Jain Journal 1974 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 28

112
In this he no doubt followed Kautilya, who had unmistakeably enunciated the policy of treating all subjects alike by the State.68 Fifthly, Somadeva had gone a step further than Kautilya by idealizing the State. No Indian writer had even invoked the State in the manner Somadeva had done. This is all the more remarkable when we realize that his partron was a petty feudatory of a great monarch. But like Kautilya he wrote for all time and for the whole country. Like Machiavelli producing his celebrated The Prince under the auspices of a small ruller, Somadeva wrote his two works Nītivākyāmṛtam and Yasastilaka under the patronage of an insignificant ruler, thereby demonstrating the fact that remarkable things were written and done not necessarily under the partonage of mighty monarchs but were also produced under the benevolent care of smaller men amidst comparatively humble surroundings. This leads us to the last point of importance concerning Somadeva which is involved in the previous one. By anticipating Hegel's idea of the State to some extent, Somadeva had not only assured for himself a place of respect among all political thinkers, but had vindicated the position of Indian political thought in the international field. Somadeva's deification of the State and the practically negligible part which the individual played in his concept of the State forestalled in a measure the nineteenth century German political philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's concept of the State. Hegel in his work on The Philosophy of Right (1821) taught that the State was the real person, its will being the manifestation of perfect rationality. In his own way Somadeva, too, had stated the same idea, namely, that knowledge was the prime requisite in the affairs of the State, thereby emphasizing the importance of rationality. When Hegel maintained that "the State is the divine idea as it exists on earth", he seemed to express in modern terms Somadeva's dictum that the king is a great god, to whom all excepting the ancestors and the gurus had to bow. And in the statement of Hegel that "all the worth which the living being possesses-all spiritual reality-he possesses only through the State", he had admirably conveyed the idea of Somadeva as expressed in the salutation to the State cited in an earlier context in this paper, namely, atha dharmartha phalaya rājyāya namah. But Somadeva stopped with this; while Hegel developed the philosophical theory of the State trancending the limits of his Jaina predecessor.69 Nevertheless the tenth century Jaina political thinker, inspite of all his shortcomings,
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68 This point is fully brought out in my Ancient Indian Political Thought and Institutions.
69 Read Hegel, G.W.F., The Philosophy of Right (1821). Translated by S. W. Dyde. Read also Beni Prasad, op. cit., p. 345.