The story of the temple begins not with stone, but with sand. According to the Ramayana, after Rama defeated Ravana and rescued Sita from Lanka, he was troubled by the fact that he had killed a Brahmin — for Ravana, despite his tyranny, was a scholar of Brahmin lineage. To atone, Rama wished to worship Shiva and sent Hanuman to the Himalayas to bring back a lingam. When Hanuman’s return was delayed, Sita is said to have shaped a lingam from the seashore sand herself so the auspicious moment for worship would not pass. When Hanuman finally arrived with the Himalayan lingam, Rama, moved by his devotion, decreed that this second lingam — the Vishwalingam — be worshipped first, a custom the temple still follows today.

The physical temple that pilgrims walk through now took shape over many centuries rather than at a single moment. Its sanctum has roots going back over a thousand years, but the structure was substantially expanded during the 12th century under the Pandya dynasty. Around the same period, Jeyaveera Cinkaiariyan and his successor Gunaveera Cinkaiariyan, rulers of the Jaffna kingdom in present-day Sri Lanka, funded major renovations to the sanctum — even shipping stone blocks across the sea from the Koneswaram temple in Trincomalee for the work.

The temple’s most spectacular feature, its immense pillared corridors, largely took form later, between the 16th and 17th centuries, under the patronage of the Setupati rulers of Ramnad, with King Muthuramalinga Sethupathi credited with much of the construction seen today. Over the generations, the Cholas, the Cheras, and the Vijayanagara Empire also left their mark through further additions and repairs, making the temple a layered record of South Indian temple architecture across nearly a millennium.