Twenty-four years ago, long before I had any idea that I’d ever study classical Tamil, let alone translate from it, I learned a verse by heart from one of its most important works, the Kural.
I didn’t memorize the poem because I had to. I did it rather because I found it to be delightful. Although it’s about right and wrong, and even good and evil, the playfulness of the verse caught my ear:
108
Forgetting good done is not good—forgetting at once
What is not good—good
Even in the Tamil, it takes a little while to really hear what the poet of the Kural, Tiruvalluvar, is saying. One may have to say the verse out loud a few times. Then, all at once, the meaning comes clear, as clear as the rhythm itself: It’s not good to forget something good that’s been done, particularly if it’s been done for you. But that thing that’s been done that is not good? Forget it, at once, right now.
I don’t remember exactly how I happened upon the verse. The Kural, or more formally, the Tirukkural, is a work that’s woven deeply into daily life in Tamil Nadu, India, as well as other places around the world where Tamil is spoken. Even though Tiruvalluvar composed it more than 15 centuries ago, ordinary people of all kinds quote the book freely whenever and wherever it might illuminate a particular moment or situation. I might have first read the verse on a placard in a bus, or heard someone speak it, or come across it in a book or newspaper.
However it entered my awareness, I quickly realized that in spite of its playfulness, the verse contained an unsettling paradox. I could easily understand not wanting to forget something good that a person may have done for you. But I had a much harder time understanding why Tiruvalluvar would counsel forgetting. Aren’t we supposed to pay attention when things have gone wrong? Don’t we need, in fact, to remember them all the more?
As I puzzled over it, I asked my Tamil teacher, Dr. K. V. Ramakoti, how he understood the poem. What he said to me has stayed with me ever since.
“Tiruvalluvar says to forget bad things,” he said, “because we can harm ourselves by dwelling on them. Suppose someone has done something wrong to you. You could then spend years grumbling that he did this terrible thing, but that won’t change what happened. It won’t even make the other person feel bad. Instead, you make a wound of your own heart.”
At the time, I could see some of the sense of what he said, but my doubts remained. Sure, I wanted to say, but don’t we still need to remember the bad things that have happened? How else can we ensure they don’t happen again?
And so, without having meant to do so, I began a kind of meditation on this verse, a meditation that has now spanned decades. Every time that I thought the verse was saying something I couldn’t agree with completely, its playfulness would make me think again. Over the years I’ve come to agree wholeheartedly that the verse is indeed trying to tell us, to show us, how to keep our hearts intact—to be able, among other things, to work for justice and embody compassion in the world.
Notice, for instance, that Tiruvalluvar isn’t saying not to notice bad things. In Tamil, as in English, one can only forget something if one has first known it, has noticed it.
Even more important, in Tamil, as in English, the word for “forget” is more layered than it might seem at first. The word can mean “forget entirely,” but it can also mean “to cease thinking about” or “to drop from one’s mind.” In fact, in English, there is a great key in the sounds of the word itself, hidden in plain sight, or perhaps better put, within reach of our ear. To forget is to forgo getting, to release one’s hold on something.
Thus the poet isn’t saying not to notice bad things. He is saying, instead, not to grasp onto them with our hearts-and-minds. Elsewhere in the Kural, in one of his chapters on letting go, he says:
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Hold to the hold of one who holds nothing—to hold nothing
Hold to that hold
In order to be able to let go, one can learn to hold to another who has learned to let go. Like a poet or a teacher or a leaf or a cloud. This is precisely how we can free up our heart-and-minds to embody what is beautiful in the world.
To put it another way, if we get stuck dwelling only on things that are wrong, we deplete our life energy for doing anything else. But if we nourish ourselves on things that are good, we will find ourselves not only living with a lighter heart, but also more able to do good things ourselves, for that’s what we are training our minds to perceive.
When people would ask Gandhi, who also loved the Kural, how he could possibly believe in nonviolence when the world itself has so much violence in it, he would always remind them that even if it seems that way, the power of nonviolence by far outweighs the violence, for the world is still alive and full of good and wonderful things.
And so a poem like Tiruvalluvar’s has the power to shift the story we may be telling ourselves about ourselves and about the world. It can become a seed in our hearts-and-minds that slowly grows into a graceful and deeply rooted tree.
108
Forgetting good done is not good—forgetting at once
What is not good—good
Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma is a writer, poet, and translator. https://thomaspruiksma.com/
His online course Taller than a Mountain begins on May 18th, reflecting on questions of how to live and act ethically in a complex and changing world, and how to relate with integrity and love to the workings of wealth and power. At The Porch we believe in the work Thomas is doing, and encourage you to take a look here: https://thomaspruiksma.com/taller-than-a-mountain/
