A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.65

c8.s3.65

Such are the two concepts of government that are taken by the authors, whom Kauṭilya quotes, to be the ground-work of their system. As we have hinted above, these authors proceed to weigh the relative importance of the constituent elements in each case. In the instance of the category of seven elements, they treat the point as a question of political pathology. They consider the elements, in other words, not in their normal healthy state, but in their abnormal diseased condition which is technically called ‘vyasana.’ Among the ‘vyasanas’ of the seven elements, it was asked, what was the scale of relative seriousness? The unnamed author so often quoted by Kauṭilya held that in the list of the king, the minister, the territory, the fort, the treasury, the army, and the friend, the ‘calamity’ of each preceding one was more important than that of the one immediately following. This gradation was adversely criticised by other teachers who considered the ‘calamities’ of the elements in a series of successive pairs.∗ We are not here concerned with the arguments, but we must not miss the general significance of the arrangement in a graded scale. This unmistakably points to the fact that the idea of organic unity of government had not yet dawned upon the minds of the Hindu political thinkers.