Legend of Manimekalai beyond the Tamil realm.

Manimekalai was an ancient Tamil poetic narrative composed around 6th century by Cattanar from Madurai. Along with Cilapathikaram, it is called irattai kappiyam — that is, twin epics. The main plot of the text is about the girl called Manimekalai, daughter of Kovalan and Matavi. She was born to be a courtesan and later moved away from that to become a Buddhist monk at the end of the narrative. The epic is a Buddhist in nature since it contains many philosophical ideas throughout the epic. It is composed before the Saiva narratives of 7th–11th centuries CE .

The story of Cilapathikaram is popular one among the people of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Manimegalai is not popular one compared to Cilapathikaram , a Jain epic.

From the Anne Monius’s book , Imagining a Place for Buddhism : Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India , one may come to know that legend of Manimekalai, legends of Naka princess , legend of Agastya was spread from South India to Java. Manimekalai was earlier extant text on Buddhism in Tamil literature.

Around 4th-5th centuries Tamil region become place for Buddhist institutions. The places like Kanchipuram and Kaveripattinam was nodal Buddhist religion institutions. The excavations in Poompuhar has revealed Buddhist vihara dated to 4th Century CE. However, according to Manimekalai, after the city was destroyed by sea around 6th century, the institution was moved to Kanchi — capital of Pallavas.

The three celebrated Pali commentators [on Theravada Buddhism ] —Buddhaghosa, Buddhadatta, and Dhammapala, all belonging to the late fourth or early fifth centuries—have some explicit connection with monastic institutions in the Tamil-speaking region. Buddhadatta, for example, more than once states that he composed his commentarial treatises while residing at Kavirapattana, the same Kavirippumpattinam where the oldest monastic artifacts have been unearthed in the Tamil region.
(Monius 2001:5)

The Nakapattinam of Kaveri delta later becomes prominent Buddhist center from 9th to 16th centuries CE. Numerous sources from outside Indian subcontinent itself attest to a long-flourishing Buddhist community in Nakapattinam.

Cavakam and Manipallavam in Manimekalai:

Lands of Cavakam and Manipallavam appears in the following narrative. Only relevant part of whole subplot is written below.

Manimekalai speaks about the king called as Punniyaracan as ruler of Cavakam in one of its subplots. As per Manimekalai, Aputtiran — son of cow — was died in island called Manipallavam [ten miles from Korkai]. During his voyage from Korkai to Cavakam , the vessel was wrecked near the island of Manipallavam and therefore all people had to stay in Manipallavam. The nayakan of the vessel— or navigator of the ship — later repaired the vessel. He assumed all the people back to ship and started the voyage. But the Aputtiran did not and he died in the island. He later reborn as Punniyaracan, ruler of Cavakam from the capital Nagapuram . Manimekalai later goes to Cavakam to meet Punniyaracan and both goes to isle of Manipallavam. The king then realizes the nature of his previous birth as the bearer of Amutacurapi. Tivatilakai — the guardian of Komuki Lake in the island — informs the king that his former life ended there on Manipallavam, and she tells Manimekalai that Puhar has been destroyed due to the king's sudden neglect of the Indra festival. Manimekalai and the Cavakam king then uncover the bones of Aputtiran's body in the sand. Then the king returned to his kingdom and Manimekalai proceeding to the city of Vanci.

The Cavakam mentioned and narrated in the epic is modern day Java. The old Tamil phonetics , unlike modern counterpart, lacked [ja] sound and therefore [ja]->[ca] is very common transformation in Old Tamil. Thus, the Manimegalai includes Cavakam as part of it’s Buddhist world which centered around Puhar and Kanchipuram.

