— The Dhammapada, verse 85 (tr. F. Max Müller, 1881)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
मनुष्यों में बिरले ही हैं जो उस पार पहुँचते हैं; बाकी सब तो इसी किनारे पर इधर-उधर दौड़ते रह जाते हैं।
What it means
The image is precise and easy to misread as a complaint about laziness. The many are not asleep on the sand — they run up and down the shore. They are in motion, possibly exhausted, and the motion is parallel to the water instead of across it. What separates them from the few is direction, not effort.
That is also what keeps the verse from being simple flattery of an elite. Nothing here says the few are made of better material or that the many are incapable; the difference named is a line taken. Anyone running the shore is doing something strenuous that will never, at any level of intensity, amount to a crossing.
What it teaches you
Take the last month’s work and sort it into two columns — what moved you across something, and what was lateral motion that felt like work: the rearranged files, the fourth revision of a plan, the reading done instead of the starting. The verse’s claim is that the second column is where most people spend their lives, and that adding hours to it changes nothing, because the problem with shoreline running was never the pace.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पद उन लोगों की शिकायत नहीं कर रहा जो आलसी हैं — यहाँ बाकी लोग भी दौड़ रहे हैं, बस किनारे के साथ-साथ, पार नहीं। फ़र्क मेहनत का नहीं, दिशा का है, और इसी वजह से यह ‘कुछ लोग ऊँचे होते हैं’ जैसी बात नहीं बनती। सीख यह कि अपने पिछले महीने के काम को दो हिस्सों में बाँटकर देखिए — किससे आप सचमुच आगे बढ़े, और क्या सिर्फ़ व्यस्तता थी जो मेहनत जैसी लगती रही।
Where it comes from
This is verse 85 of the Dhammapada, from the chapter called The Wise Man — the company of the wise, unshaken as rock by blame or praise.
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.
