How to Live · dates unknown; often placed c. 300 BCE–300 CE
Thiruvalluvar
He put a whole ethics into 1,330 two-line verses, and made kindness the first thing worth having.
Tamil country, South India · lived 300 BCE – 300
Their big question
What is the shortest way to say how to live?
Every tradition has one short book that people carry in a pocket. In Tamil, that book is the Tirukkural: 1,330 couplets, two lines each, and between them they manage to cover an entire ethics.
The structure is unusual and worth noticing. Book one is about virtue, book two about wealth and statecraft — earning, friendship, keeping promises, running a household — and book three about love. He does not treat these as three separate subjects with religion in the first and life in the others. He treats ordinary competence and ordinary affection as part of the same task.
His ethics starts with not harming, and he gives the reasoning in a way that is hard to argue with: everything that is born will suffer, so anyone who understands that will not add to it deliberately. From that he builds outward — kindness, gratitude, self-control, truthfulness, patience with people who are rude. None of it is complicated. All of it is difficult.
What makes him worth including in a philosophy library for children is the length. He is a demonstration that careful thought does not require length. You can hold the whole position in your head, which means you can act on it in the two seconds before you decide whether to be unkind.
“All that is born must suffer; so the wise do not do harm.”
His verses are couplets, and translations differ a great deal. The theme throughout is that avoiding harm comes before everything else.
Three things worth knowing
- Almost nothing is known about him, including whether Thiruvalluvar is a name or a title meaning something like 'the respected weaver'.
- The Tirukkural is 1,330 short couplets, arranged in three books: doing right, earning well, and loving well.
- It has been translated into dozens of languages, and it deliberately avoids naming gods, so it can be read by people of any belief.
Try it — think like Thiruvalluvar
Write five rules for living in exactly ten words each. Then cut each to seven. Whatever you lose in the cutting is what you were using words to hide behind.
Thiruvalluvar statue kanyakumari — Dhivya dhivi DJ. Source on Wikimedia Commons.