1.1 Neti Kautilyaḥ! (“No, says Kautilya”)

While the precise procedure was waived in cases of large monetary donations or for applicants from families with significant political sway, the traditional method of admitting students to the university was through an interview. As Brāhmaṇa initiates were most typically around the age of eight years, a formal assessment of a child’s knowledge of the Vedas, of the sciences and of the positions held on the same by various scholars and schools was impractical. While your average gurukula might merely require precise pronunciation and a conversational knowledge of the Civilized Tongue, a prestigious and selective university like Takṣaśilā looked for some kind of spark, a demonstration of insight and the capacity to think about the sciences in the correct way.

In Cāṇakya, however, they had found something far greater than a spark: they’d found a fire that could engulf a forest.

At any problem posed, Cāṇakya would, rather than immediately stating a solution, ask further questions to understand and dissect the problem, then dissect the proposed solutions to determine the precise unstated costs of these solutions, and question whether the stated dichotomy between the two solutions was even real or not. He hadn’t, at that point, been aware of the existence of the various schools or their implications for the posed problems; however, he had demonstrated a much more generalizable ability to think.

To the seven-year-old boy himself, who had studied the Vedas but had never seen libraries of such size, merely hearing the names of these great men and their scholarly lineages opened a whole new world to him, an experience that could only be akin to that of a conqueror crossing a mighty river that he thought marked the end of the world, doubling overnight the size of the realm of his knowledge.

Upon arriving at Takṣaśilā, Cāṇakya visited the lectures of every school of philosophy that he found the time for, and scoured over their cotton-paper manuscripts in the enormous library of Takṣaśilā.

Cāṇakya developed no affinity for the philosophy of the Ājīvakas. While he could appreciate their deterministic principles, he did not quite see how it implied that one ought to roam naked in forests. Indeed, if the Ājīvakas believed that the non-existence of free will implied the non-existence of morality, they ought to all be behaving in diverse and eccentric ways, for no one of those behaviours would be superior to another. Instead, they seemed to all conform to the very identical principle of having no ambition and of making no realistic contribution to their own lives or to the lives of others. From this Cāṇakya inferred that the philosophy was primarily a tool of the lazy and incompetent to excuse their own failings, and to flee the game of life.

The philosophies of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika seemed evidently true to Cāṇakya; yet they addressed the physical sciences, a subject that wasn’t directly of interest to him.

The further he studied, Cāṇakya found himself inclined towards the aspects of philosophy concerned with human goals, and the behavior undertaken to achieve these goals. Philosophies that rejected the appropriateness of human ambitions and desires, whether in the name of eliminating suffering or for any other motive, thus seemed to him as fundamentally amoral and apathetic towards the condition of life.

The school that Cāṇakya was most impressed by in matters of philosophical importance was the school of Brihaspati. These Bārhaspatyas rejected all metaphysics, stating that all knowledge was based in the senses; furthermore, they held that it was the non-rejection of metaphysics that lead to all irrationality and to standards of dharma (righteousness, morality) that had nothing to do with human desires but instead the desires of metaphysical abstractions that lacked a basis in the senses.

This too, however, was unsatisfactory for Cāṇakya’s purposes, as he could not accept the complete dismissal of dharma as a valid human goal; nor the logical implication thereof that it was righteous for a king to act solely in the interest of his imperial expansion without regard for the well-being of the people.

Cāṇakya sought, therefore, to reconcile the Bārhaspatya rejection of the metaphysical with his own intuitive conception of dharma. To do so, he spoke to many philosophers at the university, playing the advocate of amorality to the dharmics and the advocate of dharma to the Bārhaspatyas. The only effect those conversations had, however, was to further cement his confidence, both in the Bārhaspatya philosophy and in the Vedic dharma; they did not help him make any progress towards reconciliation.

“Viṣṇugupta,” said the political science professor Caṇin, choosing to address his most favoured student by the name given to him by his family rather than by the epithet that his peers now addressed him with, “How might a ruler enforce some desired behaviour among the people of his kingdom?”

“People will always act in accordance with their own goals, not the king’s,” said Cāṇakya, “Thus in order to make someone do what you wish them to, you must make them believe that it is in their interests to do what you wish them to.”

The first spark.

“Eloquently put,” said Professor Caṇin, “Indeed, this is the basis for punishment and for the science of law itself. For whatever a king might believe will bring progress to the people of the world, punishment is the sole tool on which his power rests, the sole tool by which he may achieve his goals.”

