Shloka 1
Virtue and Vice — Chanakya Niti
न ध्यातं पदमीश्वरस्य विधिवत्संसारविच्छित्तये
स्वर्गद्वारकपाटपाटनपटुर्धर्मोऽपि नोपार्जितः ।
नारीपीनपयोधरोरुयुगला स्वप्नेऽपि नालिंगितं
मातुः केवलमेव यौवनवनच्छेदे कुठारा वयम् ॥
na dhyātaṃ padam īśvarasya vidhivat saṃsāra-vicchittaye
svarga-dvāra-kapāṭa-pāṭana-paṭur dharmo 'pi nopārjitaḥ |
nārī-pīna-payodharōru-yugalā svapne 'pi nāliṅgitaṃ
mātuḥ kevalam eva yauvana-vana-cchede kuṭhārā vayam ||
I did not duly meditate on the Lord’s abode to cut off samsara, nor did I earn the dharma that can unbar heaven’s gate. Not even in dreams did I embrace a woman’s full breasts and twin thighs. In the end, I was only an axe that felled the “forest” of my mother’s youth.
FAQs
In the Chanakya-nīti/Nītiśāstra tradition, verses often juxtapose religious-ascetic ideals (meditation, liberation, dharma) with worldly aims (pleasure, social success) using stark self-reproach. This shloka reflects a common premodern South Asian literary posture in which a speaker evaluates a life as failing both soteriological goals (ending saṃsāra) and conventional enjoyments, expressed through compressed moral and erotic imagery.
Here, dharma is framed narrowly as “acquired merit” (upārjita-dharma) with a transactional metaphor: it is described as the capability that ‘opens’ the gate of heaven. The verse treats dharma as an accumulated moral-religious capital within a cosmological economy, rather than as a legal code or a philosophical abstraction.
The verse uses layered metaphors: (1) dharma as a force ‘skilled at opening’ heaven’s bolted doors (svarga-dvāra-kapāṭa-pāṭana-paṭuḥ), a compound emphasizing efficacy; (2) saṃsāra as something that can be ‘cut off’ (vicchitti), aligning with liberation idioms; and (3) a striking filial metaphor—being an ‘axe’ (kuṭhāra) that cuts the ‘forest’ of the mother’s youth (yauvana-vana), implying that the mother’s youth is consumed in rearing a child, while the speaker claims to have produced no compensating spiritual or worldly achievement.