The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s6.2

c12.s6.2

However, the achievement of transcendent authority, epochal as it was, was in a way a Pyrrhic victory, for in order to safeguard the transcendence of authority, the brahmin, though equally in need of the king's favors for his subsistence, was not allowed to serve the king and lend him his own authority, but had to keep himself free from worldly entanglements and especially from being entangled in the king's affairs. Royal power and brahmanic authority were irredeemably divorced. This explains why, as we have seen, there is no consistent theory of kingship: there cannot be one. The conflicting necessities of the cooperation between the king and brahmin on the one hand and of their rigorous separation on the other demonstrate the irreducible character of the problem. Though this problem is not the sole property of India, it may be reckoned to be one of the achievements of Indian thought to have formulated in such exemplary fashion the ultimately insoluble conundrum of authority.