Kautilya wrote the Arthashastra sometime between the fourth and third centuries BCE, and he did not waste a sentence on ambivalence about wealth. Artha, material prosperity, economic power, the capacity to act in the world, was not a concession to human weakness. It was one of the four aims of life, equal in standing to dharma, kama, and moksha. The text that followed from that premise is roughly 6,000 shlokas of administrative, economic, and strategic instruction so unsentimental that it has made comfortable readers uneasy for two millennia.
