The Kural · Chapter
CIII: Advancing the Family explained
This chapter emphasizes that a family's advancement is achieved through relentless labor, manly exertion, and sound understanding.
What happens
This chapter emphasizes that a family's advancement is achieved through relentless labor, manly exertion, and sound understanding. It asserts that those who strive to elevate their family without iniquity will find the whole world as kin, and that the burden of maintaining the family falls on those capable of bearing it. Laziness or pride leads to the family's decline, and without a good man to support it, calamities will destroy it.
Themes in this chapter
Family Life and Duty
The chapter focuses entirely on the duty of advancing one's family through relentless labor and moral uprightness.
Social Harmony and Ethics
Emphasizes that ethical conduct in family advancement leads to universal kinship and social harmony.
Characters to notice
- Thiruvalluvar
Author of the Kural, providing aphorisms on family advancement through labor and virtue.
- the Kural
The text itself, containing the teachings on family duty and exertion.
Key passages
“Nothing advanceth a man’s family so much as his determination never to weary in labouring with his hands.”
A family's progress depends on a man's unwavering commitment to hard work.
Highlights the primacy of physical labor in family advancement.
“When a man setteth out saying, I shall advance my house, the very Gods gird up their loins and march before him.”
When a man resolves to uplift his family, even the gods support his endeavor.
Illustrates divine approval for those who strive for family betterment.
“Behold the man that setteth his family on high without doing iniquity: the whole world will be as a kindred unto him.”
The person who elevates his family through righteous means gains the goodwill of all people.
Connects ethical conduct in family advancement to universal kinship.