Shloka 12
Virtuous Company — Chanakya Niti
लालनाद्बहवो दोषास्ताडने बहवो गुणाः ।
तस्मात्पुत्रं च शिष्यं च ताडयेन्न तु लालयेत् ॥
lālanād bahavo doṣās tāḍane bahavo guṇāḥ |
tasmāt putraṃ ca śiṣyaṃ ca tāḍayen na tu lālayet ||
Pampering breeds many faults; strict discipline breeds many virtues. Therefore, a son and a student should be corrected, not merely coddled.
FAQs
Within the broader Nīti-śāstra milieu, such verses reflect older South Asian household and pedagogical norms in which authority structures (parent/child, teacher/student) were articulated through discipline-centered ideals. The formulation aligns with premodern didactic literature that framed social order and character-formation as outcomes of controlled training rather than indulgence.
The verse characterizes two contrasting modes of formation—lālana (indulgent affection) and tāḍana (physical chastisement)—and assigns them opposite moral outcomes (doṣa vs. guṇa). It thereby encodes a historical prescription in which virtue is rhetorically linked to strictness and fault to indulgence, specifically in familial and instructional settings.
The couplet uses a compact antithesis: lālana/doṣa versus tāḍana/guṇa, strengthened by parallel syntax (bahavo…bahavo…). The key terms are culturally loaded: doṣa and guṇa function as evaluative categories in Sanskrit ethical discourse, while tāḍana is a concrete verb of striking that signals a historically normalized disciplinary register in some premodern instructional rhetoric.