A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c8.s3.9

c8.s3.9

Proceeding to the theories of kingship in the canonical works, we may observe that the conception of a system of laws governing the constituent members of the community, which is that of the Dharmasūtras, has obviously the result of limiting the king’s powers. Yet the ideas of the Dharmasūtras are not centred on the limitation of the king’s powers alone, but they involve in however unsystematic a fashion the balancing of the principles of authority and responsibility. In this respect, indeed, the Dharmasūtras follow in the track laid down by the Brāhmaṇas. The basis of the king’s authority however is sought in the later canon to lie, not in the dogma of the king’s divine nature, but in his fulfilment of the fundamental needs of the individual and of the society. Gautama writes in one place, “A king and a Brāhmaṇa, deeply versed in the Vedas, these two, uphold the moral order in the world. On them depends the existence of the four-fold human race, of internally conscious beings, of those which move on feet and on wings, and of those which creep, (as well as) the protection of offspring, the prevention of the confusion (of the castes and) the sacred law.”cont This striking dictum might have been based upon a text of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa describing the king and the learned Brāhmaṇa as upholders of the sacred law.† But while the earlier author derives from this text the conception of the natural and necessary limitations of the powers of both, the later writer amplifies it with the object of magnifying their importance. The later view virtually amounts to this, that the king’s office is, along with that of the Brāhmaṇa, the foundation of the social and the moral order as well as the indispensable condition of the bare existence of the people. The full import of this idea as justifying a wide range of duties owed by the subjects to their sovereign is not brought out till we reach the contemporary Arthaśāstra and the later Brahminical canon. Nevertheless it is observable that Gautama in one place derives from the king’s function of protection his right of immunity from censure. He writes, “The advice of the spiritual teacher and the punishment (inflicted by the king) guard them. Therefore a king and a spiritual teacher must not be reviled.”‡