Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s17.1

c11.s17.1

It is in the sphere of foreign policy that Kauṭilya's work seems to conform more to the tradition of his predecessors. That tradition was dominated more by a desire to make the *śāstra* complete by a systematic exposition of all possibilities than by an attempt to discuss real political situations. It is indeed often enough true that neighbouring states are seldom friendly to each other ; but the *maṇḍala* theory erects this into a principle, makes the unvarying assumption that the neighbour state is an enemy and the alternate one an ally, and works out the implications in tedious detail. We need not pursue this scheme here ; for the concepts of the *vijigīṣu* (conqueror), the four *upāyas* (instruments of policy), the sixfold policy (*ṣāḍguṇya*) and so on are common to the treatises of polity at all ages in India, and had the least direct relation to political facts in the best days of the Mauryan empire when practically the whole of India acknowledged its sway and there was little or no scope for the application of the precepts of the *maṇḍala* theory. Modern writers have often remarked on the unscrupulous and ‘Machiavellian’ nature of these precepts; but one may well doubt whether the work of modern foreign and war offices described with a due regard, not to their professions, but to what they actually perform, will be seen to evince a better respect for morality. On the other hand the Indian text-books often developed extravagant theories having little relation to practice for the sake of the completeness of the *śāstra*. The ascertained facts bearing on the relations of the three great Mauryan emperors with the few independent states in India and the Hellenistic monarchies outside have been noticed in the accounts of the reigns of these monarchs.