Tirukkural
Tirukkural
Virtue, wealth, and love form a single integrated path to a well-lived life, condensed into couplets terse enough to be memorized by anyone regardless of caste or creed.
- virtue, wealth, and love as one integrated ethical path
- 1,330 couplets across three books, aphoristic and memorizable
- largely non-sectarian, cross-religious ethical stance
- biography of Thiruvalluvar almost entirely legendary
A work of 1,330 rhymed couplets organized into 133 chapters across three books on virtue, wealth and statecraft, and love, attributed to the poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar, whose biography is almost entirely legendary. Traditionally associated with the Sangam assembly at Madurai, though a separate tradition places him at Mylapore, its precise date is debated across several centuries. It is distinguished among classical Tamil works for a largely non-sectarian ethical stance, cited with approval across Hindu, Jain, and later Christian and secular Tamil readerships alike.
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