Kautilya's Maxims
Epitome

Kautilya's reputation as the Machiavelli of India rests on the sensationalistic and intrigue-laden advice given in the Arthashâstra. But the only portion of ArS which can plausibly claim to represent the historical Kautilya is the 82 maxims which it specifically attributes to him, and those maxims tell a different story. It is the story told by the maxims which we summarize on this page.

General Traits

The Kautilya of the Arthashâstra maxims is within the tradition of Vedic scholarship, but especially in legal matters, he is is not solely a transmitter of previous views. On the contrary, he is presented by the core text in the context of earlier views, and as a critic of those views. He thus constitutes a school of his own, a distinctive voice in the context of a prior tradition.

The state for which Kautilya prescribes is an incipient bureaucracy, in which specialists are beginning to supplement the general minister-advisor (#12, 24), but which has not yet reached the point at which, for example, jurisprudence diverged from the Vedic sciences to become its own separate Dharma tradition. He is empirically minded, and constantly rejects rules of thumb, advocating instead a judgement based on the specifics of a particular situation. He does not let his indignation run away with him, but instead wants to keep penalties to an appropriate scale, so they will not become an impediment to the justice process itself. In law as in statecraft, he knows that it matters what the relevant public (the palace circle, the community of which a miscreant remains a member) will accept. He understands that decrees mean nothing without acceptance. This sense would have been extremely helpful in guiding the establishment of the Maurya empire, which rested not wholly on conquest, but partly on a system of satellite states, in negotiating with which tact would have been important, and on the compliance of its own population, which required some consideration to establish.

In diplomacy as in law, he is responsive to the immediate situation, and thus in traditional terms, expedient rather than doctrinaire. Perhaps even this much empiricism may have sufficed to earn him, as Patrick Olivelle (14 March 01) has suggested, the epithet Kautilya ("Deceitful") in addition to the personal names (Canakya, Vishnugupta) by which he is also known in later literature.

The Kautilya Persona in Later Times

The "Deceitful" Kautilya persona seems to play a role in the process that produced the later layers of the Arthashâstra. That material expands elements of Kautilya's attested position, but in ways that contort that position. The constant use of spies and entrapments in those later layers, and the development of Kautilya's fairly clear-eyed diplomacy into the elaborate mandala theory of ArS 6, may be less a response to later conditions (the multi-state context of the mandala theory was somewhat obsoleted by the Mauryan unification), than a self-generated elaboration of the Arthashâstra school's proprietary personality. More in Kautilya's own empirical spirit are the long lists of bureaucratic responsibilities in ArS 2, which can be checked for reality at several points. These are more likely to be a real-world updating of the practical Kautilya, to keep the school's doctrines serviceable to later ages, than a result of list-making for the mere pleasure of making lists. The annexation of the art of the battlefield into the range of topics on which the text prescribes (ArS 10) is the most conspicuous example of the Arthashâstra's expansion beyond the limits of Kautilya's own thought. That chapter twice cites ancient authorities - but neither of them is Kautilya. We know of no evidence that would bear on the matter, but it seems internally likely that the Arthashâstra text core was originally a small treatise based on Kautilya's actual statecraft, compiled by some group of his followers, and that this core remained in the custody of that group and its successors, and was steadily modernized and expanded to keep it current with Mauryan realities. In this, it seems to be on roughly the same pattern as the Confucian Analects, whose proprietor group were also followers of a leading figure, concerned not only to preserve his statecraft advice (in the LY 4 core of sixteen sayings) but to expand and update that advice over the next two centuries (into the 20-chapter work which we now possess).

Conclusion

Since the Arthashâstra text was rediscovered a century ago, it has been the exaggerated Machiavellian Kautilya of its later layers which has attracted most attention. This is merely to say that the developments in the later layers of the Arthashâstra were an effective advertisement for their statecraft theories, and that they remain effective in the present day. The later custodians of the book thus did their work well. But their additions do not add to our understanding of the real Kautilya. The real Kautilya is visible only in the maxims explicitly attributed to him. These it has been our purpose to present, separately from the later Arthashâstra material, and from the later history which that material implies.

 

Kautilya's Maxims is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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