Learning from an unexpected teacher

Familiarity can make a person strangely difficult to hear. We know where they sit at dinner, which errands they forget, and how they tell a story. Their place in our lives seems settled. Then they say something that does not fit that place. Before considering the thought, we may begin explaining why this particular person could not possibly have anything to teach us about it.

In the Tripura Rahasya, Hemalekha teaches her husband, Hemachuda. Early in their conversation, in the fourth chapter, she asks him what the one joy is that never turns stale, and he laughs out loud: “Women really are foolish,” he said. Whatever pleases is good, whatever does not is bad, and what is there in that to brood over? She proceeds by examining his assumptions. The same object pleases at one moment and pains at the next, and the Tripura Rahasya gives her example in one sentence: “Fire warms in winter and torments in summer, and its effect changes with place, with how large it burns, and with the constitution of the person near it.” Later, in the tenth chapter, when he wants to recover an inward peace by closing his eyes, she catches both his hands, and the question the text gives her is exact: what did his closed eyes give him, and what did his open eyes take away? Her instruction keeps reaching the point he has taken for granted.

The text’s disparaging remarks about women remain uncomfortable to read. We should not smooth them away to manufacture an uncomplicated portrait of equality. Yet we should also attend to the person doing the intellectual work. Hemalekha frames the inquiry, notices the weakness in an answer, and carries the conversation further. If we remember only the prince’s development, we risk repeating his failure to recognize the teacher before him.

In an ordinary conversation, that failure may be quieter. A younger colleague points out a flaw in a plan. A relative describes a difficulty we have been overlooking. Someone with less formal education distinguishes two things we have carelessly treated as one. None becomes right simply because they occupy the less powerful position. Their observation still deserves examination. The first useful change is to let the quality of the observation become more important than our expectation of its speaker.

Being corrected by someone close can feel especially awkward. The relationship carries an old distribution of competence: one person explains, another asks; one manages, another is managed. A good question can disturb that arrangement. We may answer with a joke, recall an unrelated mistake, or turn the discussion toward credentials. Each response protects the familiar arrangement for a little longer. It also makes learning more expensive for both people.

Hemalekha’s questions suggest a more exact kind of attention. What is the assumption underneath the answer? Under what circumstances would it fail? Can the person answering look again without having to defend an entire identity? These are possibilities for our own conversations; the text’s own teaching about consciousness runs far past them. They also require care from the questioner. A question asked merely to display another person’s weakness will rarely create room for honest reconsideration.

Somewhere in the last few weeks there is a remark that was dismissed because its speaker was already too well known. Set aside, for a moment, the usual story about who that person is, and what remains is the thing they noticed. Disagreement is still allowed. If the observation holds, it can alter something specific: a plan, an explanation, the next question asked. Recognition need not arrive as a grand declaration that a teacher has been found. It can begin by returning to the person and asking them to explain a little more.