Shloka 1
Education and Conduct — Chanakya Niti
प्रणम्य शिरसा विष्णुं त्रैलोक्याधिपतिं प्रभुम् ।
नानाशास्त्रोद्धृतं वक्ष्ये राजनीतिसमुच्चयम् ॥
praṇamya śirasā viṣṇuṃ trailokyādhipatiṃ prabhum |
nānāśāstroddhṛtaṃ vakṣye rājānītisamuccayam ||
Having bowed my head to Viṣṇu, lord and sovereign of the three worlds, I shall set forth a compendium of rāja-nīti (statecraft), drawn from various śāstras.
FAQs
This opening verse functions as a conventional maṅgala (invocatory) preface common in Sanskrit didactic and technical literature. Such invocations situate the work within a broader religious and intellectual milieu, signal authorial humility, and present the ensuing material as aligned with an accepted cosmic and moral order, while also indicating that the content is compiled from earlier śāstric sources.
The phrase “nānāśāstroddhṛtam” frames the work as a compilation or extraction from multiple authoritative treatises (śāstras), implying dependence on an established textual tradition rather than presenting itself as purely novel instruction.
Key terms are formulaic and programmatic: “trailokyādhipati” employs the cosmological idiom of the ‘three worlds’ to denote supreme sovereignty, while “rājānīti-samuccaya” labels the genre as a collected digest of political-ethical prescriptions. The first-person future “vakṣye” is a standard authorial marker announcing the forthcoming discourse.