618 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



KING BOMBA'S PHILOSOPHICAL CATECHISM. 



By Peof. E. P. EVANS. 



THE proper education of a prince and heir to the throne has 

 been regarded from time immemorial as one of the most 

 perplexing problems of pedagogics. Especially in the past ages 

 of absolutism, when the monarch was the source of all authority, 

 it was a matter of immense importance that the man whose will 

 was to be the law of the land, and upon whose merest whim the 

 weal or woe of a whole people depended, should, as a child, be 

 trained up in the way he should go, and, as an adult, should not 

 be permitted to depart from it. 



In the Orient, where the sovereign was revered as a demi-divine 

 incarnation and plenipotentiary delegate from heaven for the ad- 

 ministration of justice on earth, he was also supposed to be super- 

 naturally endowed with wisdom from on high — a pleasing fiction, 

 which still survives in the claims of kings to wear their crowns 

 and wield their scepters "by the grace of God." As a natural 

 sequence of this theory, scions of royal stock were confided to 

 members of the sacerdotal order for their education. In India 

 the Brahman claimed for his caste all posts of honor and emolu- 

 ment in the realm, and all positions of influence near the person 

 of the ruler. Not only was it deemed essential to the power and 

 permanence of the dynasty that he should perform the duties of 

 court priest (puroliita), but he also arrogated to himself the func- 

 tions of court fool (vidusliaka) ; in his overweening ambition and 

 insatiable greed of supremacy, he could bear no rival near the 

 throne, even though the competitor were a man of motley. 



It was likewise the privilege of the Brahman to be pedagogue 

 in perpetuity to the royal family. His son or some member of 

 his caste was as sure of succeeding to the ferule as the king's son 

 or some prince of the blood was of inheriting the scepter ; and, 

 judging from what we know of the manuals of instruction, in 

 which his teachings were embodied, he was eminently worthy of 

 his high office. Thus the Hitopadesa" was composed or rather com- 

 piled by Vishnu Sarman for several young princes who were his 

 pupils ; and it would be difficult to find in the whole vast range 

 of didactic literature any work containing in the same compass 

 a greater sum of homely wisdom and a larger number of pruden- 

 tial maxims and ethical rules for the conduct of life than are com- 

 pressed into this little treatise on deportment, or nitividyd, a word 

 which the modern masters of this science would translate by 

 savoir vivre. This Kind Counsel, as the title Hitopadesa" sig- 

 nifies, is illustrated and enforced by a series of fables and kindred 



