The Tiruvasagam, meaning sacred utterances, is attributed to the Tamil Shaiva poet saint Manikkavacakar, traditionally dated to around the ninth century, and unlike the Tevaram it is the work of a single author rather than a shared collection. Its verses are known for an unusually raw, emotionally exposed register, moving between ecstatic praise, despair at separation from Shiva, and passages that read almost as autobiography, describing what the tradition presents as Manikkavacakar's own conversion and subsequent spiritual struggle.
Tradition holds that Manikkavacakar had been a government minister before renouncing his position to become a wandering devotee of Shiva, and several sections of the Tiruvasagam are read within the tradition as directly reflecting episodes from this transition, giving the text a strongly personal narrative thread running beneath its devotional and philosophical content.
The Tiruvasagam is composed in a variety of meters and verse forms across its different sections, ranging from sustained devotional address to shorter, more fragmentary passages of longing and self-reproach, a formal variety scholars have read as matching the text's emotional range rather than serving purely decorative or technical purposes.