Shloka 10
Self-Discipline — Chanakya Niti
राजा राष्ट्रकृतं पापं राज्ञः पापं पुरोहितः ।
भर्ता च स्त्रीकृतं पापं शिष्यपापं गुरुस्तथा ॥
rājā rāṣṭrakṛtaṃ pāpaṃ rājñaḥ pāpaṃ purohitaḥ |
bhartā ca strīkṛtaṃ pāpaṃ śiṣyapāpaṃ gurus tathā ||
The king bears the sin committed by the realm; the royal priest bears the king’s sin. The husband bears the sin committed by the wife; likewise the teacher bears the student’s sin.
FAQs
The verse reflects a premodern South Asian ethical-political idiom in which authority figures are portrayed as bearing responsibility for the conduct of those under their jurisdiction or tutelage. Such formulations align with monarchical governance models (king and realm), Brahmanical court institutions (purohita as royal ritual adviser), and household/educational hierarchies (husband-wife; teacher-student) that structured much of the normative literature associated with Nīti and Dharma traditions.
Responsibility is framed as derivative and hierarchical: wrongdoing is represented as transferring upward to an overseeing figure (ruler, priestly adviser, household head, teacher). The verse thus encodes a theory of accountability tied to supervision, representation, and custodianship rather than an individualized model of moral agency.
The repeated compound forms (rāṣṭra-kṛtam, strī-kṛtam, śiṣya-pāpam) create a patterned parallelism that emphasizes institutional domains (state, household, school) and their associated overseers. The construction suggests a conceptual metaphor of “burden-bearing” (pāpa as something carried), a common feature in Sanskrit ethical discourse where moral transgression is treated as an accumulable, transferable weight.