— The Dhammapada, verse 16 (tr. F. Max Müller, 1881)
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सदाचारी इस लोक में भी प्रसन्न रहता है और परलोक में भी — दोनों में। अपने कर्म की निर्मलता को देखकर वह प्रसन्न होता है और आनंदित होता है।
What it means
The second sentence explains the first, and the hinge is the word sees. The delight is not handed over by anyone; it arises when the man looks at his own work and finds it clean. That is an inspectable, present-tense cause — available today, repeatable, and requiring no one else’s verdict. The verse offers ‘this world and the next’ and then, rather than leaving that as a promise, tells you the mechanism producing it in both.
Read carelessly, this becomes the familiar trade of good conduct now for reward later, with the present-world part thrown in as a bonus. The line does not work that way. There is one cause operating twice, not two payments; and note that what is inspected is the purity of his own work — how it was done — rather than its results, its reception, or his own good intentions. A well-received piece of work can fail that inspection, and a thankless one can pass it.
What it teaches you
Build in the look. When something is finished, spend a minute on how it was done — what you did not cut, whom you did not mislead, the part nobody will check — before moving to what it earned you. The verse claims that minute is where the delight actually comes from, which also means it is skippable, and that most people skip it. Note too that this inspection is not available for work whose method you would rather not examine; that unavailability is information.
अर्थ और सीख
दूसरा वाक्य पहले की व्याख्या करता है, और कुंजी है ‘देखकर’ — आनंद कोई देता नहीं, वह अपने कर्म की निर्मलता देखने से उठता है, जो आज, अभी, किसी और की स्वीकृति के बिना संभव है। इसे ‘अभी अच्छा करो, बाद में इनाम मिलेगा’ समझना भूल है: एक ही कारण दोनों लोकों में काम करता है, और जाँच कर्म के ढंग की होती है, उसके फल या प्रशंसा की नहीं। सीख यह है कि काम पूरा होने पर एक क्षण रुककर देखें कि वह कैसे किया गया — जहाँ कोई जाँचने नहीं आएगा, वहाँ क्या किया — इससे पहले कि आप देखें कि उससे क्या मिला।
Where it comes from
This is verse 16 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.
