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The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c10.s3: The Dharma, Artha and Niti Śāstras of the Buddhists

The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c10.s3

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The Dharma, Artha and Niti Śāstras of the Buddhists

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The Pali texts have to be envisaged in indology as belonging to the same category as the *Dharma-śāstras*, *Artha-śāstras* and *Nīti-śāstras*, so far as the social, political, legal and economic concepts are concerned. And in regard to the disquisitions on the mind, the soul, salvation and so forth and to their relations with the body, matter, elements, etc., the *Piṭakas* are, on the one hand, to be assimilated to the *Upaniṣads*, and, on the other, to the *Darśanas*.

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Finally, so far as the stories, legends and folk-lore go, the *Jātakas* have their natural "cognates" not only in treatises like the *Kathāsaritsāgara*, but the *Mahābhārata* itself. Exponents of secularization in indology must, therefore, attack the Buddhist Pali "canon" with the same logic as they have been applying to the so-called Hindu documents.

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In the atmosphere of Buddhist (Śākyan) *Dhamma*, righteousness, duty, etc. it is impossible to breathe anything different from the "virtue" and "justice" of Plato. Śākya's logic, again, is but a specimen of the Socratic dialectic, and his dialogues correspond to the dialogues of Plato and the Sophists. In the political speculations of mankind Śākya and his apostles from Ānanda and Upali to Moggaliputta Tissa of the *Kathāvatthu* fame (c. 250 B.C.) and Nāgasena of the *Milinda Pañha* (c. 150 A.C.) deserve the same analysis from modern researchers as those of Socrates and post-Socratic Sophists and other thinkers of ancient Greece.⁶

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⁶ Translation in the Sacred Books of the East Series Vols. XXV and XXXVI (1890, 1894) by T. W. Rhys Davids under the title of the *Questions of King Milinda*. See B. C. Sen: "Studies in the Buddhist Jatakas" (*Journal of the Department of Letters*, Calcutta University, 1930) and R. N. Mehta: "Crime and Punishment in the Jatakas" (*IHQ.*, September, 1936).

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While in the *milieu* of Śākya's lecture and dialogues, students of Hindu politics might easily be reminded of the ethical atmosphere of Plato's *Republic*. Some of the more important moral categories touched upon in that Greek work may be enumerated below:

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| Book I. | Justice, friends, enemies, good men, bad men, good policy, soul, function, virtue, happiness. |

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Book II. Worldly success, professions, guardians, education, dignity of gods, myths.

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Book III. Future life, forms of stories, music, spirited, philosophic, superior class, possessed of nothing.

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Book IV. Three classes, no innovations, Delphian Apollo, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, absence of meddling, appetite, reason, soul, injustice.

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Book V. Functions of women, philosophers, opinion, science.

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Book VI. True philosophic disposition, corrupting effect of the contact with the world, politicians of the day, highest studies, good, visible world, intellectual world, four mental states.

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Book VII. Purpose of education, from the sensuous to the real, the invisible, the eternal.

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Book VIII. Everything that has had a beginning is liable to decay, love of honour, love of wealth.

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Book IX. Three qualities of the soul, three species of pleasure, reasonable, "the man, the lion and the serpent in human personality", harmony in social relations, just man, perfect commonwealth in heaven.

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Book X. Poetry weakens the mind, hymns in honour of the gods, good man, immortality of the soul, dispensations of Providence, rewards after death.

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It is not necessary to establish an equation between Śākya and Plato on all fronts and in all items. But the student of the *Suttas* (*Nikāyas*) will have to feel that Socrates and the post-Socratics or Plato and his precursors have constantly to be remembered in Buddhistic studies. By all means those Greek philosophers are chronologically the contemporaries of Śākya and the Śākyan apostles. What is more important, Śākya and the Śākyans are comrades and colleagues of almost the same school as the Greeks in the profoundest problem of social politics, namely, the remaking of man, such as in recent times has been placed once more in the forefront of moral thought by all "idealists," e.g., Hocking, Redanò, Koellreutter, Lasbax, del Vecchio and others.

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