Shloka 10
Practical Maxims — Chanakya Niti
अनन्तशास्त्रं बहुलाश्च विद्याः
स्वल्पश्च कालो बहुविघ्नता च ।
यत्सारभूतं तदुपासनीयां
हंसो यथा क्षीरमिवाम्बुमध्यात् ॥
anantaśāstraṃ bahulāś ca vidyāḥ
svalpaś ca kālo bahuvighnatā ca |
yat-sārabhūtaṃ tad upāsanīyaṃ
haṃso yathā kṣīram ivāmbu-madhyāt ||
Treatises are endless and branches of knowledge are many; time is little and obstacles are plenty. Therefore cultivate only the essence—like the haṃsa said to draw milk from the midst of water.
FAQs
In the wider nīti-śāstra and śāstra traditions, the verse reflects a scholastic environment that recognized the expanding corpus of authoritative texts (śāstra) and specialized disciplines (vidyā). It frames learning as a problem of selection under constraints—limited lifespan/time and practical impediments—an outlook compatible with courtly, administrative, and pedagogical settings in premodern South Asia.
The verse uses sāra in a relative and evaluative sense: the ‘essential’ is presented as that portion of learning worthy of focused cultivation when total mastery is impractical. It does not enumerate a fixed canon here; instead, it indicates a principle of extracting what is most consequential or practically salient from a large textual and disciplinary field.
The haṃsa simile draws on a well-known Sanskrit motif in which the haṃsa is credited with viveka (discrimination), popularly expressed as separating milk from water. Philologically, this is a conventional emblem rather than a zoological claim, functioning to illustrate selective discernment. The compound ambumadhyāt (“from the midst of water”) intensifies the image of extraction from a mixed or crowded medium, paralleling selection from an extensive śāstric landscape.