Shloka 13
Family and Relationships — Chanakya Niti
जन्ममृत्यू हि यात्येको भुनक्त्येकः शुभाशुभम् ।
नरकेषु पतत्येक एको याति परां गतिम् ॥
janmamṛtyū hi yāty eko bhunakty ekaḥ śubhāśubham |
narakeṣu pataty eka eko yāti parāṃ gatim ||
Alone one passes through birth and death; alone one experiences the fruits of good and evil. Alone one falls into hells; alone one attains the highest state.
FAQs
In the broader nītiśāstra and dharma-oriented literary milieu, such verses commonly articulate individual moral accountability through the idiom of karmic consequence. The reference to naraka (hells) and parā gati (a highest destination) reflects widely circulating cosmological and soteriological vocabulary shared across classical Sanskrit traditions, often used to frame ethical causality rather than institutional law.
The verse frames responsibility as non-transferable: the same individual alone is portrayed as undergoing life-cycle events (birth and death) and as encountering the outcomes of śubha (auspicious) and aśubha (inauspicious) actions. The paired outcomes—falling into naraka versus attaining parā gati—function as contrasting endpoints that emphasize personal causation and personal result.
The repeated use of ekaḥ/eko (“one, alone”) is a rhetorical anaphora that intensifies the theme of singular agency and singular consequence. The compound śubhāśubham compresses a moral polarity into a single object of experience (bhunakti), and the parallel clauses (patati… yāti…) create a balanced antithesis between punitive and elevated destinations, a common stylistic device in aphoristic Sanskrit verse.