Of Unearned Wisdom

“Beware of unearned wisdom.” – Carl Jung

James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” reportedly sold over 15 million copies worldwide. This should ideally mean that at least 15 million people have mastered the art of forming and maintaining good habits.

Yet, people continue to give in to procrastination and lethargy against their better sense.

What gives?

Why can’t we become wise simply by learning books?

Surprisingly, or rather unsurprisingly, the answer lies in a story from the Mahabharata.

No Shortcuts to Knowledge

There once lived two sages Bharadwaja and Raibhya who were friends. Raibhya was highly learned and well-respected in the society. Bharadwaja, in contrast, lived an austere and isolated life, fully devoted to god.

Bharadwaja’s son Yavakrida was jealous of Raibhya’s fame and craved to be a scholar par excellence in the Vedas. So he performed a penance to please Indra and receive a boon of becoming a great scholar.

Indra appeared and upon learning about Yavakrida’s wish, he answered: “You are on the wrong path. Return home, seek a proper preceptor and learn the Vedas from him. This is not the way to learn. The path is study and study alone.”

The point is there is no shortcut to acquiring knowledge. One has to necessarily go through the human tutelage to gain wisdom.

Not satisfied with Indra’s advice, Yavakrida continued the penance more vigorously.

Indra appears again and tries to dissuade him against the vain effort.

But Yavakrida was not one to be cajoled. He persisted with the penance.

One morning, Yavakrida saw an old man trying to build a bridge across the river with handfuls of sand. The old man, on being mocked, responds: “Is my project more foolish than yours of mastering the Vedas not by study but by austerities?“

Realizing the old man to be Indra in disguise, Yavakrida prayed fervently. Indra gives up and blesses him thus: “Well, I grant you the boon you seek. Go and study the Vedas; you will become learned.”

You might expect Yavakrida’s father to be proud of his achievement. Far from it, however, Bharadwaja cautions his son: “The gods grant boons to foolish people … as intoxicants are sold to fools for money. They lead to loss of self-control, and this leads to the warping of the mind and utter destruction.“

Indeed, the boon made Yavakrida learned, haughty and impetuous. Particularly because he leaped over the learning path without actually traversing it.

The story goes on that in his newfound arrogance, Yavakrida violates the person of Raibhya’s daughter-in-law. When Raibhya finds this out, he creates a monster and commands it to kill Yavakrida. Despite Yavakrida’s best efforts to escape, the monster overtakes and kills him.

As Yavakrida’s grieving father lamented later, pride and vanity did him in.

Why Experience Matters

As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche remarked: “No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

Why do people continue to struggle despite the abundance of self-help books? Because most of them do not talk to them individually. The books do not offer solutions for the specific problems a reader is facing. The books are not personalized for their unique context.

Significantly, the readers’ experiences do not align with the book’s observations. Therefore, most of what the book says is irrelevant to the reader.

Many would have read the books that I did, without imbuing their essence. Many would have consumed ideas contained therein without digesting them. It’s not just the readers who discover books, even books find their audience.

Of the many readers of Edgar Allan Poe’s accounts of C. Auguste Dupin, it was only the genius of Arthur Conan Doyle that could transform the spark to a wildfire of Sherlock Holmes. Giving her own twist to the tale was Agatha Christie, whose Hercule Poirot remains a hot favorite among detective genre lovers. Schopenhauer’s works, barely acknowledged by his contemporaries, became the fountainhead of Nietzsche’s revolutionary philosophical ideas.

As a parting note, I would suggest people to go with books that work for them. If a book, for all its critical acclaim, bores you, you must keep it aside and move on.

As Allain De Botton said: “Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”