Shloka 7
Right Conduct — Chanakya Niti
अन्तर्गतमलो दुष्टस्तीर्थस्नानशतैरपि ।
न शुध्यति यथा भाण्डं सुराया दाहितं च सत् ॥
antargatamalo duṣṭas tīrthasnānśatair api |
na śudhyati yathā bhāṇḍaṃ surāyā dāhitaṃ ca sat ||
A wicked man with impurity within is not cleansed even by hundreds of baths at sacred fords. Like a vessel—though sound—that does not become clean after being tainted by surā (liquor).
FAQs
In the broader Nīti-śāstra tradition, such verses commonly juxtapose external ritual acts (e.g., tīrtha-snānāni, pilgrimage bathing) with internal moral disposition. This reflects a long-standing discourse in classical Indian literature where ritual purity is treated as insufficient for ethical transformation, a theme that appears across didactic anthologies and political-moral instruction texts circulating in premodern South Asia.
Purity is framed primarily as an internal condition (antargata-mala, 'impurity within') rather than a state achieved through repeated external rites. The verse presents a descriptive claim that ritual bathing, even in large quantity, does not alter entrenched moral corruption, implying a distinction between outward ritual cleansing and inward ethical character.
The comparison to a bhāṇḍa (vessel) tainted by surā employs a material-culture metaphor: certain substances were culturally marked as strongly contaminating in many purity discourses. The imagery functions as an analogy for moral stain that is resistant to superficial cleansing. Philologically, antargata ('gone inside') intensifies mala ('stain/impurity') to emphasize interiority, while the hyperbole of 'hundreds of baths' (snāna-śataiḥ) heightens the contrast between external repetition and internal fixity.