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.
