Page Text
________________
THE SEVEN WAYS TO APPROACH A NEIGHBOR
world. Though he is supreme in the realm, he is nevertheless the most in danger, in his lofty, enviable, and precarious state of splendor. Neighboring kings, his own ambitious ministers and all too successful generals, even the members of his own family -aspiring sons and princes, scheming queens-are on the alert for his throne. And last but not least, the people, often harassed and overtaxed, may at any time be secretly stirred to revolt by some enemy king or some personage of lower lineage ambitious to usurp. In such an atmosphere of threat, dread, and sudden moves, the matsya-nyāya prevails, "the law of the fish": 22 the law of life unmitigated by moral decency, as it prevails in the merciless deep.
This is a law no less well known to the West than to India. It is phrased in the popular proverb of old standing, "The big ones eat the little ones," which Pieter Breughel, the sixteenth-century Flemish artist, vividly illustrated in a number of his lively and humorous masterpieces. One sees in these works a multitude of fish of every sort and size, the little swallowed by the big and these caught in turn by fishermen. The bellies of the larger, ripped open by the men, pour out the smaller, and there is an inscription underneath this that gives the proverb. Breughe! painted these canvases in a period when the whole of Europe was being made a sca of turmoil by the struggle of Hapsburg, Flanders, world-ruling Spain, and the German Empire to restrain the rising power of France, which was trying to break free from the encirclement of that colossal coalition. It was an age when new weapons (gunpowder and cannon) as well as a new style of warfare (the deploying of large companies of mercenary infantry instead of the combat of knights on horseback) were spreading havoc and terror-just as the new weapons of modern technology are doing today. Breughel's pictorial proverbs display the life of the watery realm of cold-blooded voraciousness as an apt expression of the idea that in the sphere of politics each is out for 22 Arthaśāstra 1. 4. 9; cf. also Mahābhārata 12. 67. 16-17, and 12. 89. 21. 119
| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell |
| Publisher | Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd |
| Publication Year | 1953 |
| Total Pages | 709 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 34 MB |