Shloka 11
Governance and Policy — Chanakya Niti
अत्यासन्ना विनाशाय दूरस्था न फलप्रदा ।
सेव्यतां मध्यभावेन राजा वह्निर्गुरुः स्त्रियः ॥
atyāsannā vināśāya dūrasthā na phalapradā |
sevyatāṃ madhyabhāvena rājā vahnir guruḥ striyaḥ ||
Too much closeness leads to ruin; too much distance yields no result. Therefore keep a middle stance toward the king, fire, the teacher, and women.
FAQs
Within the Chanakya-niti/Nītiśāstra milieu, such verses function as compact observations about managing risk in hierarchical societies. The king represents political power and its volatility; fire represents a physical force that is useful yet dangerous; the guru represents authority within pedagogical-religious institutions; and ‘women’ appear as a conventional social category in didactic literature. The pairing of ‘too close’ and ‘too far’ reflects a broader ancient concern with calibrated access to power, resources, and potentially hazardous relationships.
The verse characterizes madhyabhāva as a relational posture between extremes: it contrasts excessive closeness (atyāsanna) with excessive distance (dūrastha) and associates each extreme with negative outcomes (ruin vs. lack of results). Moderation is presented descriptively as the condition under which interaction is imagined to be both safer and more productive in the idiom of classical niti.
The construction ‘atyāsannā … dūrasthā …’ sets up a binary of spatial metaphors that map onto social and political behavior. The term phala (‘fruit/result’) is a common niti marker for practical outcomes. The list ‘rājā vahnir guruḥ striyaḥ’ works as a set of exempla: each item is culturally legible as simultaneously beneficial and potentially harmful, thereby reinforcing the verse’s central metaphor of calibrated distance.