He was far more effective and far more successful than Machiavelli.
He selected Chandragupta to destroy the Nanda dynasty and used him to create the Maurya empire. The Mauryas ruled the largest empire ever in the Indian subcontinent. Ashoka, the third to rule the empire was responsible for the global transmission of Buddhism.
He was also far more vindictive than Machiavelli.
"It is also told that once, the thorns of a bush hurt Chankya's feet while he was passing through a forest. The wily Brahmin was cut to the quick, and wanted revenge. He got his revenge by pouring sugar syrup into the roots of the bush, thus ensuring that the ants ate up the root and destroyed the bush."
His main philosophy was "A debt should be paid off till the last penny; An enemy should be destroyed without a trace".
> He was also far more vindictive than Machiavelli.
> "It is also told that once, the thorns of a bush hurt Chankya's feet while he was passing through a forest. The wily Brahmin was cut to the quick, and wanted revenge. He got his revenge by pouring sugar syrup into the roots of the bush, thus ensuring that the ants ate up the root and destroyed the bush."
This seems wrongly interpreted on two levels. Processing sugarcane, while first occurring in India, happened about six centuries later [0]. That's hardly important, just that this legend, as people also tell it with milk[1], makes much more sense, allegorically.
As a metaphor, considering that it was while he did this that Chandragupta first saw Chanakya, and that together they united a bountiful, resilient people to overthrow a tyrant, we start to see his character. This legend also seems to show how forces of Nature bring people together in mystical ways that work to fix mistakes, ie, Chanakya avenging his father's murder by an extortionist king[2] with help from noble kings.
I've seen this trend especially among writers of the Western world. Reminds me of "Ahmedabad is the Manchester of India" even though cotton was mass-produced in India since the dawn of civilization.
Vedantic wisdom is like the ripened mango tree that when one fruit is plucked, two more give bloom. From the chapter on corporate espionage:
"THE acquisition of the help of corporations is better than the acquisition of an army, a friend, or profits. By means of conciliation and gifts, the conqueror should secure and enjoy the services of such corporations as are invincible to the enemy and are favourably disposed towards himself. But those who are opposed to him, he should put down by sowing the seeds of dissension among them and by secretly punishing them."
(He's re-arranged it to be coherent for a modern reader; one reason for this is because the original was meant to be memorised and perhaps used from memory, and was ordered accordingly.)
> (He's re-arranged it to be coherent for a modern reader; one reason for this is because the original was meant to be memorised and perhaps used from memory, and was ordered accordingly.)
Interesting. Can you comment on how the original was arranged to facilitate memorization?
You would find going through the initial chapters a little boring, as they are largely definition heavy. The good parts start a little later. Everything from how spies should operate, to which herbs mixture cause great poisons, and torture solutions, to how gold, mercury, etc can be extracted.
Translators can misrepresent authors' views (for personal gain, from lack of cultural exposure, due to modern revisionism, etc). Wherever a term has pivotal meaning, I highly recommend consulting multiple dictionaries yourself and exploring etymological foundations, occasionally with related texts. Doing so has allowed me to understand many great works completely differently than how many modern students report on them.
Epilogue:
I highly doubt a right hand man to Ashoka's grandfather has many meaningful, direct parallels with Machiavelli.
It seems for English translations, we can pick between:
A: R. Shamasastry (1915),
B: R. P. Kangle (1969),
C: L.N. Rangarajan (1992)
D: Patrick Olivelle (2012) [late edit. looks incomplete]
From my initial reviews of A and B, A misrepresents the original text vastly and B translates the original text using the words that are actually written in it. (I find that an important measure for a translation). Reviews of C indicate that it is incomplete and out of order. Therefore, B seems like the only potentially true translation. You can find it on Amazon[0], Google Books[1], and Digital Library of India[3][4][5].