The most interesting of the island kingdoms and the one that clearly takes center stage in the Buddhist world imagined by the Manimekalai is that of "cool Cavakam" with its "great mountains of camphor" (xv.3). The Tamil text takes significant care to establish the island as a less fantastic or imaginary place than Manipallavam; Cavakam is ruled by a king (Aputtiran reborn as King Punniyaracan) plagued by an all-too-human ennui, whose minister reminisces at xxv.12-20 about his former ambassadorial trip to Pukar to "establish good relations with [King] Killivalavan." Aputtiran's story provides a direct link with the landscape of southern India, for he was, in a former lifetime, born and abandoned by his mother ten miles from the South Indian city of Korkai (xiii.84-85) and cast out by his adopted brahmin community, only to be reborn from the womb of a virtuous cow and adopted by the childless king, Pumicantiran (Bhumicandra), on the island of Cavakam (xv.45). Aputtiran's greatness in his birth as King Punniyaracan is foretold by the sage of Cavakam, Manmukan (xv.9-14); the miracles that surround Aputtiran's birth on Cavakam mirror those of the Buddha's birth and confuse the sages of the temple of the cosmic place back in Pukar, who realize that "it is not the time for the earthly birth of the great ascetic of the bodhi tree" (xv.29-30). As Aravanan earlier describes the auspicious events to accompany the future Buddha's arrival on earth (xii.87-98), Aputtiran's reign over Cavakam is said to usher in an era of unfailing rains and prosperity (xxv.100-109). Cavakam is imagined in the Manimekalai as the home of a wise and compassionate follower of the Buddha who attains enlightening knowledge of former births before the great lotus seat on Manipallavam (xxv. 134-137).
(Monius 2001: 103–04)

The Cavakam depicted in the narrative , according to Monius, is rather realistic.

Beyond even the sites of South India properly revisioned as central locations in the Buddhist world, however, the Manimekalai includes in its landscape a variety of islands and island kingdoms, from the fabulous and wholly imaginative landscape of Manipallavam to the far-off and more "realistically" depicted kingdom of Cavakam. (p.103)
Although the historical record is scanty, the Manimekalai provides several hints that this imagined connection between Kancipuram and Cavakam does not arise from nothing, that it is not a wholly created space like the magical island of Manipallavam. (p.111)

The question why Manimekalai includes the Java as part of it’s Buddhist world is raised by Monius as it’s readers or audience needed sophisticated knowledge in both Classical Tamil poetry and Buddhist literature.

Just as obviously as the Manimekalai anticipates a model audience sophisticated in its knowledge of both classical Tamil literature and Buddhist values, as discussed in preceding chapters, so, too, does the text expect an audience for whom a literary landscape stretching from South India to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia would suggest at least the possibility of a coherent region, of an identifiable territory or world. At what level, however, might such an envisioned region actually be coherent? What might the connection between Pukar and Cavakam mean for the reading community of the Manimekalai?
(p.108)

There was, indeed , more connection between Nagapattinam and East Asia.

one might point, in the case of the Manimekalai, to the substantial body of historical evidence cited previously that connects South India to Southeast Asia through the twelfth century via ties both economic and political. That a Buddhist text written in Tamil and claiming as its imagined center the cities of Kancipuram and Pukar should also envision a Buddhist world that includes the islands of Southeast Asia and Cavakam in particular is certainly not beyond the pale of historical possibility
A long-standing relationship among various monastic establishments in the Tamil port city of Nakapattinam, roughly twenty miles from the Buddhist ruins unearthed at present-day Kavirippumpattinam, or Pukar, and the Sailendra kings of Java and Sumatra can be traced to at least the early eleventh-century reign of the Cola king, Rajaraja I. One of the so-called Larger Leiden Plates commissioned by Rajaraja I records grants to the " surpassingly beautiful Culamanivarma-vihara " at "Nagipattana" that had been built by "the glorious Maravijayottungavarman" of the "Sailendra family" of "Sri Vishaya." More than three hundred bronze images of the Buddha and various Buddhas-to-be have been recovered from Nakapattinam. The name of the royal dynasty, Sailendra, literally "Indra of the mountain," perhaps provides some point of reference for the rather enigmatic statement found in the Manimekalai (xxiv.164-165) that Nakapuram, the city in Cavakam ruled over by Aputtiran-rebom-as-King-Punniyaracan, is "the great city of the nephew of Indra."
Nagapattinam was also home to another Buddhist monastic establishment patronized by "foreigners": the so-called Chinese pagoda sketched by Elliot in the nineteenth century before the structure was torn down by Europeans to build a Jesuit college. The fifteenth-century Kalyani inscriptions of Burma relate the story of several monks who travel to Nagapattana to visit a monastic institution known as Padarikarama and to worship the image of the Buddha in a temple constructed by the king of "Cinadesa." The Manimekalai itself, as noted previously, imagines a diplomatic connection of sorts between King Punniyaracan of Cavakam and the Cola king of Kavirippumpattinam (xxv.13-18), and Punniyaracan, as Aputtiran reborn, amounts to a Cavanese ruler hailing originally from southern India.
(p.108–09)

