A History of Hindu Political Theories from the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. c9.45

c9.45

In another part of his book bearing the apt title of the suppression of disturbers of the public peace (kaṇṭakaśodhanam), Kauṭilya enjoins the king to avert eight specific kinds of providential visitations, namely, fire, flood, pestilence, famine, rats, snakes, tigers and demons,—a list which exhibits the author as sharing in the popular superstitions of his time.|| One short precept which he lays down in this connection aptly expresses the spirit of this part of his teaching. The king, he says, should always propitiate the afflicted as the father does his son.∗ In the following chapters Kauṭilya mentions various methods of entrapping by the agency of spies the people of criminal tendencies—methods, which, while doing credit to the author's ingenuity, betray in some measure his moral obliquity.† Rules of a more unscrupulous nature to which we shall presently return, are laid down in the later chapters for the purpose of dealing with those whom Kauṭilya calls the disturbers of the king as well as the kingdom.‡