According to legendary narratives,[a] preserved in various traditions dating from the 4th to 11th century CE, Chanakya (ISO: Cāṇakya, pronunciationⓘ) was a Brahmin who assisted the first Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in his rise to power and the establishment of the Maurya Empire.

According to these narratives, Chanakya served as the chief advisor and Prime Minister of the both emperors Chandragupta Maurya and his son Bindusara.

[a] Thomas Trautmann identifies four distinct accounts of the ancient Chanakya-Chandragupta katha (legend):[7] In all the four versions, Chanakya feels insulted by the Nanda king, and vows to destroy him.

[10] Some other texts provide additional details about the legend; for example, the Maha-Bodhi-Vamsa and the Atthakatha give the names of the nine Nanda kings said to have preceded Chandragupta.

Chandragupta had been born in a royal family, but was brought up by a hunter after his father was killed by an usurper, and the devatas caused his mother to abandon him.

Astonished by the boy's miraculous powers, Chanakya paid 1000 gold coins to his foster-father, and took Chandragupta away, promising to teach him a trade.

[13] The army of Chanadragupta and Chanakya invaded Dhana Nanda's empire, but disbanded after facing a severe defeat.

The woman scolded him, saying that he was eating food like Chandragupta, who attacked the central part of the empire instead of conquering the border villages first.

Chanakya anointed Chandragupta as the new emperor, and tasked a man named Paṇiyatappa with eliminating rebels and robbers from the empire.

The woman told her son that by not starting from the cooler edges, he was being foolish like Chanakya, who attacked the capital before conquering the bordering regions.

He formed an alliance with Parvataka, the king of a mountain kingdom called Himavatkuta, offering him half of Nanda's empire.

Chanakya entered this city disguised as a Shaivite mendicant, and declared that the siege would end if the idols of the seven mothers were removed from the town's temple.

[21] Chanakya then started consolidating the power by eliminating Nanda's loyalists, who had been harassing people in various parts of the empire.

At the next meal, he caught them by filling the dining room with thick smoke, which caused the monks' eyes to water, washing off the ointment.

[26] The Kashmiri version of the legend goes like this: Vararuchi (identified with Katyayana), Indradatta and Vyadi were three disciples of the sage Varsha.

Chanakya engineered Chandragupta's alliance with another powerful king Parvateshvara (or Parvata), and the two rulers agreed to divide Nanda's territory after subjugating him.

[34] Malayaketu and Rakshasa then formed an alliance with five kings: Chiravarman of Kauluta (Kulu), Meghaksha of Parasika, Narasimha of Malaya, Pushkaraksha of Kashmira, and Sindhusena of Saindhava.

This allied army also included soldiers from Chedi, Gandhara, Hunas, Khasa, Magadha, Shaka, and Yavana territories.

[35] In Pataliputra, Chanakya's agent informed him that three Rakshasa loyalists remained in the capital: the Jain monk Jiva-siddhi, the scribe Shakata-dasa and the jewellers' guild chief Chandana-dasa.

Shortly after, Chanakya's spy Siddharthaka pretended to get caught with a fake letter addressed to Chandragupta by Rakshasa.

Rakshasa pledged allegiance to Chandragupta and agreed to be his prime minister, in return for release of Chandana-dasa and a pardon for Malayaketu.

India's former National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon praised Chanakya's Arthashastra for its precise and timeless descriptions of power.

The next phase of the work's evolution, the "Kauṭilya Recension", which compiled portions of these sources into a new shastra, can be dated to the period 50–125 CE.

[45][need quotation to verify] K. C. Ojha proposes that the traditional identification of Vishnugupta with Kauṭilya was caused by a confusion of the text's editor and its originator.

[4] R. P. Kangle, writing in the 1960s, found the traditional attribution to the Maurya prime minister Chanakya acceptable, therefor dating the Arthashastra to Mauryan times.

Trautmann points out that none of the earlier sources that refer to Chanakya mention his authorship of the Arthashastra,[46] and Olivelle notes that "the name Canakya, however, is completely absent from the text.

[47] The verse seems to be a later interpolation, and Olivelle proposes that it was an attempt to identify the author of the political treatise, which was followed by the Guptas, with the renowned Maurya prime minister.

"[52] According to Trautmann, "[n]ationalist aspirations seemed somehow fortified when the existence of strongly centralized empires and native schools of political theory was shown.

"[50] According to McClish, "the desire on the part of Indologists to possess just such a source seems to have exerted, in general, a strong influence on conclusions about the compositional history of the text.

"[50] Kautilya's works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century, when the Arthashastra was discovered in 1905 by librarian Rudrapatna Shamasastry in an uncatalogued group of ancient palm-leaf manuscripts donated by an unknown pandit to the Oriental Research Institute Mysore.