ABSTRACT
Yåmuna’s Stotraratna and Råmånuja’s Gadyatraya were the paradigms for a corpus of Sanskrit poetry which came to be composed by Råmånuja’s disciples, the åcåryas K¨rattål-vån-and his son Paråçara Bha††ar. Studies of these poems1
have shown that their key motifs are derived not only from the poetry of Yåmuna and Råmånuja but also the Nålåyirativiyappirapantam.2 They tended to be a dense mixture of purely poetical and lyrical verses on the beauty of God (inspired
by the conventions of Sanksrit court poetry) juxtaposed with theological sections relating to the authority of the Vedas and the Sm®ti, the nature of the relationship between God and the World as well as soteriology. Some of their main motifs may be summed up as follows:
● Praise of the various forms of Vi‚~u-Nåråya~a, starting with his Supreme (and transcendent) form (paramaµ r¨pam) and moving on to the progressively more accessible forms such as the four-fold emanations (vy¨ha) and the incarnations (vibhava), of which the most frequently alluded to are Råma and K®‚~a.3 The form of Vi‚~u-Nåråya~a, though, of paramount importance in this poetry is the deity (arca) in the temple to which several of the poems are dedicated.4
