Shloka 17
Power and Prudence — Chanakya Niti
अध्वा जरा देहवतां पर्वतानां जलं जरा ।
अमैथुनं जरा स्त्रीणां वस्त्राणामातपो जरा ॥
adhvā jarā dehavatāṃ parvatānāṃ jalaṃ jarā |
amaithunaṃ jarā strīṇāṃ vastrāṇām ātapo jarā ||
For embodied beings, travel brings wear; for mountains, water brings wear; for women, lack of union brings wear; for garments, the sun brings wear.
FAQs
In the Chanakya Niti/Nītiśāstra tradition, verses often condense observations about human life and the material world into memorable analogies. This shloka reflects a pre-modern South Asian genre practice of listing “causes” of decline or deterioration across different domains (body, landscape, household objects), functioning as a mnemonic and rhetorical device rather than an empirical treatise.
Here jarā is used broadly as “wearing out” or “deterioration,” applied analogically: physical fatigue from travel for living bodies, erosion for mountains through water, a socially framed notion of decline for women via amaithuna, and fading/weakening of cloth through sun exposure. The verse treats jarā as a generalized principle of diminution rather than a strictly biological category.
The shloka uses parallel nominal clauses with jarā repeated as a refrain, creating a catalog-like structure typical of subhāṣita and nīti literature. The metaphorical move is to align disparate processes (fatigue, erosion, fading) under one term (jarā), producing a compact worldview statement; the gendered line reflects period-specific social assumptions embedded in the didactic register.