Begging

On asking when there is no other way, on whom it is fit to ask, and on the giver's part in it.

The chapter before this one described want. This one is about asking, and it does something unexpected with it: instead of treating asking as a humiliation to be avoided, it keeps asking the question of what makes asking bearable, and answers it every time by pointing at the person asked.

1051 sets the terms. Ask of those it is fitting to ask; and if they conceal what they have, the blame is theirs, not yours. That sentence does more work than it looks: it moves the shame off the asker and leaves it where the concealment happened. 1053 goes further and calls standing before someone who hides nothing and asking them `ஏஎர்` — a grace, an aesthetic word rather than a moral one. 1054 says asking of a person who could not conceal even in a dream is like the giving itself.

Two verses turn the whole thing around. 1058 says that if nobody asked, the going and coming of the world would be a wooden puppet moved on strings — asking is what makes the traffic between people alive rather than mechanical. 1059 asks what there would be to see in those who give, if nobody cared to come and ask. The giver, on this chapter's account, is made visible by the asker.

And 1060 closes it by turning to the asker and asking one thing of them: not to grow angry when the answer is no. The reason is the plainest sentence in the chapter — a person who has been in want already knows that means fail when they are wanted, and needs no other witness than their own affliction.

One thing to say about the Tamil. `இரவு` and `இரத்தல்` are asking generally, and the translators reach for 'begging', which is one real sense of the root and narrower than what these ten verses do with it. Where a translator has chosen the narrower word, the word card says so.

AI draft · pending review