Was Tamil a Everyday language ?

Pre Modern Indic literature in general takes little notice of lands beyond India proper. In the cultural region or ecumene based on the literary practices associated with the perceived aesthetic powers of Sanskrit and where Tamil may or may not have been "an everyday Southeast Asian koine," the Manimekalai's imagining of a Buddhist world extending to maritime Southeast Asia and centered in the Tamil city of Kancipuram offers a unique counterpoint to the Sanskrit tendency to ignore "the progressive cultural conquest of Sanskrit on [India's] eastern periphery." The cultural connections between India and Southeast Asia are enacted and perceived quite differently according to the literary language chosen. Although Tamil might have been, as [Sheldon] Pollock contends, a language of the everyday in the Sanskrit cosmopolis he describes, it also serves as a literary medium integrating South India and Southeast Asia as religious landscapes in at least one extant Buddhist text. In the case of the Manimekalai, Tamil as a literary language unites Pollock's "mainland" (South India) and "periphery" (Cavakam) into a single religious community, a single Buddhist world.

From the audience of literary connoisseurs anticipated by the model author of the Manimekalai, one can infer some sort of region of established cultural/literary contact in a language other than Sanskrit. Were Tamil simply the language of the everyday, of trade or political campaign, it would, indeed, be difficult to imagine who the model readers of the Manimekalai might be, that they envision (in Tamil) South India and Cavakam as part of a single religious community. The evidence for such a "literary territory" connecting South India to Southeast Asia, from the Southeast Asian side, appears only several centuries after the composition of the Manimekalai (all of it obviously influenced by Sanskritic literary forms and styles). Yet, given the Manimekalai's inclusion of Cavakam in its literary landscape, it is interesting to note that of all the regions of Southeast Asia, it is Java that has left behind the largest corpus of pre-Muslim literature and the Javanese/Sumatran kingdom of Srivijaya that is noted in a variety of sources spanning several centuries to be a center of Sanskrit learning and culture.

The Buddhist literary connection between Kanchipuram and Cavakam continues in the fourteenth-century Javanese poetic work, the Nagarakretagama, in which a monk known as Sri Buddhaditya, hailing from "a place called Kancipuri of the Six Monasteries . . . in India," is said to have composed "a eulogy [of] . . . countless verses" in honor of the Javanese king. In the absence of any major notice of Southeast Asia in Sanskrit literature from India and some 300 or 400 hundred years before the literary evidence (beyond epigraphy) from Southeast Asia attests in any significant way to cultural contact between South India and Java, the Manimekalai imagines such a connection and imbues it with religious significance
(p.110–11)

 Manimekalai legend in Southeast Asia :

Indeed, the evidence for Manimekhala (Tamil Manimekala) as a poetic narrative figure serving as both guardian of the sea and faithful follower of the Buddha, if taken together, draws a map of a literary world whose contours overlap to some degree with those of the Buddhist world envisioned by the Tamil Manimekalai
(p.111)
The Chakesadhatuvamsa from Burma, cited previously, ties Manimekhala to the construction of a South Indian shrine to house a hair relic of the Buddha, and the stories of the so-called apocryphal Jatakas provide evidence of Manimekhala as a literary character throughout Southeast Asia. In the Burmese recension known as the Pannasa-jataka, for example, the goddess Manimekhala furnishes the Buddha-to-be with eighty-four thousand ships filled with ocean jewels; guards his jewel-laden ships; rescues him after seven days of swimming in the sea, having neglected her duties to attend a gathering of the gods; and is identified as having been the Buddha-to-be's own mother seven births previously as she once again saves him from drowning in the ocean. The scene of Manimekhala's rescue of the future Buddha from the sea in the story of Mahajanaka is frequently depicted in Southeast Asian temple paintings and murals.

