Artha-shastra : In 1905 a copy of the Artha-shāstra in Sanskrit, written on palm leaves, was presented by a Tamil Brahmin from Thanjavur to the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library headed by Benjamin Lewis Rice. It was identified by Rice’s clerk Rudrapatnam Shamasastry as Kautilya’s Artha-shāstra. During 1905-09, Shamasastry produced & Rice published English translations of the text in instalments, in their journals Indian Antiquary & Mysore Review. Inevitably, therefore European Orientalists, constricted by their religious & educational ‘isms’ translated the title & content of Artha-Śāstra as ‘Treatise on Science of Politics’, whereas the treatise actually expounds on all the four aims & aspects of Puruṣārtha, i.e. goal & purpose of human life. Hindu culture defines the four as Artha-Dharma-Kāma-Moksha: Artha includes prosperity, wealth, economic security; Dharma – laws, duties, rights, virtues, right way of living; Kāma – pleasure, emotions, sex; & Moksha is spiritual liberation. Artha-shāstra therefore defines the economics & nature of human society under an ideal government, markets & trade, agriculture, mineralogy, mining & metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests & wildlife; all issues of political & social welfare & collective ethics. Its sixth sutra states its basis: Sukhasya moolam Dharma; Dharmaysa moolam Artha; Arthasya moolam Rājyam; Rājyasya moolam indriya jayah; Indriyasya moolam vinaya; Vinayasya moolam vriddhopseva. The root of Happiness is Dharma; Dharma’s root is Artha; Artha’s root is right governance; Right governance’s root is victorious inner-restraint; Victorious inner-restraint’s root is humility; Humility’s root is the service of the aged.
... poetry, fiction and romance. That which was for the cultured classes contained in Veda and Upanishad, shut into profound philosophical aphorism and treatise or inculcated in dharma-shastra and artha-shastra, was put here into creative and living figures, associated with familiar story and legend, Page 346 fused into a vivid representation of life and thus made a near and living power that ...
... annually out of India. Verily the moisture of India blesses and fertilises other lands." In ancient India maxims of taxation were clearly formulated and principles enunciated. Kautilya in his Artha Shastra says, "The King should be like a gardener and not be like the maker of charcoal. The resources of the State should be allowed to grow before taxes are imposed on them. Taxation should be in proportion ...
... the society and polity. This spontaneous principle of life was respected by the age of growing intellectual culture. The Indian thinkers on society, economics and politics, Dharma Shastra and Artha Shastra, made it their business not to construct ideals and systems of society and government in the abstract intelligence, but to understand and regulate by the practical reason the institutions and ways ...
... honour and duty necessary for the discharge of his allotted function in life. He was scrupulously equipped with the science of the thing he had to do, the best way to succeed in it as an interest, artha , and to attain to the highest rule, canon and recognised perfection of its activities, economic, political, sacerdotal, literary, scholastic or whatever else they might be. Even the most despised pursuits... character and knowledge and more at instruction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning the Aryan man was really prepared in some degree for the four great objects of his life, artha, kāma, dharma, mokṣa . Entering into the householder stage to live out his knowledge, he was able to serve there the three first human objects; he satisfied his natural being and its interests and desire... a bond on the individual, it was less a field for the growth of his spiritual faculties. The old fine integral harmony gave place to an exaggerated stress on one or other of its elemental factors. Artha and kāma , interest and desire were in some directions developed at the expense of the dharma . The lines of the dharma were filled and stamped in with so rigid a distinctness as to stand in the ...
... that spiritual experience is higher than religion and that what religion seeks can really be attained by the inner psychological discipline, which in due course, came to be developed into a Shastra, the Shastra of Yoga. It allowed intellectuality to become free from the crippling effects of religious dogma, and we find that the intellectual development became multisided. Materialistic atheism, agnosticism... and in the Ramayana, reflects the Vedic influence. In the field of collective life, Indian society developed its communal coordination of the mundane life of interest and desire, kama and artha. But it governed its action always by a reference at every point to the moral and religious law, dharma, and never did it lose sight of spiritual liberation, moksha, as the highest motive and ultimate... architecture and painting, all the sixty-four accomplishments, and various crafts and skills. It may be said that even such subjects as breeding and training of horses and elephants had their own shastras. Each domain of thought and life had a systematic body of knowledge, its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. During this period, India stood in the first rank in m ...
