It becomes evident when we see the great saints of our land were revered so greatly even today for they did what the people who plugged in to the society couldn’t. When it comes to the great masters of Kannada, the Lingayat Trio i.e. Allama Prabhu, his disciples Akka Mahadevi and Basava were praised a lot. The forerunner, Allama Prabhu is a wonderful saint who openly propounded the divinity within humanity and emphasised that one can turn his her embodiment into the void itself.
Little is known about the prior life of this saint that according to the scholar Ramanuja, ‘A butterfly doesn’t have the memory of a caterpillar!’ It is known that he used to work as a temple drummer who fell in love with a dancer but their relationship went asunder. With that, Allama Prabhu went on experimenting that how one can keep their body unharmed to the environment and turn it into void. While he’s wandering in the jungle, he meets Saint Animisha, who tells him that the essence of the soul sits in the cavity between the chest and its form is void itself, with that, Allama stared to call it as Guheswara (Lord of the Cave).
As an enlightened being, he encounters another yogi named Nandanar who mastered the Hatha Yoga and achieved a state of strength that no sword can harm his steel like body. He became vital and young, he’s of more than 200 years by the moment he met with Allama Prabhu. He asked Allama to test him by striking a blow of his sword. He did, and the sword flung away. So Allama, in return, asked Nandanar to do the same on him, but this time, Nandanar’s sword swung in the air, touching nothing even it went across Allama’s body. Then Saint Nandanar got startled that how he’s able to achieve such state. Then Allama, praising Nandanar for his will that he made it to this moment, he said, focus on the God, which is Void, then the body will be Void itself because the Body is the Temple of the living God! Then Nandanar also got even more enlightened and bade him his leave for his next step of evolution. Thus, Allama Prabhu, with his lifestyle, showed the path to enlightenment.
