From the Mirror for Princes to Robert Greene

Many cultures wrote books of counsel for rulers, usually as stories. In India the genre is called niti. The Panchatantra is its best-known example. Its frame is a king who has three sons who will not learn, and a Brahmin, Vishnusharman, who promises to make them wise in six months and composes five books of fables to do it. The Arthashastra is its hard-headed manual. The Mahabharata contains Vidura’s counsel to a king who will not take it.

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power (1998) and The Art of Seduction (2001) belong to the same shelf in function, if not in descent. They are counsel for the powerful, democratized for the ambitious, and made into a product.

What the old books were for

Read the Panchatantra closely and its purpose shows. In Book I, Victor the jackal drives the lion and the bull apart. The reader is not meant to admire the technique. He is meant to see how a king’s friendships are taken from him. In Book V, a woman kills a loyal mongoose because she saw blood and did not inquire. The collection’s own name for that book is ill-considered action. The tales train a ruler to distrust his own speed.

Vidura says the same to Dhritarashtra in the Mahabharata. In the Prajagara he warns the king against counselors who flatter, and says those who always speak pleasing words are many, while a speaker and a hearer of unwelcome but medicinal counsel is rare.

What Greene kept and what he dropped

Greene kept the tactics. He dropped the counsel’s purpose. In the old books the tactics are shown so the king can recognize them being used on him. In Greene they are shown so the reader can use them. The reader is told he is a courtier at the court of everyone else, and the courtier’s skill is the only skill on offer.

This is the same pattern that runs through this site: a technique survives, the telos that justified it does not. Stoicism’s revival kept the control dichotomy and dropped the Logos. The retention practice that became NoFap kept the restraint and dropped what restraint was for.

A resemblance we note, not a descent we claim

The frame of the Charitropakhyan resembles the Book of Sindbad and its Western descendant, the Seven Sages of Rome: a prince falsely accused by a queen or a stepmother, and counsel offered to delay the sentence. We note the resemblance. We found no scholar who says the Charitropakhyan frame descends from that tradition, and the frames differ. In the Charitropakhyan, a single minister speaks to the king. In the Sindbad tradition, a group of sages speaks, the woman answers with counter-tales, and the prince is silent.

The scholarly picture of the Sindbad tradition itself is also not what a simple chain would suggest. It has an Eastern branch (Syriac, Greek, Persian, Arabic, the Old Spanish Libro de los engaños, and the Hebrew Mishle Sendebar) and a separate Western branch (the Old French and Latin Seven Sages). The Hebrew text is not an ancestor of the Western one. We stay at the level of resemblance.

The reader this site is for

A reader who has left the court. The solopreneur, the remote worker, the man who works alone. The court has not left him. It reaches him through a screen, through a platform, a client, a guru with a course, a machine that tells him his idea is brilliant. He is a sovereign without a minister.

The old books were written for a king who had one. This site is written for a king who does not.