2013-04-30__30

[[Mohan K.V 2013-04-30, 03:08:10 Source]]

सदास्वाद

एको गुणः खलु निहन्ति समस्त-दोषान्

(eko guṇaḥ khalu nihanti samasta-doṣān)

Meaning

“One good quality makes up for every fault” – to write such simple, intelligible lines in verse is extremely hard! This has all the best qualities of a subhaṣita – this line is the ’take-away’, can stand independently and expresses an interesting insight. The rest of the verse presumably justifies this. How? Before you read on, try thinking of what could fit in the past 3 lines :-)

Context

Today’s phrase is taken from the Cāṇakya-nīti.Cāṇakya, also known as Kauṭilya and Viṣṇugupta, was the famous founding father of the Mauryan empire which united India for the first time in history about 2300 years ago. Over time, his political acumen and intelligence have been so celebrated that the very word ‘Cāṇakya’ is a synonym for an extremely brilliant person.
A relatively lesser-known fact is thatCāṇakya was pretty much forgotten in all but name for the largest part for the last 1000 years, and came to light as recently as 1905, whenRudrapatnam Shamasastry, a scholar and librarian atthe Oriental Research Institute at Mysore,discovered an ancient palm-leaf manuscript written in the Tamil-like Grantha script. Over 4 years of meticulous reconstruction yielded a workable copy, and 6 years of translation efforts finally made the work known to the wider English-speaking world. This is as much a testament to the industry ofShamasastry as it is to the glory of the ascendant administration of Mysore at the time. Starting from Diwan C. Rungacharlu in 1881, for almost an unbroken magical spell of 60 years, the Kingdom of Mysore was in the hands of some of the ablest administrators the land has ever known, either before or after. It was Rungacharlu’s successor, K. Seshadri Iyer, who appointed the youngShamasastry as librarian after being impressed by his scholarship. His work speaks for itself – The KingKrishnaraja Wadiyar IV once visited Germany and was invited to address a meeting. The Maharaja was introduced to the guests as “His Highness the Maharaja of Mysore”. After his address, a German audience member came up to him and asked, “Your Majesty, are you the Maharaja of Mysore where lives Dr. Shamasastry, the discoverer of Arthasastra?’’ The Maharaja was pleasantly surprised that Shamasastry was so well known even in Germany!He felt proud of this great scholar, and after his return called him and said, “In Mysore we are the Maharaja and you are our subject, but in Germany, you are the master and people recognize us by your name and fame!”
We leave the reader to reflect if such an appointment, or such genuine pleasure at an appointee’s success, is conceivable in government today.
In the literary space,Cāṇakya is credited with two works – his magnum opus Arthaśāstra, and a smaller work on Nīti. Our topic today is the second work.
As with many ancient works, the authorship of this one is hotly disputed. The degree of dispute varies from some claiming that this work is much later than Cāṇakya, and that it’s simply coasting on his name and fame, to some who claim that no one called ‘Cāṇakya’ ever existed, and some collection of the floating mass of oral knowledge was condensed into a work. We shall leave these considerations to historians and focus on the work itself.
The Cāṇakya-nīti, like a vast portion of Sanskrit literature, is not a work of poetry. It could be called a collection of thoughts on practical matters, and here a difficulty quite common in the study of old works accosts us: many such thoughts, one might say even the majority, do not apply to our society and world today. They are either irrelevant, inapplicable, or sometimes plainly morally wrong by our standards. How is one to react?
One reaction may be to judge them, and by extension the society that produced them, poorly: “If these people really believed these utterly wrong things, they must have been very backward and worthy of contempt”. To people who believe so, any good ideas in the work are merely exceptions as long as there is a sufficient mass of ‘wrong’ ideas at hand, which always is.
A counter-reaction to this would be that this is comparing apples and oranges. What if we compare Cāṇakya-nīti and its society to other works and societies of that time? This leads to the familiar “When my ancestors were pondering ethics of society, yours were prancing naked in the forests” line of arguments.
A third approach would be to explain by adding context. “Yes, this work contains such-and-such seemingly wrong idea, but if you consult these hundred other documents, you’ll find that given all the other things that existed then, this idea is not that wrong, not that harmful, and in fact quite reasonable. After all, we accept so many wrong things today, from horribly unequal money distribution to electing criminals – do you think we live in times of unbearable inhumanity? Certainly not!”. However, it must be admitted that this approach has all the tedium and little of the joy of explaining a pothole in the road by recourse to a study of geology, materials science, civil engineering, urban planning and politics.
