Chanakya Niti — Self-Discipline, Shloka 6
तादृशी जायते बुद्धिर्व्यवसायोऽपि तादृशः ।
सहायास्तादृशा एव यादृशी भवितव्यता ॥
tādṛśī jāyate buddhir vyavasāyo’pi tādṛśaḥ |
sahāyās tādṛśā eva yādṛśī bhavitavyatā ||
智慧如何生起，志业亦复如是；同伴亦多同类，皆随将要展开的命运而来。
FAQs
Within the broader Nītiśāstra tradition, such statements are commonly situated in courtly and administrative milieus where success was interpreted through a combined lens of personal capacity (buddhi, vyavasāya) and situational forces (bhavitavyatā). The verse reflects a historical tendency to correlate character, effort, and social networks with the perceived unfolding of circumstances, a theme found across didactic Sanskrit anthologies and polity-oriented literature.
The verse presents intellect and enterprise as arising “in a corresponding manner,” while also linking the quality of companions to bhavitavyatā (what is to occur). In historical-philological terms, this juxtaposition can be read as a compact formulation that places personal faculties and social environment alongside an idiom of inevitability, without explicitly resolving whether causality is primarily internal (agency) or external (destiny).
The repeated demonstrative adjective tādṛśa- (“of such a kind”) functions as a rhetorical device of parallelism, creating a patterned equivalence among buddhi, vyavasāya, and sahāya. The abstract noun bhavitavyatā (from the root √bhū, ‘to be/become’) is a technical-sounding term for inevitability or destined occurrence, lending the verse a quasi-theoretical tone typical of aphoristic Sanskrit moral-political literature.