Shloka 15
Discernment and Wisdom — Chanakya Niti
एकवृक्षसमारूढा नानावर्णा विहङ्गमाः ।
प्रभाते दिक्षु दशसु यान्ति का तत्र वेदना ॥
ekavṛkṣasamārūḍhā nānāvārṇā vihaṅgamāḥ |
prabhāte dikṣu daśasu yānti kā tatra vedanā ||
Birds of many colors gather on a single tree; at dawn they fly off in the ten directions—what is there to lament in that?
FAQs
Within the broader nītiśāstra milieu, such verses are commonly situated in contexts of courtly and social life where alliances, companionships, and congregations are understood as contingent. The image of temporary gathering followed by dispersal reflects a conventional South Asian didactic motif used to describe the instability of worldly associations in premodern political and ethical literature.
The verse presents impermanence through a naturalistic analogy: diverse birds share one tree only briefly, and their dispersal at dawn is portrayed as ordinary and expected. In this framing, sorrow (vedanā) is rhetorically questioned, implying that separation is structurally inherent to such gatherings rather than an exceptional event.
The compound ekavṛkṣasamārūḍhāḥ condenses the idea of a single locus of assembly, while nānāvārṇāḥ emphasizes diversity within a temporary community. The phrase dikṣu daśasu invokes the classical cosmological schema of “ten directions,” reinforcing total dispersal. The closing interrogative kā tatra vedanā functions as a stylized rhetorical device typical of gnomic Sanskrit, marking the verse as an aphoristic reflection rather than a narrative statement.