Shloka 6
Liberation and Truth — Chanakya Niti
अशक्तस्तु भवेत्साधुर्ब्रह्मचारी वा निर्धनः ।
व्याधितो देवभक्तश्च वृद्धा नारी पतिव्रता ॥
aśaktas tu bhavet sādhur brahmacārī vā nirdhanaḥ |
vyādhito devabhaktaś ca vṛddhā nārī pativratā ||
The powerless are deemed ‘sādhu’; so too a celibate student (brahmacārin) or the poor—likewise the sick, the god-devotee, and the elderly wife devoted to her husband.
FAQs
In the Chanakya Niti’s aphoristic style, the verse functions as a social typology: it groups certain conditions (lack of power, poverty, illness) and institutional identities (brahmacārin, devabhakta) as markers of reduced agency. Such lists are commonly read by historians as reflecting assumptions about vulnerability and social risk in premodern South Asian moral and political discourse.
Here, 'sādhu' appears less as a formal religious title and more as an evaluative label implying harmlessness or non-aggression. The verse associates 'sādhu' with limited capacity to cause harm or pursue coercive aims, framed through social and bodily conditions (powerlessness, poverty, illness) and normative roles (student celibacy, devotional identity, and an elderly pativratā figure).
The construction is enumerative and typological rather than metaphorical, using compact nominal predicates typical of nīti literature. Terms like 'brahmacārī' and 'pativratā' carry culture-specific normative meanings from dharma discourse, while 'aśakta', 'nirdhana', and 'vyādhita' are condition-based descriptors; together they create a rhetorical category of persons presumed to be socially constrained.