... that spiritual experience is higher than religion and that what religion seeks can really be attained by the inner psychological discipline, which in due course came to be developed into a Shastra, the Shastra of Yoga. This allowed intellectuality to become free from the crippling effects of religious dogma, and we find that the intellectual development became multi-sided. Materialistic atheism, ... reflects the Vedic influence. In the field of collective life, Indian society developed its Page 93 communal coordination of the mundane life of interest and desire, kama and artha. But it governed always its action by a reference at every point to the moral and religious law, the dharma, and it never lost sight of spiritual liberation, moksha, as the highest motive and ultimate... architecture and painting, all the sixty-four accomplishments, and various crafts and skills. It may be said that even such subjects as the breeding and training of horses and elephants had their own Shastras. Each domain of thought and life had a systematic body of knowledge, its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature. During this period, India stood in the first rank in m ...
... beginning of the Manwantara; but in its purity it is not the Sanscrit of the Page 475 Dwapara or the Kali, it is the language of the Satyayuga based on the true and perfect relation of vak and artha. Every one of its vowels and consonants has a particular and inalienable force which exists by the nature of things and not by development or human choice; these are the fundamental sounds which lie... subordinate force supporting the Vaishyam which has its turn of supremacy. The main qualities of the Vaishya are kaushalam, order and method, and therefore the Dwapara is the age of codification, ritual, Shastra, external appliances to maintain the failing internal spirituality; danam, and therefore hospitality, liberality, the sacrifice and the dakshina begin to swallow up other dharmas—it is the yuga yajniya... breaks down and is replaced by worldly, practical reason, the viryam breaks down and is replaced by lazy mechanical appliances for getting things done lifelessly with the least trouble, dana, yajna and shastra break down and are replaced by calculated liberality, empty ritual and tamasic social forms and etiquette. Love is brought in by the Avataras to break down these dead forms in order that the world ...
... enjoyment, next, material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and social life, and, lastly spiritual liberation; kāma, artha, dharma, mokṣa . The business of culture and social organisation was to lead, to satisfy, to support these things in man and to build some harmony of their forms and motives. Except in very rare cases... remarkable feature of the Indian mind was a close attention to the things of life, a disposition to observe minutely its salient facts, to systematise and to found in each department of it a science, Shastra, well-founded scheme and rule. That is at least a good beginning of the scientific tendency and not the sign of a culture capable only of unsubstantial metaphysics. It is perfectly true that Indian ...
... of decadence, a time of narrow ends and muddled means, of individual decay and social disruption. At first, it was no more than a slight disturbance of the old delicate balance: a shift towards artha and kama and away from dharma and moksa, a craving for luxury and artificiality, and a cultivated distaste for the older simplicity and humanity; also an excessive assertion of this-worldliness... civilisation: Her first period was luminous with the discovery of the Spirit; her second completed the discovery of the Dharma; her third elaborated into detail the first simpler formulation of the Shastra; but none was exclusive, the three elements are always present. In this third period the curious elaboration of all life into a science and an art assumes extraordinary proportions.... On one... of art and the developed Page 7 crafts, law, politics, trade, colonisation, the great kingdoms and empires with their ordered and elaborate administrations, the minute rule of the Shastras in all departments of thought and life, an enjoyment of all that is brilliant, sensuous, agreeable, a discussion of all that could be thought and known, a fixing and systemising of all that could ...
... level to level, Indian ethics provides guidance appropriate to each level, so that one can securely advance towards higher steps of ascent. In Indian ethics, therefore, there is place for kama and artha, provided they are restrained within limits by dharma that is prescribed for a regulated balance between indulgence and restraint. At a still higher level, it prescribes dharma for its own sake, but... The Gita and its Synthesis of Yoga Part One 1. Gita as a Yoga-Shastra Against this background of the general trend of the development of Indian philosophy, we may notice that four systems of philosophy, Vedavāda, Sankhya, Yoga and Vedanta, were prominent at the time when the war of the Mahabharata was fought and the perplexities arising from the conflict... yoga, which is the central subject of the Gita, follows critical, philosophical and scientific rigour of system- Page 5 building. As a result, the Gita has been rightly regarded as yoga-shastra, a systematic exposition of the principles and methods of yoga, an assured knowledge that can be stated on the basis of detailed scrutiny, constant questioning and repeated verification over a long ...
... Sri Aurobindo points out that ordinarily - in the Indian way of life - moksa (spiritual liberation) comes as a feat of transcendence out of the fullness of the other three, kāma (enjoyment), artha (material well-being) and dharma (right conduct); "there was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage". 9 Again, was the characteristic Indian attitude corrosively pessimistic... The Vedas and the Upanishads are not only the sufficient fountain-head of Indian philosophy and religion, but of all Indian art, poetry and literature. 42 Then intervened the age when the Shastras were formulated or codified, but more important were the two great epics, the Mahabharata (containing the Gita as well) and the Ramayana - which are not primitive edda or saga, nor just heroic ...
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