A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c13.7

c13.7

Let us next consider what ideas of the Individual's place in relation to the State are involved in the political theories of the Hindus. We may, we think, point out three lines of approach towards the solution of this problem. In the first place, the Hindu authors, as we have elsewhere observed, conceive the social order of which the king is a member as produced by the will of the Supreme Spirit, Brahman,∗—a conception equivalent to the notion that society is an expression of the cosmic order or the universal law. Secondly, the theory of the king's divine creation in the Manusamhitā and the Mahābhārata was, as we think, formulated deliberately with the object of counteracting the individualistic tendencies of the Buddhist canon expressed in this case in its remarkable theory of Contract.† Nevertheless and this brings us to the last point, the Brahminical idea of the social order implies that the Individual is charged with a bundle of duties which owe their existence not to the will of the king or the State but is derived from the same source as the latter, namely, the will of the Supreme Spirit.∗