Shloka 18
Family and Relationships — Chanakya Niti
अधना धनमिच्छन्ति वाचं चैव चतुष्पदाः ।
मानवाः स्वर्गमिच्छन्ति मोक्षमिच्छन्ति देवताः ॥
adhanā dhanam icchanti vācaṃ caiva catuṣpadāḥ |
mānavāḥ svargam icchanti mokṣam icchanti devatāḥ ||
The poor seek wealth; four-footed creatures seek speech; humans seek heaven; and the gods seek liberation (moksha).
FAQs
In the broader didactic tradition associated with nīti literature, such verses commonly present typologies of beings and their characteristic aims. The imagery reflects pre-modern South Asian social and cosmological categories (human, animal, divine) and uses them to map differing aspirations in a compact, aphoristic style.
Desire is presented as relative to status or ontological category: material lack is associated with the pursuit of wealth, animals are associated with the absence (and thus imagined pursuit) of articulate speech, humans with post-mortem reward (svarga), and gods with the higher soteriological aim of mokṣa. The verse functions as a schematic hierarchy rather than a practical instruction.
The construction uses parallel clauses with 'icchanti' to create a rhetorical ladder of aspirations. The phrase 'vācaṃ ... catuṣpadāḥ' is metaphorical, since animals are typically characterized in Sanskrit discourse as lacking fully articulate speech (vāk), making 'speech' a symbolic marker of higher cognitive or social capacity. The pairing of 'svarga' and 'mokṣa' also echoes classical distinctions between heavenly reward and liberation as separate religious-philosophical goals.