A History of Sanskrit Literature c17.s1.2

c17.s1.2

These maxims were not, of course, popular in the full sense of that term; they are not to be compared to proverbs racy of the soil preserved in their primitive form; they are, as in the maxims of Phokylides in Greece, the turning of the raw material by poets into finished products, and the perfection of their finish varies greatly. Some of them, doubtless, first became current in literature through having been composed or adopted by writers of the fable literature, others merely passed current from mouth to mouth until efforts were made by compilers to collect such popular currency. We need not doubt that the collector became normally an inventor at the same time. We can, indeed, hardly imagine that it would be otherwise; that would assuredly be a more than normally stupid person who could not on the models he had devise a fresh series of maxims, or at least remould the old. We see, in fact, the process at work in the case of the collections¹ which pass under a variety of names such as *Rājanītisamuccaya*, *Cāṇakyanīti*, *Cāṇakyarājanīti*, *Vṛddha-Cāṇakya*, *Laghu-Cāṇakya*, and so on. The number of recensions is extremely large—seventeen have been distinguished and doubtless there are more, for often each manuscript shows distinct variations from any other; the compilers were eclectic, they had many sources open, and it is now quite impossible to determine anything like the original shape of the collection. That it was composed by Cāṇakya, the minister of Candragupta, is absurd; it is perfectly clear that it was passed off under his name because he was famous. We do not even know whether the first stanza in some recensions which promises a treatise on Rājanīti, the conduct of princes, can be taken as indicating that originally the collection dealt with that subject alone. At any rate the number of verses which can be assigned to that topic in extant recensions is negligible, and it seems much more likely that the stanza is the product of the imagination of some one who wished to give the collection a closer appearance of connexion with the minister. The book in its various forms varies enormously; thus one recension has 340 stanzas in seventeen chapters of equal length; another by Bhojarāja, preserved in a manuscript in Çāradā characters, has 576 verses in eight chapters. Its contents deal with general rules for the conduct of life, for intercourse among men, general reflections on richness and poverty, on fate and human effort, on a variety of ethical and religious topics. In the main the stanzas are not connected by any bond of thought, but there are exceptions. Here and there verses are clearly meant to be antithetical. In one passage we find a continuation of the habit, seen in full development in such works as the Pāli *Aṅguttara Nikāya* and the Jain *Sthānāṅga*, to use numerical formulae to fix matters in the memory. Here the wise man is bidden to learn one thing from the lion, one from the heron, four from the cock, five from the crow, six from the dog, and three from the ass. In another group of seven verses the different kinds of Brahmin are expounded, the holy seer, the normal Brahmin, the Vaiçya, who lives by trade or agriculture, the Çūdra who sells *inter alia* meat and drink, the cat who is treacherous, the barbarian who is destructive, and the Caṇḍāla who is a thief and adulterer. There are certain quite common mannerisms in the collection such as the insistence on the use of numbers to give the total of groups sometimes of homogeneous, but also often of quite disparate things, as when one is warned not to abide in a place where there is not a king, a rich man, a learned man, a river, and a doctor. So we have a list of six bad things: