Shloka 15
Education and Conduct — Chanakya Niti
नदीनां शस्त्रपाणीनांनखीनां शृङ्गिणां तथा ।
विश्वासो नैव कर्तव्यः स्त्रीषु राजकुलेषु च ॥
nadīnāṃ śastrapāṇīnāṃ nakhīnāṃ śṛṅgiṇāṃ tathā |
viśvāso naiva kartavyaḥ strīṣu rājakuleṣu ca ||
Do not place trust in rivers, in those who bear weapons, in creatures with claws, in those with horns; likewise, do not trust women or royal households.
FAQs
In the broader didactic tradition of Nītiśāstra, such verses reflect a court-centered political milieu in which risk, uncertainty, and strategic suspicion were treated as practical concerns. The grouping of natural dangers (rivers) and animal threats (claws, horns) alongside human social settings (armed persons, royal households) suggests an environment shaped by travel hazards, violence, and factional intrigue typical of premodern statecraft literature.
The verse frames “trust” (viśvāsa) as something potentially misplaced in contexts characterized by unpredictability or latent danger. Rather than offering a definition in abstract terms, it catalogs domains understood in the tradition as unstable or risky—natural forces, armed individuals, certain animals, and politically sensitive social spaces such as royal households—thereby presenting distrust as a prudential posture within the text’s historical worldview.
The construction uses a list (enumeration) to create an escalating field of hazards, moving from impersonal nature (nadī) to animate threats (nakhī, śṛṅgī) and then to socially charged categories (strīṣu, rājakuleṣu). Terms like śastrapāṇin (“weapon-in-hand”) function as a concise marker of immediate coercive capacity, while rājakula evokes the royal household as a locus of succession politics, patronage networks, and intrigue—common themes in Sanskrit political and didactic literature.