The sage Agastya gave his name to the second brightest star in India's sky
Agastya is a Vedic hymn-writer, the legendary father of Siddha medicine, the supposed author of the first Tamil grammar and a guru in medieval Javanese texts. In Indian tradition he is also Canopus, the star that outshines everything in the subcontinent's night sky except Sirius.
Few figures in Hindu tradition travel so widely. Agastya, called Agathiyar in Tamil, is one of the seven great rishis of the Vedic texts and, together with his wife Lopamudra, is credited with hymns 1.165 to 1.191 of the Rigveda. He appears in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and in the literature of Shaivism, Shaktism and Vaishnavism. Some traditions hold that he never died. His image turns up in temple carvings across South and Southeast Asia, including early medieval Shaiva temples on Java, and an 11th-century Old Javanese text, the Agastyaparva, casts him as its central teacher.
In the Tamil world he looms especially large. An 8th-century commentary names him head of the legendary First Tamil Sangam in a southern Madurai later swallowed by the sea, and says his grammar, the Agattiyam, was the authority of that age. Tradition ties him to the Pothigai Hills, where a waterfall bears his name, and credits him with many medical and spiritual works.
His birth story is extraordinary. Two gods, Mitra and Varuna, are so overcome by the celestial dancer Urvashi during a sacrifice that their seed falls into a clay jar, and Agastya grows and is born from it, in some versions with the sage Vasistha as his twin. Hence the epithet Kumbhayoni, one whose womb was a pot. Scholars also propose several origins for the name itself: a root meaning to shine, fitting the star; an Iranian word giving not foul; or, in a verse of the Ramayana, the mover of mountains.
Legends disagree about his marriage. In one, Princess Lopamudra of Vidarbha accepts the forest ascetic against her parents' fears, valuing his virtue over her own passing youth. In another she demands basic comforts first, forcing him back into society to earn money. Their son Drdhasyu is said to have absorbed the Vedas in the womb and come into the world reciting them. Even his hermitage has many claimed homes, from Tamil Nadu to Nashik, Kannauj and Uttarakhand.
Source: Agastya
