Kautilya's compendium on worldly affairs) is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, politics, economic policy and military strategy.

[13] Early on, the identification has been questioned by scholarship, and rejected by the main studies on the topic since 1965,[a] because of stylistic differences within the text which point to multiple authorship, and historical elements which are anachronistic for the Mauryan period, but fit in the first centuries of the Common Era.

[20][21] The text incorporates Hindu philosophy,[22] includes ancient economic and cultural details on agriculture, mineralogy, mining and metals, animal husbandry, medicine, forests and wildlife.

[23] The Arthashastra explores issues of social welfare, the collective ethics that hold a society together, advising the king that in times and in areas devastated by famine, epidemic and such acts of nature, or by war, he should initiate public projects such as creating irrigation waterways and building forts around major strategic holdings and towns and exempt taxes on those affected.

[27][a] Olivelle states that the surviving manuscripts of the Arthashastra are the product of a transmission that has involved at least three major overlapping divisions or layers, which together consist of 15 books, 150 chapters and 180 topics.

[30] A copy of the Arthashastra in Sanskrit, written on palm leaves, was presented by a Tamil Brahmin from Thanjavur to the newly opened Mysore Oriental Library headed by Benjamin Lewis Rice.

[30][31] During 1923–1924, Julius Jolly and Richard Schmidt published a new edition of the text, which was based on a Malayalam script manuscript in the Bavarian State Library.

In the 1950s, fragmented sections of a north Indian version of Arthashastra were discovered in form of a Devanagari manuscript in a Jain library in Patan, Gujarat.

[41][6] The division into 15, 150, and 180 of books, chapters and topics respectively was probably not accidental, states Olivelle, because ancient authors of major Hindu texts favor certain numbers, such as 18 Parvas in the epic Mahabharata.

"[70] Rangarajan notes that the science of artha (material well-being, livelihood, conomically productive activity, wealth) was not developed by Kautilya.

[63] The "Kauṭilya Recension" was created in the period 50–125 CE by a historic person named Kautilya, compiling selections from these texts into a new shastra, which was likely titled Daņdanīti, "literally the administration of punishment but more broadly the exercise of governance.

[88] With regard to the upper limit, McClish too, following Trautman, refers to the disappearance of punch-mark coins in the second century CE, which are mentioned extensively though in the Dandanati, which means that it was compiled before this period.

"[90] Regarding the original compilation and its later major redaction, three names for the text's compilor are used in various historical sources: "Kauṭilya" or its variant "Kauṭalya", Vishnugupta, and Chanakya.

[94] Nevertheless, Vishakhadatta's pun may have had unintended consequences, as later Sanskrit texts supportive of his work omit the name Kautilya, while those with negative views are keen to use it.

[94] Trautmann points out that none of the earlier sources that refer to Chanakya mention his authorship of the Arthashastra,[100] and Olivelle notes that "the name Canakya, however, is completely absent from the text.

[13] The verse seems to be a later interpolation, and Olivelle proposes that it was an attempt to identify the author of the political treatise, which was followed by the Guptas, with the renowned Maurya prime minister.

"[104] According to Trautmann, "[n]ationalist aspirations seemed somehow fortified when the existence of strongly centralized empires and native schools of political theory was shown.

"[103] According to McClish, "the desire on the part of Indologists to possess just such a source seems to have exerted, in general, a strong influence on conclusions about the compositional history of the text.

[116][118] The Kautilya text thereafter asserts that it is the Vedas that discuss what is Dharma (right, moral, ethical) and what is Adharma (wrong, immoral, unethical), it is the Varta that explain what creates wealth and what destroys wealth, it is the science of government that illuminates what is Nyaya (justice, expedient, proper) and Anyaya (unjust, inexpedient, improper), and that it is Anvishaki (philosophy)[120] that is the light of these sciences, as well as the source of all knowledge, the guide to virtues, and the means to all kinds of acts.

[126] Topic 2 of the Arthashastra, or chapter 5 of Book 1, is dedicated to the continuous training and development of the king, where the text advises that he maintain a counsel of elders, from each field of various sciences, whose accomplishments he knows and respects.

[124][127] Topic 4 of the text describes the process of selecting the ministers and key officials, which it states must be based on king's personal knowledge of their honesty and capacity.

It asserts, in chapter 4.2, that a girl may marry any man she wishes,[v][w] three years after her first menstruation, provided that she does not take her parents' property or ornaments received by her before the marriage.

[citation needed] The Arthashastra dedicates Topics 30 through 47 discussing the role of government in setting up mines and factories,[152] gold and precious stone workshops,[153] commodities,[154] forest produce,[155] armory,[156] standards for balances and weight measures,[157] standards for length and time measures,[157] customs,[158] agriculture,[159] liquor,[159] abattoirs and courtesans,[160] shipping,[161] domesticated animals such as cattle, horses and elephants along with animal welfare when they are injured or too old,[162] pasture land,[163] military preparedness[164] and intelligence gathering operations of the state.

The Arthashastra dedicates many chapters on the need, methods and goals of secret service, and how to build then use a network of spies that work for the state.

The spies should be trained to adopt roles and guises, to use coded language to transmit information, and be rewarded by their performance and the results they achieve, states the text.

[178]Kautilya, in the Arthashastra, suggests that the state must always be adequately fortified, its armed forces prepared and resourced to defend itself against acts of war.

[179] All means to win a war are appropriate in the Arthashastra, including assassination of enemy leaders, sowing discord in its leadership, engagement of covert men and women in the pursuit of military objectives and as weapons of war, deployment of accepted superstitions and propaganda to bolster one's own troops or to demoralize enemy soldiers, as well as open hostilities by deploying kingdom's armed forces.

[166][197] According to Boesche, writing in 2003, its ideas helped create one of the largest empires in South Asia, stretching (possibly) from the Hindu kush to Bengal on the other side of the Indian subcontinent, with its capital Pataliputra twice as large as Rome under Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

[202] This view has been challenged by Thomas Trautmann, who asserts that a free market and individual rights, albeit a regulated system, are proposed by Arthashastra.

[203] Boesche is not summarily critical and adds: Kautilya's Arthashastra depicts a bureaucratic welfare state, in fact some kind of socialized monarchy, in which the central government administers the details of the economy for the common good...In addition, Kautilya offers a work of genius in matters of foreign policy and welfare, including key principles of international relations from a realist perspective and a discussion of when an army must use cruel violence and when it is more advantageous to be humane.