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THE UNIVERSAL KING
gratulatory times, but not enough to have made any conspicuous impression on the general belief in human melioration and perfectibility. Most of the scholars could look with only pity and disgust on such documents as Kautilya's Arthaśāstra, which confimed for them everything they had ever believed about the need for Christian light in the unregenerate lands of the heathen.
Today, however, when we peruse this document handed down to us through more than two thousand years, history forces us to the sad and witty comment of Hamlet when he realized that the time was out of joint: "This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof." What is going on today in a large portion of the world would seem, in the light of this book, to amount to a total Asiatization of political affairs, both international and domestic. And the laws are seen again to be what they were in ages past. One feels inclined to bestow a new and deep respect on the genius who at that early period recognized and clucidated the basic forces and situations that were to remain perennial in the human political field. The same style of Indian thought that invented the game of chess grasped with profound insight the rules of this larger game of power. And these are rules that cannot be disregarded by anyone seriously preparing to enter the field of political action, whether for motives of rugged individualism or in order to take the world in his hands and see whether it may not be he who is destined to become the Cakravartin-that blessed one who is to lift the sufferings that have always and everywhere marked our sorry history under the government of the sharks.
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| 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 |