The story

Kūreśa — Sri Kurattalvan — was born into wealth at Kuram near Kanchipuram. He left it at Sri Ramanujacharya's side with nothing but a pair of cloths and the posture of a servant. The Govindacharya biography records that when he first came to the acharya's door, he had walked from his ancestral home carrying only his wife, Āṇḍāḷ Amma, and the Lord's name.

The central scholarly episode is the journey to Śāradā-pīṭha in Kashmir. Sri Yamunacharya's third vow had charged Ramanuja with a Brahma Sutra commentary in the Bodhāyana-vṛtti tradition. The only surviving copy of Bodhayana's Vṛtti lay in the Sharada library. Sri Ramanujacharya and Sri Kuresha journeyed there, consulted the text, and — when the custodians refused to permit further reading — Kuresha, blessed with total recall, preserved the needful passages in his memory. On the return south, he wrote down at Ramanuja's dictation what the world now holds as the Śrī Bhāṣya. This labor is commemorated separately in the naama śrībhāṣyādimahāgranthakāraka (#63).

Then came the Chola persecution. Tradition names the Chola king as Kṛmikaṇṭha, "worm-necked" — a title the Ashtottara itself preserves in the naama kṛmikaṇṭhanṛpadhvaṁsine (#84). Summoned to the court, Ramanuja was spirited away northward to Melkote in the disguise of a pilgrim; Kuresha, donning his acharya's ochre, went in his place. Asked to sign a declaration that "Śiva is the supreme," Kuresha wrote instead, in the margin, droṇam asti — taṇḍulo nāsti ("the measuring-pot exists, but the rice does not"), meaning: Śiva is a great deity, but not the Supreme. He lost his eyes for that sentence.

Blinded, exiled, and later restored through the intercession of Sri Ranganatha at Tirumala, Sri Kuresha never once spoke a word against the king. The naama pavitrīkṛtakūreśāya — "he who sanctified Kuresha" — does not read, in the tradition, as Ramanuja conferring purity on a lesser man. It reads as the acharya receiving into himself the purity that Kuresha's sharanagati manifested.

Contemplation

An acharya is known by his disciples, and Sri Ramanujacharya's stature is measured, in part, by the stature of Sri Kurattalvan. A man who gave his eyes rather than utter one false word about Sriman Narayana is the kind of devotee a true guru attracts. The contemplation for the devotee is that śiṣya-bhāva — the discipleship posture — is itself sanctifying. Offer the 108-chant of this naama for those you love who are undergoing trial for truth's sake, and for the strength to stand with an acharya when the cost of standing is great.