Chanakya, India's legendary kingmaker, may never have written his famous book
Tradition credits Chanakya, the Brahmin adviser who helped Chandragupta Maurya found an empire, with writing the Arthashastra, a classic manual of statecraft. Scholars now think that treatise was most likely composed by several authors centuries after the Mauryan era, with his name attached to lend it prestige. Everything else about him comes from legend.
No documented history of Chanakya survives. Historian Thomas Trautmann identifies four legendary traditions: a Buddhist one from Sri Lankan chronicles of the 5th or 6th century CE, a Jain one retold by Hemachandra in the 12th century from much earlier sources, a Kashmiri one, and a largely fictional Sanskrit play. Trautmann judges the Jain version older and more consistent. In every telling, Chanakya is humiliated by a Nanda king, swears to destroy him, and places Chandragupta on the throne.
Both main versions say he was born with teeth, taken as a sign of future kingship, and that they were broken, in one story to reassure his worried mother and in another by his father to keep him humble. In the Buddhist account, King Dhana Nanda has the ugly Brahmin thrown out of an alms ceremony; Chanakya snaps his sacred thread in fury, curses the king and escapes disguised as an ascetic. In the Jain account, he stubbornly occupies the royal throne while waiting for an audience, piling his belongings on every other seat offered, until a servant kicks him off.
Legend says he found Chandragupta as a boy playing at being king among other children, and was struck by his commanding manner. Their first assault on the Nanda capital failed. According to the Buddhist chronicle, they learned strategy by overhearing a mother scold her son for eating only the middle of a cake and discarding the edges, just as Chandragupta had attacked the empire's heart instead of its border villages. Starting at the edges, they eventually took Pataliputra.
Stories also claim he secretly fed the new emperor tiny doses of poison to build immunity against assassins. He supposedly went on to advise Chandragupta's son Bindusara as well.
Source: Chanakya
