Shloka 20
Discernment and Wisdom — Chanakya Niti
शोकेन रोगा वर्धन्ते पयसा वर्धते तनुः ।
घृतेन वर्धते वीर्यं मांसान्मांसं प्रवर्धते ॥
śokena rogā vardhante payasā vardhate tanuḥ |
ghṛtena vardhate vīryaṃ māṃsān māṃsaṃ pravardhate ||
Grief makes diseases grow; milk makes the body grow. Ghee increases vigor; meat increases flesh.
FAQs
This verse reflects a pre-modern South Asian habit of linking mental states and diet to bodily outcomes, a theme also encountered in classical āyurvedic and gnomic (subhāṣita) literature. In the broader Nīti-Śāstra milieu, such observations function as compact, memorable statements about causes and effects in human life, recorded as part of a didactic tradition rather than as clinical claims.
The verse presents a parallel set of cause–effect pairings: an affective cause (śoka, grief) is associated with increased illness (roga), and three dietary substances (payas, ghṛta, māṃsa) are associated with increases in body, vigor, and flesh respectively. The structure is enumerative and aphoristic, indicating a traditional taxonomy of influences rather than a detailed explanation.
The repeated verb root √vṛdh (“to grow/increase”) creates a rhythmic catalogue of augmentations (vardhante/vardhate/pravardhate). The terms tanu (“body/frame”) and vīrya (“vigor, potency”) are semantically broad in Sanskrit and can denote both physical and socially valued capacities, allowing the verse to operate as a compact statement about embodied consequence using widely understood pre-modern categories.