Long before Nadaloka came to sit on its slopes, Arunachala had already been drawing pilgrims, poets, and seekers for centuries. To understand why a sound temple would choose to root itself here — on the Girivalam path, opposite Sri Raghavendra Temple — is to understand something of the mountain’s own long history.
The fire that became a hill
Arunachala is one of the five sacred elemental abodes (Pancha Bhoota Sthalams) of Shiva in South India, representing the element of fire (Agni). According to the legend recorded in the Skanda Purana, Brahma and Vishnu once quarrelled over who was the greater of the two. Shiva appeared between them as an infinite column of light to settle the dispute — and that column, too vast and blinding to behold, is said to have cooled and taken form as the hill that stands today at Tiruvannamalai. Once a year, at Karthigai Deepam, a giant flame is lit atop the hill to commemorate this appearance, visible for miles across the plain.
A path older than memory
The 14-kilometre road that circles the base of the hill — the Girivalam — has been walked by pilgrims for so long that its exact origins are lost to history. What is known is that it passes eight shrines, each marking one of the cardinal and sub-cardinal directions, and that the practice of walking it, especially at full moon, is considered one of the most direct forms of worship available at Arunachala: no priest, no ritual object, simply the mountain on one side and the walker’s own steps on the other.
The mountain of the modern seekers
In the twentieth century, Arunachala became known far beyond Tamil Nadu through Sri Ramana Maharshi, who arrived as a teenager in 1896 and never left, living first in caves on the hill and later at the ashram that grew at its foot. His teaching — self-enquiry, the simple question “Who am I?” — drew visitors from across the world and reframed Arunachala, for many, less as a pilgrimage site than as a place where the boundary between seeker and sought quietly dissolves. He is far from the only figure associated with the hill: it has hosted ascetics, poets, and Nada yogis for generations, drawn as much to its silence as to its sanctity.
Sound at the foot of the fire mountain
It is this layered history — fire, path, silence, sound — that Nadaloka sits within. Nada, the Sanskrit root of our name, means the primordial sound from which all creation is said to emerge; Arunachala, in its own traditions, is described less as a physical mass than as a vibration made visible. Every evening at 5PM, when the Nada Abhishekam begins in the Sound Cave, it continues a conversation between sound and stillness that this mountain has been holding for a very long time.