Introduction
Chandragupta Maurya was the founder of the Maurya Empire, the first ruler to unify most of the Indian subcontinent under a single administration, achieving this with the strategic guidance of his mentor Chanakya.
Family
Founding an Empire
After overthrowing the Nanda dynasty, Chandragupta expanded his new empire's borders, most notably defeating the Hellenistic general Seleucus I Nicator (one of Alexander the Great's successors) in a campaign that secured large territories in the northwest and established diplomatic relations formalized through the marriage alliance and the exchange of the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, whose now-fragmentary account of India (the Indica) remains a valuable historical source for the period.
A Jain Tradition of Renunciation
Jain tradition holds that in his later years Chandragupta abdicated the throne, became a Jain monk under the teacher Bhadrabahu, and traveled to Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, where he is said to have fasted to death (sallekhana) according to Jain ascetic practice; this is recorded here as a specifically Jain textual tradition rather than as uncontested general history.
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.