Shloka 13
Governance and Policy — Chanakya Niti
स जीवति गुणा यस्य यस्य धर्मः स जीवति ।
गुणधर्मविहीनस्य जीवितं निष्प्रयोजनम् ॥
sa jīvati guṇā yasya yasya dharmaḥ sa jīvati |
guṇadharmavihīnasya jīvitaṃ niṣprayojanam ||
He truly lives who has virtues; he truly lives who has dharma. The life of one without virtue and dharma is purposeless.
FAQs
In the Cāṇakya-nīti / nītiśāstra milieu, such statements function as compact moral-political aphorisms, reflecting a broader classical Indian discourse in which personal character (guṇa) and adherence to dharma are treated as foundations for social legitimacy and effective participation in public life. The formulation aligns with didactic literature used for instruction in conduct and governance-adjacent ethics.
The verse employs ‘living’ (jīvati) in a layered sense: biological existence is implicitly distinguished from socially and morally meaningful life. Presence of guṇa and dharma is presented as the criterion by which life is rhetorically counted as significant within the tradition’s ethical vocabulary.
The repetition of ‘sa jīvati’ creates an emphatic parallelism, using a definitional style common to aphoristic Sanskrit. The compound guṇadharmavihīna (‘devoid of virtues and dharma’) compresses evaluation into a single lexical unit, and niṣprayojana (‘without purpose/aim’) frames the critique in terms of telos (prayojana), a key category in classical Sanskrit intellectual traditions.