Cāṇakyanīti

The maxims attributed to Cāṇakya, the minister of Candragupta — the most widely diffused body of gnomic verse in India, and the spring from which the whole nīti literature of Burma flows.

The versions say of their author that he “teaches worldly wisdom selected from various śāstras”. Sternbach is the authority on them: he edited the six recensions critically in the Cāṇakya-nīti-text-tradition (Hoshiarpur 1963–64), then all the verses attributed to Cāṇakya in alphabetical order (1967–68), with a study of the aphorisms and a bibliography of twenty-seven items, and a separate volume for the maxims on rājanīti.

The nīti collections exist because a king needed advice. Bode puts it plainly: a king's ācariya “must be able to discourse on ethics and polity, pronounce moral maxims, and give advice”, and “the Rājanīti, Lokanīti, and Dhammanīti represent this sort of literature, modelled on Sanskrit originals” (Bode 1909, p. 51). Hinüber says it technically: the collections “rely heavily on Indian Subhāṣita traditions” and add verses from Pali sources, some of them — especially in the Rājanīti — direct translations from Sanskrit, which is what produces “an at times rather Sanskritized Pali”.

The Pali text printed here is the Burmese end of a Sanskrit tradition, and neither its author nor its date has been established from any source on file. That is the same situation as the Nītimañjarī elsewhere in this collection, where Ikeya showed the Pali to be a translation out of Sanskrit — the Sanskrit tradition behind both is far older than the Pali version of it.