Shloka 72
अभुक्तवत्सु चैतेषु भुञ्जन् भुङ्क्ते ऽतिदुष्कृतम् मृतश् च नरकं गत्वा श्लेष्मभुग् जायते नरः
abhuktavatsu caiteṣu bhuñjan bhuṅkte 'tiduṣkṛtam mṛtaś ca narakaṃ gatvā śleṣmabhug jāyate naraḥ
He who eats the portion of those who have not yet eaten—seizing enjoyment before the rightful—incurs a grievous sin. Dying, he goes to hell; and on returning to birth, that man is born as a feeder on phlegm, in a loathsome state.
Sage Parāśara (teaching Maitreya in a dharma-and-karmaphala section)
Concept: Appropriating food before those entitled to eat generates severe pāpa that yields naraka and degrading rebirth.
Vedantic Theme: Dharma
Application: Practice restraint and fairness in shared resources—serve dependents/guests first and avoid entitlement.
Vishishtadvaita: Dharma is lived as service within the Lord’s ordered world; violating others’ rightful share disrupts that divinely sustained order.
FAQs
This verse treats premature or selfish consumption as a form of appropriation that violates social dharma, making the act spiritually weighty and karmically punishable.
Parāśara links the unethical act directly to karmaphala: first a post-mortem consequence (going to naraka) and then a correspondingly degraded rebirth that mirrors the moral ugliness of the deed.
Even without naming Vishnu in the verse, the teaching assumes Vishnu’s sovereignty as the ground of dharma: moral order is not arbitrary but upheld within a cosmos governed by the Supreme Reality, where actions inevitably mature into results.