All the above approaches have judgment of the work as a whole and more as one of their central aims. For our purposes, it is best to adopt a fourth approach that differs here: Yes, there are many thorny ideas here, but we shall choose to focus only on what gives us joy. Is that 30% of the volume, which in our experience is typical of the very best and most celebrated of works? Maybe 5%, or 1%? Whatever it is, it is a number not worth getting agitated about. After all, there is an entire ocean to explore, and every moment spent on ponderous judgment is a moment not spent on discovering self-evidently beautiful things.
With that, let’s delve right in:
कोऽतिभारः समर्थानाम् किं दूरं बलशालिनाम् ।
को विदेशः सुविद्यानां कः परः प्रियवादिनाम् ।3.13।
ko’tibhāraḥ samarthānām kiṃ dūraṃ balaśālinām |
ko videśaḥ suvidyānāṃ kaḥ paraḥ priyavādinām |3.13|
“What indeed is too heavy for the mighty? What distance is too far for the strong? What is a foreign land to a learned man? Who is beyond the power of praise?”
This is a famous subhaṣita, with the last line being the “punch”. It appears in many other places as well. Throughout this work, there are echoes of Pancatantra, Bhartṛhari, and others – it is a lifetime’s task to find out who influenced who.
मूर्खा यत्र न पूज्यन्ते धान्यं यत्र सुसञ्चितम् ।
दाम्पत्ये कलहो नास्ति तत्र श्रीः स्वयम् आगता ।3.21।
mūrkhā yatra na pūjyante dhānyaṃ yatra susañcitam |
dāmpatye kalaho nāsti tatra śrīḥ svayam āgatā |3.21|
“Where fools don’t hold power, where riches aren’t squandered, and where there isn’t infighting among couples – wealth makes its way there by itself.”
We should be wary of reading too much wisdom, but one must admit that this reveals an incredible concept in allegory. If only we take ‘couples’ to mean ’those who have to stay together for whatever reasons’, this lays out a distinction between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. In a piece of art, the part which the artist actually draws is the ‘figure’. The backgroundof the piece, which includes what the artist didn’t draw explicitly, but which formed automatically, is the ‘ground’. This is a common theme in optical illusions.If a certain minimum set of conditions is satisfied, human ingenuity left to itself will take care of producing wealth. The ‘figure’ should not crowd out the ‘ground’, and there must be a balance between the two. The greatest economic learning from the 20th century has been that having too many constraints and expecting too much discipline is not just ineffective, it is destructive.
कः कालः कानि मित्राणि को देशः कौ व्ययागमौ ।
कश्चाहं का च मे शक्तिः इति चिन्त्यं मुहुर्मुहुः ।4.18।
kaḥ kālaḥ kāni mitrāṇi ko deśaḥ kau vyayāgamau |
kaś cāhaṃ kā ca me śaktiḥ iti cintyaṃ muhurmuhuḥ |4.18|
“What is the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times? Who really are my friends? What is the nature of the land I am in? What really have I gained, and what have I lost? Who am I in my context? What is my strength?” – One should think thus periodically.
We find that our answers to these questions, and how they change in the course of our life, are the most insightful inputs into our self-knowledge. Writing nearly 2000 years after our author, Richard Bach said, “The simplest questions are the most profound : Where were you born?Where is your home?Where are you going?What are you doing?Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change”.
राज्ञि धर्मणि धर्मिष्ठाः पापे पापाः समे समाः ।
राजानम् अनुवर्तन्ते यथा राजा तथा प्रजाः ।13.8।
rājñi dharmaṇi dharmiṣṭhāḥ pāpe pāpāḥ same samāḥ |
rājānam anuvartante yathā rājā tathā prajāḥ |13.8|
“When the king is noble, so are the subjects. When he’s wicked, so are they. They follow their king in every way”.
Another very famous verse. It is interesting to see how this plays out in democracies, where rājā are prajā are ideally inverted. We don’t know if that has ever happened to the satisfaction of everyone somewhere, but we are quite intimately familiar with what happens when an inchoate mass of fickle impressions is made the ruler. A commentator speaking about a recent megascam quipped about the culture of pervasive corruption, ‘yatha prajā tathā Raja’ :-)
धर्माख्याने श्मशाने च रोगिणां या मतिर्भवेत् ।
सा सर्वदैव तिष्ठेत् चेत् को न मुच्येत बन्धनात् ।14.6।
उत्पन्न पश्चात्तापस्य बुद्धिः भवति यादृशी ।
तादृशी यदि पूर्वं स्यात् कस्य न स्यान् महोदयः ।14.7।
dharmākhyāne śmaśāne ca rogiṇāṃ yā matirbhavet |
sā sarvadaiva tiṣṭhet cet ko na mucyeta bandhanāt |14.6|

