Shloka 14
Power and Prudence — Chanakya Niti
अपुत्रस्य गृहं शून्यं दिशः शून्यास्त्वबान्धवाः ।
मूर्खस्य हृदयं शून्यं सर्वशून्या दरिद्रता ॥
aputrasya gṛhaṃ śūnyaṃ diśaḥ śūnyāstvabāndhavāḥ |
mūrkhasya hṛdayaṃ śūnyaṃ sarvaśūnyā daridratā ||
For one without a son, the house is empty; for one without kin, the directions are empty; for a fool, the heart is empty; and poverty makes everything empty.
FAQs
Within the Chanakya-nīti/Nītiśāstra tradition, such verses function as compact social observations framed as maxims. The content reflects premodern North Indian household and kinship assumptions, where lineage (often articulated through sons) and extended family networks are treated as key supports for social continuity, ritual obligations, and security; the verse encodes these as markers of ‘fullness’ versus ‘emptiness’ in one’s social world.
Here śūnya operates as a relational metaphor rather than a literal absence: ‘empty house’ denotes lack of perceived continuity or support in a household; ‘empty directions’ denotes lack of social connections across space; ‘empty heart’ denotes absence of discernment or cultivated understanding attributed to the mūrkha; and ‘total emptiness’ in poverty denotes a state imagined as deprivation of multiple forms of resource and agency.
The verse uses parallelism and repetition of śūnya/śūnyā to build a graded series (house → directions → heart → everything). The term diśaḥ (‘directions’) is a conventional Sanskrit idiom for one’s wider sphere of movement and association, while sarvaśūnyā (‘empty of all’) intensifies the final clause, presenting daridratā as an encompassing condition through a rhetorical climax.