A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.28

c8.s3.28

How far may the date of the Arthaśāstra be carried back into the past? We have no means of giving a precise answer to this question, but the following data may help us to form some idea of its antiquity. Already in the time of Kauṭilya the literature of the Arthaśāstra must have reached a considerable size, since he quotes no less than four specific schools and thirteen individual authors. “A School,” as Prof. D. R. Bhandarkar remarks, “means a traditional handing down of a set of doctrines; and presupposes a series of āchāryas or teachers, who from time to time carried on the work of exegetics and systematisation.”¹ Rich and extensive as is the literature of Arthaśāstra referred to by Kauṭilya, it contains within itself sufficient evidence pointing to a still earlier stratum in the history of this science. The discussions of the authorities whom Kauṭilya quotes involve, as will appear from the sequel, a number of political categories. Such are the four sciences (vidyās), the seven elements of sovereignty (prakritis) the three powers (śaktis) of the king, the seven royal vices (vyasanas) divided into two sub-groups, the six expedients of foreign policy (guṇas), and the four means of conquering an enemy. These categories must have come into general vogue when the authorities quoted by Kauṭilya composed their treatises, for otherwise they would not have been accepted more or less implicitly by those authors. A long interval, therefore, which may well have extended over three centuries, separated these dim beginnings of Arthaśāstra thought from the time of Kauṭilya.∗