Rules of Speech in Charaka Samhita (Sutrasthana 8): Speak First, Speak Hita-Mita-Madhura, Never Speak of Others' Faults

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ें: चरक संहिता में बोलने के नियम: पहले बोलें, हित-मित-मधुर बोलें, निंदा न करें

📖 19 min read · Charaka Samhita, Sutrasthana 8.17–25; Sharira Sthana 1.25–26; Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 2.21–22

Why a Medical Text Has Rules for Speech: Vak as an Indriya

Most people come to the Charaka Samhita for food, herbs and the doshas, so a list of rules about talking can look out of place in it. In Charaka's own terms it is not out of place at all. Chapter 8 of the Sutrasthana is the Indriyopakramaniya Adhyaya, the chapter on the care and management of the indriyas: the senses and the organs of action. We walk through the whole chapter, from the five senses to the full code of conduct, in Charaka Samhita Part 8. This page stays with one strand of it: what the chapter says about speech.

Speech is one of those organs. In the Sharira Sthana (1.25), Charaka counts five organs of action, the karmendriyas: the hands, the feet, the two organs of excretion and generation, and vagindriya, the organ of speech. The next verse (1.26) places the organ of speech in the tongue and then adds a line that could stand over everything below:

With that in mind, the two verses that open the code of conduct read differently. Sutrasthana 8.17 says that everyone who wants their own good should follow sadvritta, good conduct: sarvena sarvam sarvada smritim asthaya, all of it, always, keeping it in mind. Sutrasthana 8.18 then says what it gives:

The rules about speech belong to that mastery. In Charaka's frame they are less about etiquette than about governing one of the body's own organs, in the same chapter and the same breath as caring for the eyes, the ears and the mind. That is why a book of medicine tells you when to speak, how much, and about whom.

The Speech Lines of Sutrasthana 8.18–19: the Shloka, Word by Word

Sutrasthana 8.18 is one long list of what a person of good conduct does, and 8.19 is a longer list of what such a person avoids. The speech rules are scattered through both, a word or two at a time, between rules about bathing, clothes, hospitality and travel. The three our reel takes up read like this in the Sanskrit, as printed in the Charaka Samhita edition of the Charak Samhita Research, Training and Skill Development Centre (2020):

Texts like the Charaka Samhita were kept for centuries as cloth-wrapped bundles like this one.

Each line is built from a few plain words, and they are worth taking apart.

Purvabhibhashi. Purva means first or before, and an abhibhashin is one who addresses another. Together: the one who speaks first, who opens the conversation instead of waiting to be spoken to. The edition we follow translates it as taking the initiative in conversation. The word is also written purvabhashi, and we use both forms here.

Sumukha. Su means good and mukha means face (and also mouth): pleasant-faced. Charaka places it immediately after purvabhashi, so the two read as one instruction. Open the conversation, and open it with a pleasant face.

Kale. At the right time. The word stands at the head of the compound and governs everything after it: even useful and sweet words can be badly timed.

Hita, mita, madhura, artha. Useful or beneficial (hita); measured, not too much (mita); sweet or pleasant (madhura); and meaningful, carrying real content (artha). A vadi is one who speaks in that way.

Nanya-doshan bruyat. Na, not; anya, others; doshan, faults; bruyat, one should speak. One should not speak of others' faults. Dosha here has its everyday meaning, a fault or failing in a person, not the technical sense of vata, pitta and kapha.

Charaka states these as rules and moves on. Beyond the promise of 8.18 that good conduct as a whole brings health and mastery of the indriyas, he does not explain why each one matters. The reasons in the next three sections are modern ones, from research on how people talk and how they judge each other, and we credit them to the researchers who did the work, not to Charaka.

Rule 1: Purvabhashi and Sumukha — Speak First, With a Pleasant Face

The habit this rule targets is a familiar one. In a lift, at the office, at a family function or in a new class, most of us wait for the other person to say something first. Silence feels safer than a greeting that might land badly, and the moment passes.

Psychologists have measured how badly we judge that risk. In 2018 Erica Boothby, Gus Cooney, Gillian Sandstrom and Margaret Clark published five studies in the journal Psychological Science under the title "The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think?" In the first, pairs of strangers talked for about five minutes with a sheet of ice-breaker questions. Afterwards each person rated how much they liked the other, and guessed how much the other liked them. People consistently underestimated how much their conversation partner liked them and enjoyed their company. The authors called the difference the liking gap.

After a first chat, most people think the other person enjoyed it less than they actually did.

The gap held well beyond one laboratory chat. It appeared in conversations that ran anywhere from 2 to 45 minutes. It appeared among members of the public at "How to Talk to Strangers" workshops in the United Kingdom. And it appeared among first-year university students rating the new dorm mates they lived with, where it lasted through every survey from September to February and closed only by May, once the students knew each other well. Shyer participants showed a larger gap.

