Chanakya Neeti

Chanakya — also known as Kautilya, or Vishnu Gupta — was a teacher at the ancient university of Takshashila, an economist and political theorist, and mentor to the Mauryan emperors Chandragupta and Bindusara between roughly 350 and 275 BC. He was central to the founding and expansion of the Mauryan Empire, and his Arthashastra remains the foundational Indian treatise on politics and economics.

This volume gathers his Neeti Sutras, in Sanskrit with commentary, on how a person should conduct themselves with different people and in different situations. The observations are brief and unsentimental, drawn from watching how people actually behave, and they have lost remarkably little of their force in two thousand years.