Shloka 6
Ethics of Action — Chanakya Niti
तैलाभ्यङ्गे चिताधूमे मैथुने क्षौरकर्मणि ।
तावद्भवति चाण्डालो यावत्स्नानं न चाचरेत् ॥
tailābhyaṅge citādhūme maithune kṣaurakarmaṇi |
tāvad bhavati cāṇḍālo yāvat snānaṃ na cācaret ||
With oil-anointing, smoke from a funeral pyre, sexual intercourse, and shaving, one is said to be like a “cāṇḍāla” until one has bathed.
FAQs
This verse reflects pre-modern South Asian purity/pollution frameworks in which certain bodily acts and contact-situations (sexual activity, shaving, and exposure to funerary smoke) were discussed in relation to temporary impurity and the restoring function of bathing. The use of “cāṇḍāla” here operates as a socially charged marker within a hierarchical taxonomy found across dharma and didactic literature, indicating how moral and ritual vocabulary could overlap with inherited social categories.
The verse frames impurity as a temporary condition triggered by specified activities or exposures, and it presents bathing (snāna) as the event that ends that condition. Its phrasing treats the state as lasting “until bathing is performed,” indicating a time-bounded model of ritual restoration rather than a permanent status in the immediate logic of the couplet.
Key terms include “citādhūma” (funeral-pyre smoke), which anchors the verse in funerary impurity discourse, and “kṣaurakarma” (shaving), which can denote routine grooming or rite-associated shaving depending on context. The term “cāṇḍāla” functions rhetorically as an extreme comparator for impurity; philologically, it signals how social labels could be deployed as metaphors within normative registers, a feature that is important for historical reading but not directly transferable as modern ethical instruction.