utpanna-paścāttāpasya buddhiḥ bhavati yādṛśī |

tādṛśī yadi pūrvaṃ syāt kasya na syān mahodayaḥ |14.7|

“The detachment that comes when listening to the Purāṇas, when visiting a graveyard and when ill – if only it lasted, who wouldn’t be free of bondage?”

“If only the clarity that appears during remorse had appeared earlier, who wouldn’t have become great?”

A couple of other short-lived vairāgyas are also popular: prasava-vairāgya, speaking of the intolerable pain to the mother at the time of birth, abhāva-vairāgya, the detachment that develops as a defense action against scarcity.

Today’s verse appears at the end of the work, in a surprisingly poetic climax:

व्यालाश्रयापि विकलापि सकण्टकापि

वक्रापि पङ्किलभवापि दुरासदापि ।

गन्धेन बन्धुरसि केतकि सर्वजन्तोः

एको गुणः खलु निहन्ति समस्त-दोषान् ।17.21।

vyālāśrayāpi vikalāpi sakaṇṭakāpi

vakrāpi paṅkilabhavāpi durāsadāpi |

gandhena bandhurasi ketaki sarvajantoḥ

eko guṇaḥ khalu nihanti samasta-doṣān |17.21|

(vasanta-tilakā metre, 14 syllables per line)

“Even though infested with snakes, appearing mutilated, abounding in thorns,

crooked, growing in slime and difficult to approach,

O Ketaki tree, your fragrance alone makes you a friend.

One good quality makes up for every fault”

In one stroke, Cāṇakya explains one of the most fundamental features of humanity. David Nicholls once said, “There are ten or twenty basic truths, and life is the process of discovering them over and over and over”. This idea is definitely up in that list. Virtually everything we relate to as human behaviour has to do with this. Relationships? Absolutely. Parental, fraternal, romantic, platonic – all kinds of bonds that would have otherwise been slowly corroded by mismatches are stabilized by some one redeeming feature. If one were to look for a logical best match, our bonds would change as fast as our moods do. Patriotism? Of course. From Rama (“api svarṇamayī lankā na me lakṣmaṇa rocate | jananī janmabhūmiśca svargādapi gariyasī”) to the fond reminiscences of poets, some features of one’s homeland stand untouched by any consideration.

How about art, creativity and the essentials of human continuity? By every means. An old Greek proverb goes, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”. Why do they take the trouble to plant them? This same feature Caṇakya extols. Some actual examples are in order. A sandalwood tree is almost completely odourless for decades of its life. Only after 40 or 50 years does it concentrate enough of the fragrance to be usable, and even then, for high quality it has to age for 80 years or more. What is assured is that no one who plants and cares for a sandalwood tree will live to reap its benefits – only the following generation can take advantage of it. Sandalwood production is almost a barometer for society’s maturity – only if a society is wise enough to think of its future will it thrive. So far it has, which is most encouraging. Another example: the temples of the Ellora caves took about 300 years to build. The first sculptor chiseling away at the entrance had no hope of seeing his art complete – and yet, nearly 1500 years later, we still marvel at them.

It is no different in the realm of literature. There has been a tremendous amount of work connected with Sanskrit literature done in regional Indian languages such as Kannada. Chakravarthi Srinivasa Gopalacharya was a great scholar of Sanskrit of the past generation. Starting in the 1960s, after nearly 30 years of toil, he published an incredibly detailed Sanskrit-Kannada dictionary called ‘Śabdārtha-kaustubha’ that almost borders on being an encyclopedia. The greatest service one may offer to a language is to actively engage in it, recount its great works and rejoice in its beauty – and Chakravarthi Srinivasa Gopalacharya’s magnum opus does all this and more, touching upon art, literature, linguistics, culture and history as it defines, nay, chronicles words. Alas, in those times when printing even a small book was a major project, due to severe financial constraints he had to heavily abridge his work for publication. Even after such abridgments, his work came to six volumes totaling over 3000 pages. When we consider our own tradition – here we are, discussing a work of more than 2300 years ago and rejoicing in the very same words (and perhaps even thoughts) as the very first man who wrote it – the tireless dedication of people to tasks that always seemed to have that ’eko guṇaḥ’ leads to the richness of the life we’re living.

In a beautiful closing-of-the-loop, this verse applies to the work itself. For all its faults, this one gem makes it worth reading the whole thing :-)

Thought for today

The brilliant clarity of Cāṇakya’s thought is manifest in this verse from the Arthaśāstra:

नक्षत्रम् अति पृच्छन्तं बालम्अर्थोऽतिवर्तते |

अर्थस्यार्थो हि नक्षत्रं किं करिष्यन्ति तारकाः ।9.4.26।

nakṣatram ati pṛcchantaṃ bālam artho’tivartate |

arthasyārtho hi nakṣatraṃ kiṃ kariṣyanti tārakāḥ |9.4.26|

“Wealth ignores the fool who worries too much about astrology. Wealth is its own star. What can far-away twinklers do?”

What raw power! What certitude! What are we to think, when our ancestors had such acuity, while today our elected leaders spend vast sums of public money on vāstu re-adjustments? The cassandras that we are, the most we can do is take recourse in eloquence; Dr. Warder, commenting on the play Mudrārākṣasa in his masterful Indian Kavya Literaturesays: (vol 3, page 277)

As long as India could produce Cāṇakyas, her civilization > flourished, defended from the aggression of the mlecchas. When on > the other hand she relied on simple, straightforward heroism and > chivalry, as the ideal, her civilization was gradually destroyed by > barbarous invaders. >

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