Shloka 6
Practical Maxims — Chanakya Niti
अन्यायोपार्जितं द्रव्यं दश वर्षाणि तिष्ठति ।
प्राप्ते चैकादशे वर्षे समूलं तद्विनश्यति ॥
anyāyopārjitaṃ dravyaṃ daśa varṣāṇi tiṣṭhati |
prāpte caikādaśe varṣe samūlaṃ tad vinaśyati ||
Wealth gained through injustice lasts ten years; when the eleventh year arrives, it is destroyed utterly, root and all.
FAQs
Within nīti-śāstra (didactic political-ethical literature), this verse reflects a recurring pre-modern South Asian idea that illegitimate acquisition of wealth carries an inherent instability. Such formulations appear in aphoristic collections meant to summarize social expectations about rulers, officials, merchants, and householders, and to articulate a moral economy in which unjust gain is imagined as temporally bounded.
The verse characterizes unjustly acquired wealth (anyāyopārjita dravya) as something that may persist for a limited period but is ultimately subject to complete loss. The emphasis falls on inevitability and totality of reversal (“samūlam”), presenting a traditional causal linkage between injustice and eventual ruin rather than a procedural or legal definition.
The compound anyāyopārjitam condenses the causal frame (“acquired by injustice”) into a single qualifier of dravya. The term samūlam (“with the root”) functions as a metaphor of uprooting, implying not merely reduction but eradication of the basis of wealth. The fixed time-frame (ten/eleven years) operates as a stylized, mnemonic temporal marker typical of aphoristic literature, signaling delayed but decisive consequences rather than a literal chronology.