One couplet of the Tirukkuṟaḷ sets aside the two outward marks of the holy life, the ascetic's matted hair and the monk's shaven head: a person who shuns what the world condemns, it says, needs neither. The book's 1,330 couplets make the same case at length. Goodness, for the poet whom tradition calls Tiruvaḷḷuvar, does not require leaving home. A householder who lives rightly and helps others keep their vows is, in another couplet, holier than those who practise austerities. And the first rule of that goodness is not to kill, ranked above truthfulness itself.
The book is built on three aims, taken in order: aṟam, virtue; poruḷ, wealth and the running of a state; and iṉpam, love. Virtue comes first and governs the rest. The second part advises a king on choosing ministers and setting spies, and it calls farming the chief of all work, since in the end everyone depends on the plough for food. The third part gives its voice to lovers. This is an ethics for people with families, fields and offices.
The book draws on two literatures. According to Kamil Zvelebil, the Czech scholar of Tamil literature, the poet knew the classical Tamil poems well, and some of his verses on statecraft translate into Tamil lines from Sanskrit treatises such as the Arthaśāstra, the old Indian manual of government.
Of the man himself nothing is on record. The book names no author, and neither his real name nor the work's original title can be fixed. The name Tiruvaḷḷuvar, "the holy Vaḷḷuvar", first appears in the Tiruvaḷḷuva Mālai, an undated Śaiva collection of verses in praise of the book, and written accounts of his life were printed only from the early nineteenth century. In those accounts he was a weaver at Mylapore, now part of Chennai, married to a woman named Vāsuki. A poem that Zvelebil dates to the fifteenth century makes him the son of a Brahmin father and a low-caste mother. Tradition also has the book win the approval of the third Sangam, the legendary assembly of poets at Madurai. A shrine at Mylapore has honoured him since the early sixteenth century, and Śaiva communities there and elsewhere worship him as the sixty-fourth of the Nāyaṉmār, their poet-saints.
Historians place the book, and so its author, around 500 CE. Zvelebil set it between 450 and 500, on two grounds: its grammar is newer than that of the older Sangam poems, and it has a larger stock of Sanskrit loanwords. The tradition places him much earlier, and some Tamil scholars date him to the last centuries BCE; the government of Tamil Nadu counts a Tiruvaḷḷuvar year from 31 BCE.
Which religion he held is the oldest quarrel about him. Zvelebil judged him most probably a learned Jain who drew on many sources: the chapters against eating meat and against killing match the Jain moral code. Yet no early Jain text mentions him, and the first Jain work to cite him as an authority dates from the sixteenth century. Parimēlaḻakar, a thirteenth-century Vaishnava Brahmin whose commentary became the standard one, read the three parts as the three classical Sanskrit aims of life: duty, prosperity and pleasure. Couplets name Vishnu and Lakshmi; Śaivas have set his image in their temples; and Iyothee Thass, a Tamil Dalit activist who had become a Buddhist, claimed him for Buddhism. The couplets never say which religion their author held, and scholars have not settled it.
The book kept its readers through all of this. In 1708 Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a German missionary in South India, reported that the Tamils he lived among learned it by heart and quoted it to prove their arguments. Tolstoy drew on it in 1908 in "A Letter to a Hindu", and that letter brought it to Gandhi. On 1 January 2000 a 133-foot statue of Tiruvaḷḷuvar was unveiled at Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, one foot for each chapter of the book.