Kural 48 ranks two lives against each other and puts the household first. Parimelazhagar reads the ranking as one about endurance and gives the reason in his own words: நோற்பார் தம்மை உற்ற நோயல்லது பிறரை உற்ற நோயைப் பொறுத்தலின்மையின், இல்வாழ்வார் அதனையும் பொறுத்தலின் — ascetics bear only the affliction that has come upon themselves, while the householder bears what has come upon others as well. Earlier in the same gloss he has said that it is the householder who keeps the ascetics on their own paths, by removing hunger and the other obstacles. Two verses before, at 46, he names the alternative rather than leaving it abstract: 'புறத்தாறு' இல்லை விட்டு வனத்துச் செல்லும் நிலை — the outer path is the state of leaving the house and going to the forest. The chapter's question, what there is to gain by going off to it, is asked of a real destination.
The chapter on renunciation makes that destination the most demanding thing in the book. Kural 344 sets the standard at nothing whatever, and Parimelazhagar explains why a single possession is fatal rather than merely regrettable: உடைமை பெயர்த்து மற்றும் மயலாகும்= அஃதன்றி, ஒன்றாயினும் உடைமை அத்தவத்தைப் போக்குதலான், மீண்டும் மயங்குதற்கு ஏதுவாம் — owning even one thing drives that austerity away, and so becomes the cause of bewilderment returning. Kural 345 pushes past possessions to the body itself, which he glosses as மிகை, an excess, for anyone who has undertaken the cutting off of birth.
So the same book builds a discipline whose price is everything a person has, and then tells the man who never paid that price that he endures more. Nor is this two chapters looking away from each other: chapter 5 raises the comparison itself, and chapter 35 sets its standard without reference back to it.
Parimelazhagar does reconcile them, and the manner of it is what leaves the pair contested rather than settled. He does not stage the two lives as stages, the household first and renunciation after, which is the reading the tradition most often reaches for and which would cost neither verse anything. He qualifies the ascetic downward instead: the man of penance is the smaller figure because his endurance has a smaller object, his own suffering and no one else's, and because the household he left is what feeds him. That defends 48 at the expense of the figure 344 and 345 are describing, a man for whom even the body is surplus. The comparison is decided, but by lowering one side of it.