Shloka 17
Virtue and Vice — Chanakya Niti
वरं प्राणपरित्यागो मानभङ्गेन जीवनात् ।
प्राणत्यागे क्षणं दुःखं मानभङ्गे दिने दिने ॥
varaṃ prāṇaparityāgo mānabhaṅgena jīvanāt |
prāṇatyāge kṣaṇaṃ duḥkhaṃ mānabhaṅge dine dine ||
Better to give up life than to live with honor broken. Death brings pain for a moment; dishonor brings pain day after day.
FAQs
In the broader niti (ethical-political aphorism) tradition associated with Chanakya, social reputation (māna) functions as a key form of symbolic capital in courtly and administrative life. The verse reflects a milieu where honor and public standing could determine access to patronage, alliances, and authority, making “dishonor” a recurring social penalty rather than a single event.
The verse frames māna (honor) as a condition whose loss (mānabhaṅga) produces ongoing distress, contrasted with the temporally bounded pain of death. Rather than defining honor abstractly, it operationalizes it through its perceived social-psychological consequence: repeated, everyday suffering tied to diminished standing.
The couplet uses a temporal contrast as its primary rhetorical device: kṣaṇam (“for a moment”) versus dine dine (“day after day”). The compound prāṇaparityāga (“abandonment of breath/life”) is a conventional Sanskrit idiom for death, while mānabhaṅga (“breaking of honor”) employs a concrete verb-root image (bhaṅga, “breaking”) to conceptualize reputational loss as a fracture that persists in social memory.