| The Indian social context challenges assumptions that sources of power and authority must be absolute, mutually exclusive, and universal. Early Brahmanical and Buddhist texts that imagine royal governance share an understanding that advisors possess powers a king cannot do without. By considering the advisor, this study provides a more expansive view of the contributions of other actors in creating royal power and dharma. Through a comparative consideration of early Brahmanical and Buddhist sources, an integral relationship between advice, trust (and its predicates, emotion and intimacy) and kingship emerges. While the advisor is idealized as the mediator of a king's dharma and power, ultimately, it is the relationship between the advisor and the advised---between the king and his counselor---that is the nexus of royal power and dharma. Thus, royal power---while centered on the king---is not exclusively within the king's grasp. Power is collaborative, relational, and fragile, as is the dharma imagined to sustain it.;This study works comparatively on multiple levels. Advisors, ministers and advising others are examined as ideals, and the idealized methods and media which they employ to influence, advise, and otherwise relate to and with kings are explained. The history of how dharmic communities (Brahmanical and Buddhist) imagine the ideal advisor, and how they imagine dharma should be engaged in royal contexts through the literary experiences of a larger ruling context---the rajanya experience is also traced. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that dharma in Brahmanical and Buddhist advisory contexts exists on a spectrum of uses and demonstrations. The ends of the spectrum are called "deliberative dharma" and "talismanic dharma," respectively. I argue that dharma shifts toward one or the other end of the spectrum by the ways that bonds of kinship, trust and emotion converge on royal relationships. Thus, royal power is reliant on such dharmic intimacies, and not simply on dharmic regulations. |
