Arthashastra aparnama Rajsiddhanta

Author(s): Kautilya Acharya,
Publisher: Singhi Jain Shastra Shiksha Pith Mumbai

Page 17

·
( 4 )
word or phrase scattered at random. The additional matter in the North cannot generally be explained by such inflation, nor the occasional word or phrase in the southern (printed) texts missing in these palm-leaf finds. To cut short the discussion: it seems to me that the divergence can best be explained by long neglect and progressive dying out of the tradition. That is, most copyists were not ignorant professional scribes but scholars of ability who changed as little as possible. But they were totally unable to comprehend the forgotten technical terms and fundamentally different social structure of a vanished epoch; and there were so few of them that the occasional loss of a word, phrase, or short passage in each transcription was not compensated by any matter added by mistake. This applies both to North and South. The main reason the northern copy contains a little more is that it is older. The Southerners had at least six centuries more of recopying in which to accumulate the slow losses. Had the work been popular, or obligatory reading (like Panini's grammar) no such loss would have occurred.
3. By substantiating most of the readings of the list of contents in 1.1, the new discoveries permit inner criticism which reveals losses in the text very much greater than might have been estimated by the direct comparison of the surviving textual matter in the portion covered by the Northern folios. The printed Arth. text would have to be augmented by about twenty five percent in order to reach the original extent of the work.
This conclusion points in the same direction as comparative study of the codices, but it has a totally different basis. The list of contents gives the extent of the whole work as 15 books (adhikarana) in 180 sections (prakarana ) or 150 chapters (adhyaya), and 6000 slokas. The last cannot refer to the actual stanzas found in the book. The word sloka must here be taken with T. Gaṇapati Sastri as the grantha unit of 32 syllables. Such is the uniform practice of early scribes in describing their copy. The stray anuṣṭup quarters one can pick out of the Arth. text come from the genius of the Sanskrit language and not from a lost metrical original, as some would like to believe. The round number 6000 may be suspected but, at worst, it ought to be a reasonable estimate made by counting every letter on a few sample folios, whether of the original composition, or of the archetype of the definitive redaction. The possibility that a rough grantha count, had at some time been made for the whole work is not entirely to be excluded. Even Dandin, in the final chapter of his Dasakumara-caritam refers to Caṇakya's précis of dandaniti written for the Maurya as being