For more information on how challenging it is to translate this work, check out this 2014 essay by Michael Liebig, Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra: A Classic Text of Statecraft and an Untapped Political Science Resource. [2] (excerpted below)
METHODOLOGICAL PUZZLES AND METHODOLOGICAL/THEORETICAL APPROACHES
The Arthaśāstra's authoritative translations into English (R.P. Kangle) and German
(J.J. Meyer) were made by Indologists. Also, the secondary literature on the work
comes almost exclusively from the Indologists. 6 The Indological perspective is
focused on Sanskrit philology, but with respect to specifically political issues,
Indologists are (probably, inevitably so) 'semantic generalists'. Sanskrit philology has
made the Arthaśāstra accessible to social science, but the philological meticulousness
of Indologists cannot substitute political science terminology – which is the
prerequisite for an adequate understanding of Kauṭilyan ideas. The problematic is not
merely one of proper translation in terms of political science terminology, but brings
up the issue of interpretation in the sense of adequate reconstruction of (latent) ideas
or 'complexes of meaning' in the Arthaśāstra and the 'transposition' of such ideas into
modern categories.
> I'm willing to bet that Machiavelli is MUCH more well known by political scholars than Chanakya.
By western scholars. Honestly, I went to an Indian school and an American university, and I've never heard of Machiavelli until just now.
Chanakya, for me, is a household name. And so it is for over a billion people. I am willing to bet Machiavelli is not a common household name for over a billion people. So he's less popular, and he came a thousand years later. So I do think that OP has a point.
That said, there is no denying that this is an article written by an Indian for a Western publication. So it is apt in this context.
Originality is a function of putting together old ideas in new ways or of having a completely new idea, however you distinguish between the two. Machiavelli was completely unaware of Chanakya. The paradigm in which he worked was the Mirror of Princes, which were not marked by Machiavelli's realism.
Machiavelli's "The Prince" was a break from a tradition which assumed that what was moral for a ruler was what was moral for an individual, just at a larger scale. As manuals for statecraft, instructions for how to achieve the goals of state it is far superior to the works that preceded it in the Western European tradition.
If you want to read more Machiavelli after "The Prince" try the Discourses on Livy, often considered the greater work, and definitely closer to Machiavelli's own republican personal leanings.
The ancient Indians have first claim to many inventions and discoveries covering a wide range of disciplines including math, science, statecraft, philosophy, governance, technology.
But unfortunately India has had remarkably little influence on the outside world considering. Indians may (or may not) have invented the zero but it was the Arabs that took it the world.
There are many possible reasons for this. I could speculate that it might be due to :-
1. These things happened so long ago. India was way ahead in many of these things, and perhaps the rest of the world was not ready to understand them at the time.
2. India was too inward looking. Of course What we call India today never existed under the rule of a single entity until the British came. Until then the various kingdoms were preoccupied with affairs within the subcontinent instead of looking elsewhere. In the concise history of the modern world, William Woodruff says that (until 500 years ago) either India or China could have both conquered the world, except that they never seemed to have the motivation to do so. By comparison, arabs, persians, europeans travelled, traded with and conquered lands far from their origins, and hence they have had much more influence on the modern world.
3. There was also deep stratification of Indian society along caste/race lines. The higher and elite classes of the time were obsessed with protecting their knowledge (which was part of their power) from other sections of society. By contrast, the Arabs, Romans, Europeans, translated, copied and disseminated their literature widely.
Let's just say they are both. Just depends on reference point. My brother is taller than I am, I'm shorter than my brother. Both correct, if we presume the height discrepancy has been accurately told.
The link has waaaaay too many ads. Almost unreadable if you don't run an ad blocker. The content provider should consider a more tasteful, smaller ad footprint. It might even increase ad engagement.
He selected Chandragupta to destroy the Nanda dynasty and used him to create the Maurya empire. The Mauryas ruled the largest empire ever in the Indian subcontinent. Ashoka, the third to rule the empire was responsible for the global transmission of Buddhism.
He was also far more vindictive than Machiavelli.
"It is also told that once, the thorns of a bush hurt Chankya's feet while he was passing through a forest. The wily Brahmin was cut to the quick, and wanted revenge. He got his revenge by pouring sugar syrup into the roots of the bush, thus ensuring that the ants ate up the root and destroyed the bush."
His main philosophy was "A debt should be paid off till the last penny; An enemy should be destroyed without a trace".