With similar themes of festival, ocean, jewels, and neglected duty, the goddess Manimekhala is also found in several Southeast Asian versions of the Ramayana story, versions of the narrative which, as Frank Reynolds argues, present "Rama as a royal hero who embodies Buddhist values." The relevant story in each of the recensions runs as follows: Nang or Muni Mekhala attends a celebration of the gods and displays a beautiful crystal in her hands. An evil demon known as Ramasun or Ramasur covets the jewel and throws his axe at the goddess to wrest the crystal from her. The god Orajun (Arjun) intervenes but is killed when thrown against Mount Meru. Siva gathers together the gods to straighten out the sacred mountain, now tilted to one side, and Mekhala and Ramasur return to their respective homes.This narrative lives on in the folk literature of Vietnam and Cambodia as a story explaining the origins of thunder (Ramasur's axe) and lightning (Mekhala's crystal) and in classical Khmer dance drama performed to summon the rains. What is the significance of these scattered references to Manimekala/Manimekhala for a deeper understanding of the Tamil narrative text? From the presence of Manimekala as a central character in the Manimekalai and in a variety of literary forms and genres throughout Southeast Asia, one can infer early cultural contact between South India and Southeast Asia unrelated to or extending beyond both the "Sanskrit cosmopolis" and mere economic or political exchange, a cultural region claimed for Buddhism by the Tamil narrative text.

Although several scholars have located evidence of specifically Tamil influence on the Ramayana traditions of Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, Manimekala/Manimekhala appears in no Indian rendition of the Ramayana story, including the twelfth-century Tamil version, the Iramavataram, attributed to Kampan. Her relative popularity in literary cultures beyond India perhaps suggests that cultural influence did not flow merely in an easterly direction. Jaini, in fact, in his discussion of the Pannasa-jataka, simply assumes Manimekhala to be "an indigenous Southeast Asian deity." Although the details of the transmission of the story of Manimekala, whether from South to Southeast Asia or vice versa, will probably never be known, the presence of the goddess as a compassionate savior of the shipwrecked future Buddha in a variety of languages and literary forms is certainly suggestive of a discrete cultural/literary region extending from South India through mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, a transregional motif at the very center of the Tamil Buddhist Manimekalai.
(p.111–12)

Pallava Origin myth and Cambodian parallels :

The Manimekalai's imagining of a coherent cultural region extending from South India to Southeast Asia can also be inferred from the shared story of the tragic marriage of an Indian prince and a serpent (nagi) princess, a narrative found in both Pallava and Cambodian inscriptions and deemed important enough to be repeated three times in the Manimekalai (xxiv.27-61, xxv.178-204, and xxix.3-12). In the Manimekalai, it is the Cola King Killi of Pukar who falls in love with the lovely and mysterious woman known as Pilivalai, the daughter of a Naga king. The woman gives birth to a son who is lost in a shipwreck. The distraught king forgets to celebrate the annual Indra festival while frantically searching for his missing infant son, thus precipitating the destruction of Pukar by a massive flood and the moving of the Tamil capital to the city of Kancipuram. A strikingly similar story is associated with the founding of the Southeast Asian kingdom generally known as Funan, a narrative referred to briefly in the third-century CE inscription of Baksei Camkron in Champa and elaborated on in various Chinese accounts of Funan dating from the third century. Two ninth-century inscriptions provide a similar genealogy for the Pallava dynasty of Kancipuram. The first, attributed to the Pallava monarch Skandasisya, explains the birth of the founder of the royal line, also known as Skandasisya, as the result of the union of Asvatthama and a female serpent (nagi). The second, attributed to Nandavarman III, again cites a female serpent as the mother of the first Pallava monarch, Skandasisya. Although it is impossible to determine historically whether or not the story in Cambodia signals direct Tamil influence in the region, the presence of such similar narrative accounts of royal lineage suggests some measure of cultural contact that spans the cultural worlds of Sanskrit epigraphy (the Cambodian and Pallava inscriptions) and Tamil literary text (the Manimekalai)
(p.112–3)

