A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.2

c8.s3.2

With the period forming the subject-matter of the present chapter we open a new and interesting page in the history of Hindu political theory. The age of experiment, as it may be called, is past, that of growth and development has begun. The Brāhmaṇas which are the true fountain-head of the Hindu ideas of the State are not wanting in striking reflections relating to the nature of the king's office, the mutual relations of the king and the Brāhmaṇa order and the like questions. But these, as we have endeavoured to show elsewhere, involve a long and painful process of groping which is the mute witness of the birth-throes of a new thought, and they occur intermixed with extraneous matter in the form of dogmatic expositions of the great ceremonies of royal and imperial consecration. In the present period a change comes over the scene. The practical spirit of the age found vent in the preparation of short aphoristic manuals based on the teachings of the earlier canon, and the priestly authors of these works, the founders of the Vedic schools of sacred law (Sūtracharaṇas) carefully separate their description of the sacrificial rituals that are treated in the Śrauta and the Grihya Sūtras, from the first arranged list of duties pertaining to the constituent classes and sections of the community, that is laid down in the Dharmasūtras. A new departure moreover, is signalized by the schools and authors of the Arthaśāstra who bring into being an independent branch of knowledge avowedly concerned with the acquisition and the preservation of States. Finally, the founders of the Buddhist canon, the leaders of a new heresy, introduced a rich leaven into the general ferment of ideas through their daring speculations into the origin of the social and the political order, and the conditions of the republican communities.