Kural 222 states both halves of its judgement with the reward stripped off. Even if someone calls receiving a good road to the world above, it is an evil; even if someone says no such world awaits the giver, giving is still the good. Parimelazhagar points at the construction itself, noting that in speaking of the good thing the verse has spoken of the bad one alongside it — நல்லது கூறுவார் தீயதும் உடன் கூறினார். Giving is not high because it pays, and receiving is not low because it does not.
Eight hundred verses later, the chapter on begging gives that same low act a different office. If there were nobody left who asks, 1058 says, what would the movement of this great world amount to? Parimelazhagar answers in an image the verse only gestures at: உயிர் இல்லாத மரப்பாவை இயந்திரக் கயிற்றாற் சென்றுவந்தாற் போலும் — a lifeless wooden figure drawn out and back on its strings. The next verse makes the dependency explicit. With nobody who cares to come and ask, what is there to be seen in those who give? The commentator's own reply is யாதும் இல்லை. Nothing at all.
So the cardinal virtue of Book 1 rests on an act that Book 1 calls degrading. Take away the people who ask and there is no giving; take away the giving and the giver has no standing left. One chapter says that these people are what keeps the world from being a mechanism, and another says that becoming one of them is an evil no heaven could redeem.
Chapter 107 presses harder still rather than settling anything. Not asking, 1061 says, even of the giver who conceals nothing and gives gladly, is worth ten million times what asking would bring; and 1062 says that if the maker ordained a world in which life must be sustained by asking, let him too wander and perish. Parimelazhagar glosses each of these where it stands. Why the people who keep the world animate should be the people warned at all costs not to exist is a question he does not raise.