The Pallava king Nandivarman III — author of Tamil text Nandikalabagam—was from Cambodia is very well known and this suggests some link between the Cambodia and Kanchipuram and hence Manimekalai. According to Manimekalai, Nakapuram was the capital of Cavakam kingdom. Cavakam possibly included Cambodia too. 
Monius says that the epic was written for the audience beyond the South India. 

The literary presence of the goddess Manimekala/Manimekhala, the story of the Indian king and the serpent princess, and the occurrence of the sage Akattiyan/Agastya in the Manimekalai and in the inscriptions and texts of various regions of Southeast Asia do not, of course, establish any specific economic or political ties between the two regions, nor do such shared images prove that the Manimekalai's anticipated audience possessed first-hand knowledge of the lands of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, or Java. What such literary parallels do suggest, however, is the possibility of a cultural region extending far beyond the borders of South India proper, a region built by shared narratives, by shared literary culture, long before the appearance of the first full-fledged Old Javanese court poetry (kakawin) in the late ninth or early tenth century.
Such a cultural territory or region would seem to have existed alongside, largely if not fully independent of, the Sanskrit cosmopolis discussed by Pollock. That the Manimekalai is the first Tamil text to mention the sage Akattiyan and at the same time incorporate Cavakam into its vision of religious community and landscape, that the Manimekalai is the only Tamil text and one of only very few Indian texts to feature the goddess Manimekala, who constitutes an important figure in Southeast Asian literary and performative cultures, further underscores the significance of these stories and literary figures as indicators of a shared cultural region extending from South India to Southeast Asia as early as the sixth century.

Clearly, the Manimekalai anticipates an audience capable of conceiving of South India and Cavakam as part of a single religious world. The cultural connections glimpsed in the text are strong enough that the Tamil narrative can claim this transregional landscape for Buddhism, marking its boundaries with the lives and activities of the Buddha's bowl relic and various Buddhist characters, all of whom evince a compassionate concern for the well-being of those who share their world. To return briefly to the issue of language and language choice raised in the previous chapter, the fact that the Manimekalai is composed in a regional or local language yet envisions a transregional or translocal landscape and community, including some portion of modern-day Sumatra/Java, raises an interesting question about the status of Tamil as a literary language in the sixth century. As discussed in the final section of the previous chapter, the translation of Buddhist stories, ideas, and images into Tamil serves, among other things, to localize Buddhist tradition, to make Buddhism part of a local South Indian literary culture. In the context of the Buddhist world envisioned by the Manimekalai, in which Kanchipuram is imagined as a vital center after the destruction of Pukar and the enshrining of the bowl relic, that the vision of the world is expressed in the regional literary language of the imagined center is perhaps not surprising. Yet what of the inclusion of Cavakam in this world vision of Buddhist community? Does the Manimekalai imply that Tamil was, at the very least, imagined to be a transregional literary language, at least in the Southeast Asian Buddhist world? In the realm of ornate poetic narrative, Tamil is used for the significant business of articulating and defining religious community on a transregional scale. The Manimekalai attests to the use of Tamil as a suitable vehicle for the imagining of a religious community that encompasses lands far beyond the local region commonly associated with the language. A local literary language, in other words, is used to expressed a supralocal religious vision of the world
(p.113–4)

Through Monius’s book we can see the legend of Manimekalai from the epic with the same name is not only known to Tamil culture but rather it known beyond the Tamil realm. (also see Manimekhala)