Arthashastra aparnama Rajsiddhanta

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

Page 19

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magnitude we have just measured would have arisen, mainly from missing folios, which means that the gaps would be long, connected passages. At no place does the surviving Northern text show a foliosize difference from the southern.
4. It does not reduce our difficulties in any way to note that even the enumeration by sections does not coincide in North and South. The Northern text actually lists a total of 184 sectional titles though the number is given as 180. The list agrees in books 1, 4-6, 8, 11-12, and 15. North contains 3 more in book 2, two more in book 14, one each in 7 and 10; it contains one less than the South in each of books 3, 9, and 13. The southern total is, therefore, accurately 180 sections. The difference arises primarily by combining two adjacent sections, or subdividing a long title. The original scribe had completely omitted the contents of the fifth book in the Pāțan folios of 1:1; this has been entered on the margin in minuscule by another hand. One hitherto unknown sectional title in the second book is illegible on the northern folios of 1.1; the seventh book contains one and the fourteenth two more new ones, not found in the South. Just how much additional matter these might have yielded cannot now be conjectured, but one could not reasonably expect more than 250 granthas, if indeed these sections really had a separate existence.
It is possible to show by internal criticism that missing psesages are indicated in certain contexts. Shāmasāstry's indispensable wordindex to the Arth. (3 vol., Mysore 1924–25) records 78 places where the author refers to himself with the specific emphasis iti Kautalyaḥ. The reason for this underlining of his own name is clear, because the adjoining text cites other authorities of the science either by name, or together in a group as ity ācāryāḥ; and the opinion qualified with Kautalya's name differs from the others in important particulars, or contradicts them all flatly. Only in three of the 78 cases does iti Kautalyaḥ occur without any other ācārya or contrary views in context. The presumption is therefore very strong that in these three cases (namely in 3.4, 7.15, and 13,4), some other opinions have been lost from the original composition. That the name of an authority, even of Kautalya himself, could drop out along with the maxim is proved by the sentences reported as additive variants to Shāmasāstry's text of 8.1 and 8.2 (pp. 324, 325 of his edition); the extra quotations appear as part of the main text in the edition by T. Gaņapati Sāstri. This precisely illustrates my thesis that the text has been steadily whittled down by inadvertent negligence in successive transcription.