Shloka 10
Family and Relationships — Chanakya Niti
अन्यथा वेदशास्त्राणि ज्ञानपाण्डित्यमन्यथा ।
अन्यथा तत्पदं शान्तं लोकाः क्लिश्यन्ति चाह्न्यथा ॥
anyathā vedaśāstrāṇi jñānapāṇḍityam anyathā |
anyathā tatpadaṃ śāntaṃ lokāḥ kliśyanti cāhnyathā ||
The teachings of the Vedas and śāstras are one thing; knowledge and scholarship are another. The tranquil state is something else again; yet people are afflicted in still another way.
FAQs
In the broader nīti-śāstra milieu, such verses commonly juxtapose textual authority (Veda/śāstra) with practical realities of social life. The formulation reflects a historical discourse in which learned traditions and everyday experience were frequently presented as misaligned, a theme visible across didactic Sanskrit literature.
The verse frames these domains through repeated ‘anyathā’ (“otherwise/differently”), suggesting perceived divergence: authoritative teachings, learned expertise, an idealized peaceful condition, and the actual condition of people are represented as not coinciding.
The repeated adverb ‘anyathā’ functions as an anaphoric device, creating a rhetorical cadence of disjunction. The compound ‘vedaśāstrāṇi’ compresses multiple sources of authority into a single unit, while ‘tatpadaṃ śāntam’ is semantically flexible (pada as “position/state/footing”), allowing the line to gesture toward an ideal condition contrasted with ‘lokāḥ kliśyanti’ (“people suffer/are afflicted”).