A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.132

c8.s3.132

Great as is the interest attaching to the Buddhist theory of the origin of kingship, it unfortunately does not stand correlated to any system of rights and duties on the part of the king and his subjects. In his insistence upon contract as the foundation of the political order and above all in the terms of the contract itself, the Buddhist canonist had evidently discovered a weapon which might be used to justify almost any degree of popular control over the king, and in particular to counter the contemporary doctrines of the respect and obedience of the subjects. Nevertheless, as will appear from the above, no single claim is advanced on behalf of the people in the above passages, the first of which mentions the theory as it were incidentally in an attempt to refute the Brāhmaṇas' claim of social precedence. Nor, so far as we are aware, was the hidden significance of the theory brought out in any other work except apparently in a passage of the Chatuḥśatikā to which we shall return in a later chapter.∗ Thus the Buddhist theory of contract virtually exists as an isolated phenomenon in the history of Hindu political thought.