The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c10.s2: Buddha-Kauṭalya Complex
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c10.s2
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Buddha-Kauṭalya Complex
c10.s2.1
A great methodological difficulty in indology has arisen from the fact that the so-called "Hindu" sources are studied apart from the so-called Buddhist sources. The two have for a long time been treated in two water-tight and air-tight chambers. Somehow or other the impacts of the one group of studies upon the other have been few and far between, or, at any rate, not intimate enough. The result is that even among exponents of secularization in indology the obsession with the one source or the other is almost profound.
c10.s2.2
It is time to recognise that the two sources require to be treated in one and the same atmosphere for parallel studies, comparisons, contrasts, interactions and so forth. The change in the methodology of study suggested here would indeed be just in keeping with the life. Vedic lore *vis-à-vis* Buddhist lore, Buddhism *vis-à-vis* other "isms," ancient, medieval and modern, did not constitute segregation in morals, manners and sentiments. Every bit of life represented some form or "process" of culture-contact, relationship or *Beziehung*, as we see analyzed in the sociological system of Simmel or von Wiese. The "division of labour" in Durkheim's sense or the "imitation," "opposition" and "adaptation" of Tarde's sociology cannot be overlooked in any epoch of Indian culture.
c10.s2.3
For instance, the whole view of life would have to take Buddha, Kauṭalya and many others as influencing and supplementing one another. Kauṭalya completed Buddha,⁵ so to say. It was in the Kauṭalyan *milieu*, taken in the sense of a category of formal logic (for materialism in the generic sense), that Buddha flourished and *vice versa*. In modern studies, therefore, Kauṭalyalogy and Buddhalogy ought to go hand in hand. In other words, the students of the Sanskrit texts or of the Pali texts cannot afford to be ultra-specialists but must have to come together on a common platform for the reconstruction of "Hindu" culture. That culture in every epoch,—Vedic, post-Vedic, Buddhist, Maurya, post-Maurya and what not,—was always what may be described as an expression of the Kauṭalya-Buddha complex or the Buddha-Kauṭalya complex in its diverse dynamic phases.
c10.s2.4
⁵ See the discussion on "Kauṭalya in Buddhist Perspectives" and "Kauṭalya and His Boswell", *Infra*, Ch. VIII.