Shloka 18
Governance and Policy — Chanakya Niti
तावन्मौनेन नीयन्ते कोकिलैश्चैव वासराः ।
यावत्सर्वजनानन्ददायिनी वाक्प्रवर्तते ॥
tāvan maunena nīyante kokilaiś caiva vāsarāḥ |
yāvat sarvajanānandadāyinī vāk pravartate ||
Days pass in silence, and so too with the cuckoo, until speech that delights all people begins to flow.
FAQs
In the Cāṇakya-nīti tradition, compact verses often frame social and courtly communication through natural imagery. This śloka reflects a milieu in which speech (especially pleasing or socially effective speech) is treated as a valued cultural resource, and silence is depicted as the default condition until an auspicious or attractive voice emerges.
Speech is characterized through the compound sarvajanānandadāyinī (“giving delight to all people”), indicating an idealized form of utterance associated with broad social approval. The verse presents this quality descriptively as a threshold after which communication becomes notable, contrasting it with the earlier condition of mauna (“silence”).
The verse uses seasonal/natural metaphor: the kokila (cuckoo), a conventional sign in Sanskrit literature for a sweet or auspicious voice, parallels “speech” (vāk). The construction tāvan...yāvat (“so long...until”) creates a temporal frame in which silence is portrayed as prevailing until the emergence of a voice that produces shared delight, aligning the social metaphor with a familiar poetic emblem.