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Chandragupta Maurya's origins are shrouded in mystery. Having been brought up by peacock tamers, he could be of low caste birth. According to other sources, Chandragupta Maurya was the son of a Nanda prince and a dasi called Mura. It is also possible that Chandragupta was of the Maurya tribe of Kshatriyas, a clan of Hindu kings and warriors.
He rose to power under the influence of a famed Hindu minister named ChanakyaChanakya (c. 275 BC) also known as Kautilya is one of the earliest known political thinkers and king makers in the literal sense of the word. Seeking revenge for being thrown out of the court of the ruler of Magadha, Chanakya took a promising young boy of (also known as Kautilya), and with his assistance, overthrew the last of the Nanda kings of Magadha and captured their capital city of Pataliputa. He then turned his attention to northwestern India where a power vacuum had been left by the departure of Alexander. The way in which he carried himself and the way he ruled seems like a mirror image of Alexander. He conquered the lands east of the Indus RiverThe Indus ( (known as Sindhu in ancient times) is the principal river of Pakistan. It originates in Tibet, flowing from the Himalayas in a north-westerly direction, and then turning south for nearly the entire length of Pakistan. The Indus Valley Civiliza and then, moving south, took over much of what is now Central India. Chandragupta Maurya established the Mauryan empire with the help of Chanakya (Kautilya), who is also known as the Indian Machiavelli. It is said that Chanakya met Chandragupta in the Vindhya forest , after being insulted by the Nanda king. Meghasthenes, a GreekAncient Greece is the term used to describe the Greek-speaking world in ancient times. It refers not only to the territory of the present Greek state, but also to those areas settled in ancient times by Greeks: Cyprus, the Aegean coast of Turkey (then kno traveller visited IndiaThe Republic of India is a large multicultural country in South Asia, with a population of over one billion. The Indian economy is the fourth largest in the world, in terms of purchasing power parity, and is the world's second-fastest growing economy. at this time and although only fragments of his travelogue Indica are available to us, his account supplements the information provided by the Arthashastra and the other literary sources about governance and social life during the Maurya period.
The year 305 BC saw him Chandragupta back in the Northwest, where Seleucus I Nicator, the Macedonian satrap of Babylonia, was threatening fresh invasions. Chandragupta not only stopped his advance but forced him to a humiliating peace in 303 BCE and pushed the frontier farther west into what is now Afghanistan. This showed how powerful Chandragupta really was. Apparently a settlement was reached between the two monarchs, by which Seleucus exchanged territory for 500 of Chandragupta's war elephants. It included a matrimonial alliance of some kind between Chandragupta and Seleucus and the latter's dispatch of an ambassador, Megasthenes, to the Mauryan court at Pataliputra.
The most important result of this treaty was that Chandragupta's fame spread far and wide and his empire was recognised as a great power in the western countries. The kings of Egypt and Syria sent ambassadors to the Mauryan Court.
Toward the end of his life he renounced his throne and became an ascetic under the Jain saint Bhadrabahu , ending his days in self-starvation [1].
Chandragupta Maurya's son Bindusara became the new Mauryan Emperor by inheriting an empire that included the Hindu Kush, Narmada, Vindhyas , Mysore, Bihar, Bengal, Assam, Baluchistan and Afghanistan.