Who was Chanakya?

Chanakya is the name by which Indian tradition remembers the teacher and political thinker who is said to have helped Chandragupta Maurya to found the Maurya empire in the fourth century BCE. He is also called Kautilya and Vishnugupta. The details of his life come from later stories, in Sanskrit, Buddhist and Jain sources, and historians treat many of them with caution.

The Arthashastra

The Arthashastra, "the science of material welfare", is a long Sanskrit treatise on government, law, economy, war and spies that tradition attributes to Kautilya. It is a manual for a ruler, written in prose and verse. It was lost for centuries and found again in a manuscript in 1904 and published in the following years.

The Chanakya Niti

The Chanakya Niti is something different: a collection of short verse maxims on conduct, money, friendship and wisdom, which tradition attributes to Chanakya. Scholars believe that it was put together later, from many sources, and that the text exists in several versions (the number of chapters and verses varies). It is much easier to read than the Arthashastra, and it is the book that is meant when people say "Chanakya says".

Reading it today

Treat the Niti as a mirror of an old world, with many sharp observations about people and a few views we would not hold today. See how to read old maxims. Start with the topics.

The Sanskrit is from a volunteer-made online edition and may contain slips; the gists are our own plain summaries, not a translation. Maxims reflect the society and the views of their time, and some verses about women, birth and class are not views we share; we show the text as it is and do not comment on those verses.