The researchers' explanation is that after a conversation we are busy with our own self-critical thoughts (what we said badly, what we forgot to say) and miss the signals that the other person enjoyed it. Those signals were there: when trained observers watched video recordings of the first study's conversations, they could see the liking that the participants themselves had missed.

Set beside Charaka's rule, the finding says that the cost we fear in speaking first is mostly imagined. The neighbour in the lift is likely to think better of the exchange than we will. And sumukha, the pleasant face, does part of the work before a word is said: it is the first signal the other person reads.

One boundary, which is our reading rather than Charaka's words: speaking first does not mean speaking most. The next rule takes care of that.

Rule 2: Kale Hita-Mita-Madhura-Artha-Vadi — Five Words on What to Say

The second rule packs a short manual of conversation into a single compound. Each of its five words rules out a familiar kind of bad talk.

Kale, at the right time. The same words land differently depending on when they are said. The examples are ours, not Charaka's: advice given to someone in the middle of their anger, an important question asked of someone who is rushing out of the door, or a remark dropped into the middle of another person's sentence.

Hita, useful. Speech that does the listener some good: information they need, help, encouragement, a fair warning. Its opposite is talk that serves only the speaker, such as boasting or point-scoring.

Mita, measured. Enough, and no more. Charaka repeats this one as a prohibition in 8.25: na catibruyat, one should not speak too much.

Madhura, sweet. Pleasant in tone and in choice of words. It is not a licence for flattery: the same chapter asks for truth (8.19, nanritam bruyat, one should not speak untruth), so madhura is about how a true thing is said, not about saying only pleasant things.

Artha, meaningful. Talk with content in it. Its opposite is filler: words that fill a silence and carry nothing.

The research that lines up best with this rule asks what people who are good at conversation actually do. In 2017 Karen Huang, Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Julia Minson and Francesca Gino of Harvard University published "It Doesn't Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In their first study, strangers chatted online for 15 minutes with the aim of getting to know each other. One person in each pair was quietly told to ask either at least nine questions or at most four. The partners of the people who asked many questions liked them more.

A short question about what the other person has just said: the follow-up question.

When the team looked at which questions did the work, the answer was above all follow-up questions: questions about what the other person had just said. They also studied face-to-face speed dating, with 110 people on four-minute dates. Daters who asked more follow-up questions got more "yes" answers to a second date, though that part of the work shows an association, not a cause. Their explanation is responsiveness. A follow-up question shows that you listened, understood and care about what was said. One more finding matters for habits: nobody predicted any of this. Neither the people asking the questions nor outside observers expected the questions to make anyone better liked.

A follow-up question is a neat fit for Charaka's five words. It is short (mita). It is about the other person, so it serves the conversation rather than the speaker (hita). Asked with interest, it is warm (madhura). It moves the talk towards something real (artha). And it arrives at the right moment almost by definition (kale), just after the other person has finished speaking.

Rule 3: Nanyadoshan Bruyat — Never Speak of Others' Faults

Verse 8.19 is the list of what a person of good conduct avoids, and this rule sits in it beside a close neighbour: nanya-rahasyam agamayet, one should not try to find out other people's secrets. Charaka comes back to the same ground twice more. Verse 8.23 says one should not speak ill of good people or of teachers (na sato na gurun parivadet), and 8.25 says one should not disclose secrets (na guhyam vivrinuyat). Read together, these lines rule out the whole business of gossip: digging for what others keep hidden, passing on what one has found, and running people down.

Nanyadoshan bruyat: Charaka's rule against speaking of the faults of people who are not there.

The modern reason is one of the odder findings in social psychology. In 1998 John Skowronski, Donal Carlston, Lynda Mae and Matthew Crawford published four studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Spontaneous Trait Transference: Communicators Take on the Qualities They Describe in Others". Participants saw a person (in photographs, and in one study on video) describing someone else's behaviour, such as cruelty to an animal. Afterwards they rated the speaker as having the very trait the speaker had described. This happened even when participants were told outright that the speaker had nothing to do with the behaviour, which is why the authors called it spontaneous: an association the mind makes on its own, not a reasoned judgement.

In plain words: when you tell people that someone is lazy or dishonest, part of that label sticks to you. The effect is not only for bad news: describing someone's good qualities tends to link those qualities to the speaker as well. Later work by Ramos, Garcia-Marques and Hamilton (2018) found that the transfer depends on the speaker being visible to the listener; when names replaced photographs, it did not appear. Gossip over chai, face to face, is exactly the visible kind.

Speak well of someone who is not in the room, and listeners tend to connect that quality with you.

