Proverbial Wisdom from the Hitopadesha

Narayana, Sir Edwin Arnold (T) · Living the Life Series · 22 pages

From Sir Edwin Arnold's Indian Poetry, fourth edition, London: Trübner & Co., 1886, pages 225–70 — his verse rendering of selections from the Hitopadesha, the Sanskrit book of counsel attributed to Narayana. Twenty-two pages. The running head describes the contents as beneficent advice.

Arnold presents the collection under its own description — a Book of Counsel in which the reader shall see fair speech, Sanskrit lore and policy — and the verses arrive as rhymed couplets and quatrains rather than as prose maxims, which changes how they are read. The opening group is on wisdom itself: that wise men, holding wisdom highest, scorn delights more false than fair, and should live daily as if Death's fingers were already twined in their hair; that wisdom is richer than all riches and better than the best of gain, unbought and secure, and once won never lost again; and that wisdom brings dark things into daylight and solves the doubts that vex the mind, being like an open eye, so that whoever lacks her is blind. The verses then turn domestic and worldly by turns — that the man who is father to a fool is more miserable than the man who is childless; that one wise son gladdens his father where forty fools avail him not, as one moon silvers all the darkness the stars merely dot; that ease and health, obedient children, wisdom and a fair-voiced wife are the five felicities of life. A note of fatalism closes the opening section: that which will not be, will not be, and what is to be, will be.

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