevi Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity, and Bhudevi, goddess of the earth. Brahma is shown emerging from a lotus that rises from the navel of Vishnu. The deity is formed of 12,008 saligramas from the Gandaki river in Nepal, bound in the special ayurvedic compound known as the Katusarkara yogam.

The temple is named in Sangam-era Tamil literature, including the Cilappatikaram, where it is called Syanandoorapura and praised as a city of golden walls. It is glorified in the Divya Prabandha as one of the thirteen Divya Desams of Malai Nadu and was sung by the Alvar saint Nammalwar in the seventh and eighth centuries.

The seven-tiered gopuram in the Pandyan style rises a hundred feet above the entrance, its foundation laid in 1566. Beside it lies the Padma Theertham. A corridor of 365 and a quarter sculpted granite pillars runs to the sanctum, and within the precincts the shrines of Thekkedom for Ugra Narasimha and Thiruvambadi for Krishna Swami stand alongside the main sanctum.

History

The temple is named in Sangam-era literature and in numerous Puranas, including the Vishnu, Brahma, Matsya, Varaha, Skanda, Padma, Vayu, and Bhagavata Puranas, and in the Mahabharata. The granta-pura, a dedicated record room, was built within the temple in 1425 by Venad king Veera Iravi Iravi Varma, and most of the surviving Mathilakam records were transferred to the Archives Department in 1867. In 1731, Marthanda Varma ordered the Ottakkal-mandapam to be cut from a single great stone at Tirumala and installed before the deity, alongside the re-consecration of the image with 12,000 fresh saligramas from the Gandaki.

Significance

Padmanabhaswamy is one of the 108 Divya Desams of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, the sacred geography sung by the Alvar saints. As the family deity of the Travancore line, the shrine binds royal duty and devotional service into the daily liturgy, with Tantris from the Tharananallur Nambuthiripad line and four Nambi chief priests serving the deities.