Shloka 12
Human Nature — Chanakya Niti
बन्धाय विषयासङ्गो मुक्त्यै निर्विषयं मनः ।
मन एव मनुष्याणां कारणं बन्धमोक्षयोः ॥
bandhāya viṣayāsaṅgo muktyai nirviṣayaṁ manaḥ |
mana eva manuṣyāṇāṁ kāraṇaṁ bandhamokṣayoḥ ||
Attachment to sense-objects brings bondage; a mind free of objects brings liberation. For humans, the mind itself is the chief cause of both bondage and release.
FAQs
In the broader Sanskrit intellectual milieu, concise aphoristic verses frequently link governance-oriented ethics (nīti) with widely circulating renunciant and philosophical vocabulary. This śloka reflects a cross-genre conceptual exchange in which terms such as viṣaya (sense-object), bandha (bondage), and mokṣa (liberation) are used to frame moral psychology, a theme present across classical Indian traditions and later compendia of didactic literature.
Bondage is described in causal relation to viṣayāsaṅga, i.e., the mind’s attachment to objects of experience, while liberation is associated with a nirviṣaya state, i.e., a mind characterized as lacking object-directed entanglement. The verse attributes both outcomes to the mind (manas) as the central explanatory factor, emphasizing an internal, psychological account rather than an external or ritual mechanism.
The construction “bandhāya… muktyai…” uses parallel dative forms to mark contrasted ends (telic datives), creating a balanced causal antithesis. The compound viṣayāsaṅga (“attachment to viṣayas”) condenses a common moral-psychological diagnosis into a single term, while nirviṣaya (“without viṣaya”) is a compact descriptor that can be read philologically as ‘objectless’ or ‘disengaged from sense-contents,’ foregrounding the mind as the locus of causation in the final line (“mana eva… kāraṇam”).