Shloka 20
Human Nature — Chanakya Niti
एकाक्षरप्रदातारं यो गुरुं नाभिवन्दते ।
श्वानयोनिशतं गत्वा चाण्डालेष्वभिजायते ॥
ekākṣara-pradātāraṃ yo guruṃ nābhivandate |
śvāna-yoni-śataṃ gatvā cāṇḍāleṣv abhijāyate ||
Whoever does not revere a teacher—even one who imparts a single syllable—is said to undergo repeated low rebirths (as if a hundred births in a dog’s womb) and then be born among those called Cāṇḍālas.
FAQs
In Sanskrit didactic literature (nīti and dharma-oriented texts), reverence toward the guru is frequently framed as a foundational social and intellectual norm. This verse reflects a pre-modern milieu in which learning was transmitted through teacher-centered lineages, and disrespect toward the teacher could be rhetorically presented as a serious moral failing, expressed through the idiom of karmic consequence and rebirth.
The verse treats even minimal instruction—symbolized by the gift of a single syllable (ekākṣara)—as sufficient to establish the status of “guru.” The underlying historical prescription emphasizes the asymmetry of obligation: the recipient of knowledge is depicted as owing ritualized respect (abhivandana) regardless of the quantity of instruction.
The expression ekākṣara-pradātā (“giver of one syllable”) is a compact philological marker of the high valuation of knowledge transmission. The rebirth imagery (śvāna-yoni-śatam) functions as hyperbolic moral rhetoric common to classical Sanskrit genres. The term Cāṇḍāla is a historically situated social label used in Brahmanical textual traditions to denote an outcaste category; in this verse it operates as a trope of social degradation rather than an ethnographic description.