Overview
Tirukkuṟaḷ
Quick Reference
A popular early Tamil text, composed sometime in the first millennium ce, and attributed to a legendary figure called Tiruvaḷḷuvar. Nothing, including his religious affiliation, is known about him, other than what can be inferred from the text itself, and there the evidence is scant and ambiguous. ‘Kuṟaḷ’ refers to couplets in verse, which deal, according the text's own arrangement, with the equivalents of the Sanskritic dharma, artha, and kāma (the first three puruṣārthas). The work is essentially a book of popular wisdom or ethics. It struck a chord with Christian missionaries, and has since been widely translated into both Indian and Western languages.
From: Tirukkuṟaḷ in A Dictionary of Hinduism »
