The Kural remains the most reviewed work of the
Tamil literature, with almost every scholar down the ages having written commentaries on it. Of the several hundred commentaries written on the didactic work over the centuries, the commentaries written by a group of ten medieval scholars are considered to have high literary value. The ten scholars are: •
Manakkudavar (c. 10th century CE) •
Dhamatthar (c. 11th century CE) •
Nacchar (c. 11th century CE) •
Paridhi (c. 11th century CE) •
Pariperumal, also known as Kaliperumal (c. 11th century CE) •
Thirumalaiyar (c. 11 to 13th century CE) •
Mallar (c. 11 to 13th century CE) •
Kaalingar (c. late 12th century CE) •
Dharumar (c. 13th century CE) •
Parimelalhagar (c. 13th century CE) Of these, only the commentaries of Manakkudavar, Paridhi, Pariperumal, Kaalingar, and Parimelalhagar are extant in their complete (or almost complete) form. The commentaries of Dharumar, Dhamatthar, and Nacchar have survived only in fragmentary form, and those of Thirumalaiyar and Mallar are now lost completely. The oldest of these is the commentary of Manakkudavar (c. 10th century CE), which is considered to be the closest to the original text of the Kural, and is considered the cornerstone against which other medieval commentaries are compared in order to find variations in them. Each commentators followed his own sense of logic in the arrangement of the chapters and the couplets within them. Researchers have found as many as 16, 20, 120, and 171 variations in the ordering of the Kural couplets by Pari Perumal, Paridhi, Parimelalhagar, and Kaalingar, respectively, with respect to the commentary by Manakkudavar. According to M. Shanmugham Pillai, there are about 305 textual variations in all the commentaries combined. The last of these medieval commentaries is that of Parimelalhagar, who wrote the commentary around 1271–1272 CE, as indicated in an inscription at the
Varadharaja Perumal Temple at
Kanchipuram. Commentaries written by Paridhiyar, Pariperumal, Kaalingar, and Mallar have all been found in the
Kongu Region. Parimelalhagar's commentary is followed ever since as the standard for numbering of the Kural chapters and the couplets within each chapter. ==Chapter order variations==