Padmanabhaswamy temple. Tiruvananthapuram
The legendary sage Vilvamangalathu Swamiyar was a great devotee of Vishnu. After several years of meditation, Lord Vishnu appeared in front of him as a small boy. The sage loved the child immensely and requested him to stay with him in the hermitage forever. The child agreed but mentioned that if the hermit failed to treat him with respect, the child would vanish.
One day, when the sage was in deep meditation, the child by mistake tainted the idol which was kept for puja. The sage was enraged and punished the child. But since his condition was broken, the child vanished telling the hermit that if he wanted to see him again, he had to search for him in Ananthankaadu. The sage then started moving in the direction the child vanished, fasted and searched for days for Ananthankaadu.
Finally, he reached Ananthankaadu where he saw the boy merging into an Iluppa tree (Indian Butter Tree). The tree fell to the ground and instantly transformed into the form of Lord Vishnu. But this form of the Lord was of an extraordinarily large size, with his head at Thiruvallam (5km from where the Padmanabhaswamy temple is located), the body at Thiruvananthapuram and the feet at Thrippadapuram (8km away towards the north). The sage requested the Lord to shrink to a smaller proportion and the Lord shrank to the form of the idol that is seen at present in the temple. With the assistance of the reigning King and some Brahmin households, a Temple was constructed. The Ananthankaadu Nagaraja Temple still exists to the north west of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple. The Samadhi of the sage exists to the west of the Padmanabhaswmy Temple and a Krishna temple has been built over his samadhi.
The main idol is 18 feet long and can be viewed through three different doors in the temple today – head and chest through one door, hands through the second door and feet through the third door.
The Padmanabhaswamy temple is the richest temple in the world as it has thousands of kilograms of gold, jewels, ancient idols and metals inside its secret vaults, which were stored by our kings from thousands of years. During the 17th century, the Mughals tried to invade the temple, but it is said that divine serpents materialised in hundreds and protected the temple.
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