Shloka 15
Power and Prudence — Chanakya Niti
अनभ्यासे विषं शास्त्रमजीर्णे भोजनं विषम् ।
दरिद्रस्य विषं गोष्ठी वृद्धस्य तरुणी विषम् ॥
anabhyāse viṣaṃ śāstram ajīrṇe bhojanaṃ viṣam |
daridrasya viṣaṃ goṣṭhī vṛddhasya taruṇī viṣam ||
Without practice, a treatise is poison; when undigested, food is poison; for the poor, social gatherings are poison; for the old, a young woman is poison.
FAQs
Within the Cāṇakya-nīti/Nītisāra aphoristic tradition, such verses function as compact didactic statements, using everyday domains (study, digestion, social status, age) to express perceived risks in social and bodily economy. The imagery aligns with broader Sanskrit nīti literature that circulated in pre-modern educational settings as mnemonic ethical and pragmatic observations rather than as narrative history.
The verse frames abhyāsa implicitly as the applied use and repeated cultivation of learning: śāstra without abhyāsa is characterized as harmful or ineffective, using ‘poison’ as a metaphor for knowledge that remains unassimilated or misapplied within one’s conduct and decision-making.
The repeated predicate “viṣam” (“poison”) creates a parallel structure (anaphora) linking four scenarios through a single metaphor of harm. Philologically, “viṣa” operates as a conventional Sanskrit trope for something intrinsically potent that becomes dangerous under the wrong conditions (e.g., undigested food, unassimilated learning), while terms like goṣṭhī and taruṇī reflect period social categories used to encode vulnerability, temptation, or mismatch (economic or age-related) in aphoristic form.