INDIA, July 15, 2026 (gurusubbaraman.github): The 276 Temples Interactive Directory is an interactive map with all 276 Paadal Petra Sthalams plotted, including the temples in Tamil Nadu Sri Lanka, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Nepal, and Tibet — from Chidambaram to Trincomalee to Kedarnath. This free, open online resource is an interactive bilingual (English and Tami)l digital directory of all 276 Paadal Petra Sthalams, with a new feature that animates the traditional pilgrimages of the four Saiva saints (the Naalvar) as narrated in Sekkizhar’s Periya Puranam. The site has GPS coordinates for every temple and satellite imagery so users can see the great temple gopurams from above — Chidambaram’s four gates, Madurai Meenakshi’s fourteen gopurams, Thiruvannamalai’s hill complex.
Click any saint’s button in the lower-left of the map, and their journey traces itself across South India in about 15 seconds — connecting the temples they visited in the traditional narrative sequence from Sekkizhar’s Periya Puranam. The effect is quite moving. Watching Sambandar’s journey line trace from Sirkazhi through Chidambaram, down to Madurai, on to Rameswaram, and back to Kanchipuram in fifteen seconds gives you an immediate visceral sense of the geographic scale of the Tevaram tradition — the sheer distances the child-saint covered before he attained moksha at age 16.
A daily summary of world news for Hindus and non-Hindus alike