Shloka 5
Discernment and Wisdom — Chanakya Niti
रङ्कं करोति राजानं राजानं रङ्कमेव च ।
धनिनं निर्धनं चैव निर्धनं धनिनं विधिः ॥
raṅkaṃ karoti rājānaṃ rājānaṃ raṅkam eva ca |
dhaninaṃ nirdhanaṃ caiva nirdhanaṃ dhaninaṃ vidhiḥ ||
Fate can make a pauper a king and a king a pauper; it can make the wealthy destitute and the destitute wealthy.
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In the didactic Nītiśāstra milieu, such verses commonly reflect an early Indian political and social awareness of rapid reversals in status—kingship, patronage, and wealth could change through succession disputes, war, court intrigue, famine, taxation pressures, or shifting alliances. The formulation frames these contingencies through the culturally legible category of vidhi (fate), which functions as a traditional explanatory idiom in many Sanskrit moral-anthological texts.
Here vidhi is presented as an impersonal or personified principle of worldly reversal that redistributes status across extremes (pauper/king, wealthy/destitute). The verse does not specify a mechanism (such as merit, policy, or divine intervention) and instead uses vidhi as a compact historiographical shorthand for contingency and instability in human affairs.
The verse employs balanced parallelism and chiasmus-like reversal: raṅka ↔ rājā and dhanī ↔ nirdhana. The repetition of key nouns in the accusative (raṅkam, rājānam, dhaninam, nirdhanam) with karoti underscores transformation, while vidhiḥ placed at the end functions as the grammatical and conceptual agent, a common Sanskrit rhetorical strategy for emphasis.