A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c10.s1.4

c10.s1.4

∗ While on the subject of kingship as conceived by Āryadeva, we may pause for a moment to trace the subsequent fortunes of the Buddhist theory of Contract,—a theory which as we have seen in another place, hinges upon the election of a fictitious king called Mahāsammata by popular consent. It appears to us, from the evidence bearing on this point, that the Buddhist theory was pushed into the background by the rival Brahminical theories of the king’s divine creation and was finally extinguished on the Indian soil along with the faith of which it was the product. It is significant to notice in this connection that the author of the Śukranīti, while exhibiting (I 188) at a later date Āryadeva’s conception of the king’s relation to the people, is constrained to base this upon the king’s ordination by the god Brahmā (Infra, ch. VII). Meanwhile, however, Buddhism had travelled to distant lands, and the theory of Contract as forming part and parcel of the Sacred Canon, found a secure asylum in the native literatures of those countries. We thus get more or less identical accounts of the election of Mahāsammata in the Tibetan Dulva (Vide Rockhill, *Life of the Buddha*, pp. 1-9), the Burmese Damathat (Richardson’s translation, p. 7) *and* the Ceylonese sacred works (vide Spence Hardy, *Manual of Buddhism*, p. 68.) \* Catuḥśatikā pp, 462-464.