Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c11.s20.11

c11.s20.11

Jolly employs a more general argument. ‘Generally speaking’, he says, ‘the Dharmaśāstra or science of duty and religion has far better claims to a high antiquity than the Arthaśāstra or science of gain which in its turn is older than the Kāmaśāstra or science of love, the three sciences based on Trivarga having followed each other in point of time as well as in rank and value’.¹ One may well doubt this; for even the earliest dharmasūtras known contain a core of rājanīti, the subject-matter of Arthaśāstra. Even granting the correctness of this sequence in the evolution of the sciences, we can get no decision from it about the age of any single work in view of the long tradition each of the sciences lays claim to. A plausible *priori* case can be made out for the view that early Indo-Aryan life was gayer and more materialist in its outlook, that the sciences of gain and love had a better chance of coming up in that period than in a later time when Indians became more and more intent on the other world and began to lay greater stress on dharma and conceived of mokṣa as the *summum bonum* of life. In truth, we know as yet too little of the growth of the concept of *puruṣārthas* to be in a position to affirm or deny the truth of Jolly’s proposition regarding the sequence of the sciences. But the Indian writers are seen to have recognised, in their works the interdependence of the different ends of human endeavour, and no work is purely a work of dharma or artha to the exclusion of the other. And one of the best summaries of general dharma is found in the pages of the *Carakasamhitā*, a work of medicine. It is not much use laying stress on the open recognition in KA of ‘reprehensible practices such as the murder of distinguished officers, the levying of highly oppressive taxes, the corrupt system of espionage’, and seek to draw any inference from it either about the age of the work or on the character of administration in the age which produced the work. The author of the *Kāmasūtra* gives the clue which has not received the attention that it merits. He says :