“Not so,” said Cāṇakya, “The fundamental principle is that you must make them believe that the desired behaviour is in their interests. There are four ways to achieve this. First, they may have an incorrect belief that leads them to reject the action you desire them to make, or their own goals may be unknown to them, or be malleable to eloquent speech. In this case, you may dispel them of these incorrect beliefs and persuade them to act as you desire. Or there may truly be a cost that they incur by acting in the manner that you desire of them – in that case, you may either compensate them for this cost, i.e. purchase their consent, or you may impose an equal cost for non-compliance, i.e. punish their non-consent, which is the approach that you exalt. The fourth and final approach is to falsely convince them that acting in the manner you desire will be of personal benefit to them; while this appears similar to the first approach, the two methods are as far as can be, as convincing someone of the truth is a completely different art from convincing someone of a falsehood. All four of these – sāma, dāma, daṇḍa, bheda (respectively: persuasion, purchase, punishment, deceit) – as well as any combination of them, are methods that will grant you control over another person.”

“Perhaps these methods exist in theory,” admitted Professor Caṇin, “But they can hardly be implemented effectively. A king cannot convince a murderer to not murder, pay him to not murder, or deceive him into believing that murdering will cause him to receive divine retribution.”

The second spark.

“Certainly not all these methods are effective for every situation,” Cāṇakya conceded, “But you have chosen only one example, that of criminal deterrence, and indeed for this purpose daṇḍa is the most effective method. But dāma is used widely outside of government, in trade, agriculture and production. We are employing sāma right now, in attempting to convincing each other of what we each believe to be the truth.”

Professor Caṇin nodded, awed by the coherence of his student’s thoughts. “I must concede the truth of your words, Viṣṇugupta. I would say, then, that what you call sāma is the method of the Brāhmaṇas, dāma the method of the Vaiṣyas and daṇḍa the method of the Kṣatriyas to achieve similar goals.”

“Not so,” said Cāṇakya, “While that characterization is elegant in its simplicity, I believe that all four of these methods are of wider applicability than you suggest. In particular, I believe the kṣatriya benefits from the adoption of all four methods. While war is often to be based on daṇḍa, the effective and lossless execution of a war must rely largely on bheda, as a war whose outcome’s truth is known in advance to both sides should never be fought. The employment of armies is primarily based on dāma; indeed, the use of daṇḍa for this purpose is known as military conscription, and is a practice of barbarians.”

“I must agree to this too,” said Professor Caṇin, “And in governance?”

“In governance too, a king who uses daṇḍa only to enforce his laws ends up inflicting punishment on the innocent and quickly becomes reviled among the people. A king who is brutal in his collection of taxes will quickly become hated among the wealthy, or may become reviled for some unintended or perceived partiality in tax collection, and men of influence will then conspire to overthrow and replace him for their own gain. Effective governance requires a combination of all four methods.”

The third spark.

That was it.

That was the realization.

Politics was the basis of the reconciliation of the Bārhaspatya with the Vedic dharma. In fact it was the more general science of economics that held this role, but Cāṇakya had not yet invented this science.

The Bārhaspatyas had thrown out Dharma entirely claiming that its basis was in metaphysics – the question of what ought to be done depends entirely on a being’s goals and desires, they said, and thus to postulate a universal morality independent of individual goals and desires meant to postulate the existence of a universal being whose goals and desires reflected that universal morality. As such a being is not known to the senses, it does not exist, and hence they declared Dharma to be devoid of meaning.

But Dharma, Cāṇakya realized, did not require the existence of metaphysics, but rather emerged naturally as a consequence of men pursuing their own individual goals under a functional political system, as in such a political system righteous conduct would reward one’s Artha (wealth) and unrighteous conduct would harm it, in accordance with the principles of dāma and daṇḍa. Thus it was politics, and not metaphysics, that gave meaning to Dharma.

Cāṇakya identified that the fallacy of those Bārhaspatya scholars who had thrown out Dharma entirely was to define Artha too narrowly, referring only to land, cattle and gold (and also to possessions, currency, cultivation and buildings, but it was not in poetic fashion to list these). In fact it made more sense to define Artha as the sum of all human goals entirely.

Traditionally, Vedic philosophy listed three goals (trivarga) of human pursuit, with some schools adding the fourth (caturvarga) goal of moksha whose definition differed between schools:

• artha (wealth) in the traditional sense
• kāma (pleasure), which the Bārhaspatyas had accepted as a valid human goal, and
• dharma (righteousness)

Cāṇakya accepted this tradition, but he declared all three pursuits as incarnations of Artha, which he called the Puruṣārtha (human goals/wealth). To him Artha was fundamental, encompassing all three goals; Artha was the root and the cause of Dharma; and much as matter was comprised of dravya (substance), as consciousness was comprised of atman (self/soul), artha was the basic element that comprised all human interaction, its cause, its modes and its goals.

And thus as his first major achievement, eight-year-old Cāṇakya established the basis of ethics and ethical philosophy.