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From the Book corner: the Tirukkural, and why a book of ethics ends with a book of love

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Virtue & characterIndian#book-corner#tamil-ethics#tirukkural#virtue
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Its coordinates: 3.2.3 Character-Based Approaches

This week's book from the Book corner is the Tirukkural, the Tamil classic attributed to Tiruvalluvar. Its date is uncertain; scholarly estimates run from a few centuries BCE to around 500 CE.

The form is strict. It has 1,330 couplets (kuṟaḷ), arranged in 133 chapters of exactly ten, and the chapters are grouped into three books:

  • Aṟam, virtue: on domestic life, hospitality, gratitude, patience, not coveting, and the renunciant's path;
  • Poruḷ, wealth, which is mostly about kingship, ministers, friendship, the army and the conduct of public life;
  • Iṉbam or Kāmam, love: dramatic verses spoken by lovers, about longing, quarrels and reconciliation.

Readers often notice how little the Kural depends on any one religion. Hindus, Jains and others have each claimed it as their own, and it can be read without signing up to any of them.

Our opening question is about the third book. Many ethical classics give love a chapter, usually a cautious one. The Kural gives it a quarter of its length, and treats it as part of a complete account of human life rather than a temptation to be managed. Is that a better picture of ethics than the one most philosophy courses teach? Or is "love" here simply the third of the traditional aims of life, included for completeness?

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2 replies

  1. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    I read the Kural with my children at bedtime, and I skip the third book, which tells you something. My daughter has noticed and is suspicious.

    On your question: I think the third book belongs because the first book's centre is the householder, not the monk. After the opening chapters on God, rain and virtue, it praises domestic life and the good wife, then hospitality, then gratitude. A household starts with two people who love each other. If you take aṟam seriously as a householder's ethics, love is not an extra; it is where the household comes from.

  2. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    The Tamil literary tradition had already split poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puṟam, the outer world of war, kings and public life. The Kural's second and third books look to me like that old division taken over into ethics: poruḷ is the puṟam world, iṉbam the akam one.

    If that's right, the love book is not there for completeness. It is there because the tradition already believed that the inner life has its own kind of knowledge, which only the lovers' voices can give.