A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c10.s1.6

c10.s1.6

The above extract, it seems to us, controverts the position of the Brāhmaṇa canonists of this period at some important points. In the Manusaṁhitā and the Mahābhārata, as we have seen in another place, Politics is treated within certain limits as more or less independent of morality.∗ Hence the authors not only justify lawful slaughter, but also approve of the king's treacherous attack upon his foe, and in the same spirit commend the king's death on the battlefield as an act of the highest sacrifice. Far different is the attitude exhibited by the Buddhist author in the passage above quoted. To this stern and uncompromising moralist Politics, it would appear, is absolutely subservient to morality. He begins by boldly avowing, in justification of his ban against lawful slaughter, that the sages themselves must be judged by the eternal standards of right and wrong. Continuing his argument in the following verse, he points out by contrast with the conditions of a hypothetical golden age in the past the wickedness of the canonical laws of his own time. This implies, if we may trust the commentator, that the sacred canon itself must be judged by the ethical standard. Turning to another point, the Buddhist author declares, in flat contradiction of the Brāhmaṇa canonists, that the king treacherously attacking his enemy is just like an ordinary robber, while his self-sacrifice on the battlefield is on the same moral level as the spending of one's whole substance in riotous living.