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Saints and Poets
He was given the treasury to buy war horses. He built a temple with it instead, and told the king the horses were coming.
He was the Pandya king's minister. And he was good at the work.
Good enough to hold the title Thennavan Brahmarayan. And to be trusted with the treasury.
The king sent him east to the coast with a very large sum of money to buy war horses. This was routine, and important. Tamil kingdoms imported cavalry by sea, from Arabia and the Gulf.
And a minister with the purse was a normal arrangement.
He got as far as Thiruperunthurai, and under a kurundai tree there he met a teacher, and that was the end of the horses.
The accounts do not describe an argument or a conversion in the usual sense. They describe a man sitting down in front of somebody, and not getting up again.
The teacher was Shiva. And when he had finished doing whatever he did, Manikkavachakar had no interest left.
Not in cavalry. Not in the treasury. Not in Madurai, or in his career.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.