One boundary, which again is our reading rather than Charaka's words: the rule is about speaking of others' faults to third parties. It does not ask anyone to stay silent about harm. Telling someone who can act (a parent, a teacher, a manager, the police) that a person is in danger is not gossip, and raising a problem directly with the person concerned is a different act from discussing it behind their back.

All Fifteen Speech Rules in Charaka's Sadvritta (Sutrasthana 8.18–25)

The reel had room for three rules. Here is every line in the chapter that governs speech, in the order Charaka gives them. Seven are duties, all in 8.18. Eight are prohibitions, in 8.19, 8.23 and 8.25.

Read as a set, the fifteen fall into a few groups. The first two are about how to talk to anyone at all: open the conversation, and fill it well. Numbers 3 and 8 are about truth, from both sides: keep your word, and do not say what is false. Numbers 9, 10, 12 and 13 are the anti-gossip lines, covering the whole chain from prying to passing on. And four of the duties are about other people's emotions, which is easy to miss in a list that runs past quickly.

Kruddhanam anuneta, the one who calms the angry: one of seven speech duties in Sutrasthana 8.18.

Samapradhana, kruddhanam anuneta, bhitanam ashvasayita and para-parusha-vacana-sahishnu describe a particular kind of person in a difficult conversation: the one who reaches for conciliation first, who calms the angry and reassures the frightened, and who can hear harsh words without throwing them back. Read with kalim narabheta, do not start a quarrel, they make speech a way of lowering the temperature of a room rather than raising it. The fourteenth line adds the old social hierarchy of its time (elders, teachers, assemblies and rulers); the principle under it, that public abuse of anyone in authority is a failure of speech, travels to the present without much strain.

Two more lines in the chapter touch the voice rather than the words, and we list them separately because they are about manner rather than content. Verse 8.19 says one should not laugh loudly (noccair haset). Verse 8.24, on study, asks that a text be recited neither too fast nor too slow, neither too feebly nor too loudly nor too low (natidrutam na vilambitam naticlibam natyuccair natinicaih svaraih). That second line was written for students reciting their lessons, but it is good advice for anyone speaking to a room.

Vagbhata's Four Sins of Speech: Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 2.21–22

Vagbhata's Ashtanga Hridaya, written several centuries after the Charaka Samhita, compresses the same ground into two verses of its daily-routine chapter. Sutrasthana 2.21–22 names ten papa-karma, wrong acts, to be given up "by body, speech and mind" (kaya-vang-manasais tyajet). Three belong to the body (violence, theft and unlawful desire) and three to the mind (malice, covetousness and wrong views). The largest group, four, belongs to speech:

The two lists were written for the same purpose, a healthy and well-governed life, and they land on the same four failures of speech. For Vagbhata's daily routine as a whole, see our guide to Vagbhata's dinacharya.

Charaka himself returns to speech once more, in the Chikitsa Sthana. The list of qualities he calls achara rasayana, rejuvenation through conduct, opens with satyavadin, one who speaks the truth, and its first verse (1.4.30) closes with priyavadin, one who speaks pleasantly. We cover the whole list in Achara Rasayana in the Charaka Samhita.

Practising the Three Rules This Week

Charaka's verse 8.17 asks for good conduct to be practised sarvada, always. A week is only a start, but it is long enough to notice the habits each rule is aimed at. One rule at a time works better than all three at once.

Days 1 and 2: purvabhashi and sumukha. Greet first wherever you can: the guard at the gate, the neighbour in the lift, the colleague who joined last month, the relative you only see at weddings. Let your face be pleasant before you speak.

Days 3 and 4: mita and the follow-up question. In every conversation, make your point in two or three sentences, then ask one question about what the other person has just said.

Days 5 and 6: nanyadoshan bruyat. When the talk turns to someone who is not there, add one good thing about them or change the subject. It helps to notice how often the urge to add a fault comes up; most people are surprised.

Day 7: kale. Before you say something important, ask whether now is the time. Is the other person calm, free, ready to hear it? If not, wait for a better moment.

What These Rules Are Not

They are not a fix for shyness, and they do not ask anyone to enjoy every conversation. Some people find talking to others genuinely hard. If that fear is strong enough to hold you back from work, study or friendships, it is worth raising with a doctor or a counsellor.

The research is not proof of Charaka. The studies above were done mostly with students and adults in the United States and the United Kingdom, they report averages across many people, and they were designed to answer their own questions, not to test a text written some two thousand years ago. What they show is narrower and still interesting: three rules written for health and self-mastery also fit what we now know about how people judge one another in conversation.

And they are not rules for silence. Charaka's speaker talks first, talks well, keeps their word, calms a heated room, and simply leaves out the faults of the people who are not there.

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