— The Dhammapada, verse 15 (tr. F. Max Müller, 1881)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
पाप करने वाला इस लोक में भी शोक करता है और परलोक में भी; वह दोनों जगह शोक करता है। अपने ही किए हुए की मलिनता जब वह देखता है, तब शोक और संताप दोनों उसे घेर लेते हैं।
What it means
Notice where the verse locates the cause of the suffering. No one is said to be punishing him; the trigger named in the line is seeing — he mourns and suffers when he sees the evil of his own work. The grief arrives at the moment of recognition, which makes this a description of a mind reading its own record, not of a court delivering a sentence.
That is also why the common use of it as a threat about consequences gets it slightly off. ‘In this world and in the next’ is heard as a warning about what is coming later, while the line spends its force on what is already underway. The insistence is carried by repetition rather than by argument — mourns, mourns, mourns, three times before the reason is even given.
What it teaches you
When you are weighing something questionable, the useful question is not whether anyone will find out but whether you will be able to look at it plainly a year from now without flinching. Most people already know which of their past actions fail that test — they are the ones that surface uninvited at two in the morning — and the verse’s claim is that this replaying is not a separate misfortune added on afterwards; it is part of what the act cost.
अर्थ और सीख
इस श्लोक में दुख का कारण कोई बाहरी दंड नहीं, बल्कि अपना किया हुआ स्वयं देख लेना है — पीड़ा ठीक उसी क्षण शुरू होती है जब आदमी अपने कर्म को साफ़-साफ़ देखता है। इसे अक्सर आगे मिलने वाली सज़ा की चेतावनी की तरह पढ़ा जाता है, जबकि पंक्ति का ज़ोर उस शोक पर है जो अभी चल रहा है। सीख: कुछ करने से पहले यह मत पूछिए कि पकड़े जाएँगे या नहीं, यह पूछिए कि सालभर बाद उसे बिना कतराए देख पाएँगे या नहीं।
Where it comes from
This is verse 15 of the Dhammapada, from the chapter called The Twin-Verses — paired verses contrasting the outcomes of a corrupted and a purified mind.
The Dhammapada is a collection of 423 verses in Pali, among the oldest and most widely read records of the Buddha’s teaching. This English translation is by F. Max Müller (1881), the pioneering Oxford scholar of Indian texts; the verse number is cited with this quote.
