Introduction
Bindusara was the second Maurya emperor, son of Chandragupta Maurya, who continued his father's project of imperial expansion, extending Maurya control further into the Deccan region of southern India.
Family
- Father: Chandragupta Maurya
- Mother: Durdhara
- Spouse: Subhadrangi (married)
- Children: Ashoka
Continuing Hellenistic Relations
Bindusara maintained the diplomatic ties his father had established with the Hellenistic world, receiving the Seleucid ambassador Deimachus at his court, a relationship that, alongside earlier contact through Megasthenes, gives historians valuable external corroboration for the scale and sophistication of the Maurya court during this period. Comparatively little independent narrative detail survives about the specifics of Bindusara's reign compared to his father's founding achievements or his son Ashoka's extensively documented rule, though his reign's territorial gains provided the expanded empire Ashoka would later inherit.
This article records the Maurya Empire (c. 4th-2nd century BCE) as historical genealogy reconstructed from Ashoka's own rock and pillar edicts, Greek and Latin accounts of contact with the Mauryas, and later Buddhist, Jain and Puranic traditions composed well after the events they describe; where these traditions genuinely disagree, that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into invented certainty.