Person · Mauryan emperor · India
Chandragupta Maurya
Founder of the Mauryan empire, who took Magadha in the 320s BCE and then the eastern provinces Alexander's successors held, defeating Seleucus I about 305 BCE and concluding the treaty that fixed the empire's north-western frontier at the Hindu Kush.
- Date
- -340–-297
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.610, 85.140
Worth knowing
Jain tradition has him abdicate in favour of Bindusara, take initiation as a monk, travel south with Bhadrabahu and starve himself to death by the Jain rite of sallekhana at Shravanabelagola, where the hill and a cave are named for him. Greek sources call him Sandrokottos, and that identification is what anchors the whole early Indian chronology to a date.
About the place
Placed at Pataliputra, the capital he took and ruled from. His origins and his end are both disputed — Jain sources put his death at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, which is a separate entry.
Connections (6)
- CampaignBabylon
Seleucus I Nicator marched east from Babylon about 305 BCE to recover Alexander's Indian conquests and lost. The settlement gave Chandragupta the eastern satrapies as far as Gandhara and Arachosia, gave Seleucus five hundred war elephants, and was sealed by a marriage agreement the Greek sources describe without naming the bride. Those elephants decided Ipsus four years later — Indian animals, and probably Indian mahouts, settling a Macedonian civil war in Anatolia.
- Court associationChanakya / Kautilya
The tradition that Chanakya found Chandragupta, trained him and put him on the Magadhan throne is told in the Buddhist Mahavamsa commentaries, the Jain Parishishtaparvan, the Puranas and Vishakhadatta's play the Mudrarakshasa, and each version differs. No inscription mentions him. The repository carries the pairing because the Arthashastra's political thought is inseparable from it, not because it is documented.
- Imperial administration ofPātaliputra
Chandragupta ruled from Pataliputra and Megasthenes came there as Seleucus's ambassador after the settlement of about 303 BCE. His lost Indika, quoted by Strabo, Arrian and Diodorus, describes the city's timber walls, its five hundred and seventy towers and sixty-four gates, its administration and its lack of slavery, and is the earliest sustained foreign account of an Indian capital.
- Power passed toSeleucus I Nicator
Seleucus marched east about 305 BCE to recover Alexander's Indian satrapies, lost, and settled: he ceded everything as far as Gandhara and Arachosia in exchange for five hundred war elephants, and a marriage alliance was concluded. Those elephants then decided Ipsus in 301 and so the map of the Hellenistic world, which makes an Indian treaty a cause of a settlement in Anatolia.
- Samadhi atShravanabelagola
Jain tradition has Chandragupta abdicate in favour of Bindusara, take initiation under Bhadrabahu, travel south with him and end his life at Shravanabelagola by sallekhana, the Jain fast to death. The smaller hill there is called Chandragiri for him and a cave on it is shown as his. The tradition is Digambara and late, and no Mauryan source mentions it.
- Power passed toBindusāra
Chandragupta's abdication in favour of his son is the one Mauryan succession that was not contested, according to the traditions that report it, and it is the hinge between the founder and Ashoka's father. Bindusara then held the empire for about twenty-five years and left it larger than he found it, which is more than the record credits him with.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chandragupta Maurya”. Megasthenes's Indika as quoted in Strabo, Arrian and Diodorus; the Jain Bhadrabāhucarita and the Shravanabelagola inscriptions; Romila Thapar, Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961).
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