The Nectar of Statecraft: Maxims on Power from Tenth-Century India - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

In the middle of the tenth century, a Jain monk who owned nothing wrote a manual for kings.

Somadeva Sūri had renounced property, violence, and ambition. What he had not renounced was his eye. The Nītivākyāmṛta is his book on power: more than fifteen hundred short sentences on ministers, spies, envoys, forts, treasuries, allies, law, war, and the daily conduct of a man who intends to keep his position.

He has no patience for a ruler who mistakes piety for the job. A king's dharma, he writes, is to restrain the corrupt and protect the cultivated. A king's dharma is not head-shaving or matted locks. On war he is colder than most: fight first with intelligence, and take up arms only when intelligence cannot conquer. On people he is colder still. Every servant is humble while still new.

Somadeva has been read in India for a thousand years and almost nowhere else. This is a new English translation of the complete work, all thirty-two books, made directly from the Sanskrit.

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