Shloka 6
Governance and Policy — Chanakya Niti
धर्माख्याने श्मशाने च रोगिणां या मतिर्भवेत् ।
सा सर्वदैव तिष्ठेच्चेत्को न मुच्येत बन्धनात् ॥
dharmākhyāne śmaśāne ca rogiṇāṃ yā matir bhavet |
sā sarvadaiva tiṣṭhec cet ko na mucyeta bandhanāt ||
The mindset that arises during dharma teaching, at the cremation ground, and before the sick—if it stayed with us always, who would not be freed from bondage?
FAQs
In the broader Nīti-śāstra milieu, such aphorisms commonly juxtapose socially charged settings—religious instruction (dharmākhyāna), the cremation ground (śmaśāna), and illness—to illustrate how reflections on mortality and suffering temporarily intensify ethical or renunciatory sentiments. The verse can be read as part of a classical South Asian discourse on the instability of moral resolve outside liminal contexts.
The verse frames “mati” (mental disposition or resolve) as context-sensitive: it is portrayed as arising strongly in encounters with doctrinal teaching, death rites, and sickness. It then treats “bondage” (bandhana) in a conventional, tradition-inflected sense—often associated with attachment, ignorance, or worldly entanglement—without specifying a single doctrinal school.
The triad “dharmākhyāna–śmaśāna–rogin” functions as a rhetorical clustering of environments that historically evoke heightened awareness of impermanence and vulnerability. The conditional construction (“cet … ko na …”) is a common Sanskrit aphoristic device: it presents a hypothetical permanence of a rare mental state to underscore, by contrast, the usual fluctuation of human resolve.