A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.22

c8.s3.22

While the Dharmasūtras are the product of the Vedic theological schools and are inspired by the canonical tradition, the works with which we are concerned in the present place trace their origin to the independent schools and authors of political science (Arthaśāstra) and contribute some of the most original and valuable chapters to the history of Hindu political theory. The early literature of the Arthaśāstra may be shown, even from the scanty evidence at our disposal, to have been not only rich in stores of thought, but also to have attained a considerable size and extent. Its present condition, however, is no index of its true character. For the whole of it has perished with the exception of a few fragments that are scattered through the pages of the later Brahminical canon as well as secular Arthaśāstra. Kauṭilya quotes the opinions of four specific schools and thirteen individual authors of the Arthaśāstra.∗ Most of these citations are reproduced in the Nītisāra of Kāmandaka, who moreover mentions some authors unknown to Kauṭilya. The Śāntiparvan section of the Mahābhārata (LVIII-LIX) furnishes two lists of authors of political science (daṇḍanīti or rājaśāstra), in which no less than six names can be identified with those mentioned by Kauṭilya.† The Śāntiparvan, moreover, contains a mass of traditions and legends connected with statecraft, which are attributed to schools and individual teachers some of whom were not known to Kauṭilya.∗ In some cases, again, the simultaneous occurrence of identical or nearly identical verses in the Mahābhārata and the Manusamhitā stamps them, in accordance with the usually accepted canon of interpretation on this point, as the specimens of a pre-existing collection of metrical maxims and presumably the relics of the lost literature of Arthaśāstra.∗