Little known facts of Badass Chanakya

A thorn had pricked his foot once. After that instead of uprooting the tree, he poured buttermilk on the tree so that the ants will gather around tree and finish the tree to its last pieces. An unhappy royal minister saw this and introduced Chanakya to the Nanda king, knowing that Chanakya would not be treated well in the court. Insulted at the court, Chanakya untied the sikha (lock of hair) and swore that he would not tie it back till he destroyed the Nanda kingdom.

Chanakya met Chandragupta Maurya, a young man who too had deep personal grudges against the Nandas. Together they set about provoking the people of Magadha against Dhanananda and, as there happened to be many amongst the populace that Dhanananda had offended in some way, it was not long before they had managed to amass a considerable force. The new Mauryan Army was still numerically inferior to that of Dhanananda. Chānakya's initial attempt to overthrow Nanda failed, whereupon he comes across a mother scolding her child for burning himself by eating from the middle of a bun or bowl of porridge rather than the cooler edge. He realized his initial strategic error and, instead of attacking the heart of Nanda territory, slowly chips away at its edges. By 321 B.C. Chandragupta had succeeded the Nandas and the long reign of the Mauryans had begun.

The advent of the Mauryans brought them into conflict next with the Greek General Seleucus I Nicator, who had inherited both Alexander's Asian holdings and his ambitions. These, Chandragupta shattered in 303 B.C. The resulting treaty gave the loser 500 war-elephants and granted to the victorious Chandragupta the Seleucid Provinces of Trans-Indus (Afghanistan), Seleucus's daughter Helen in marriage, and the future court presence of the Seleucid Ambassador Megasthenes.

A rival king Malayaketu sought control of all the former Nanda territories. He was supported by Rakshasaa, the former Nanda minister, several of whose attempts to kill Chandragupta were foiled by Chanakya. As part of their game plan, Chanakya and Chandragupta faked a rift between themselves. As a sham, Chandragupta removed Chanakya from his ministerial post, while declaring that Rakshasa is better than him. Chanakya's agents in Malayaketu's court then turned the king against Rakshasa by suggesting that Rakshasa was poised to replace Chanakya in Chandragupta's court. The activities by Chanakya's spies further widened the rift between Malayaketu and Rakshasa. His agents also fooled Malayaketu into believing that five of his allies were planning to join Chandragupta, prompting Malayaketu to order their killings. In the end, Rakshasa ends up joining Chandragupta's side, and Malayaketu's coaliation is completely undone by Chanakya's strategy.

According to a popular legend mentioned in the Jain texts, Chanakya used to add small doses of poison to the food eaten by Emperor Chandragupta Maurya in order to make him immune to the poisoning attempts by the enemies.Unaware, Chandragupta once fed some of his food to his queen, Durdhara, who was seven days away from delivery. The queen, not immune to the poison, collapsed and died within a few minutes. In order to save the heir to the throne, Chanakya cut the queen's belly open and extracted the foetus just as she died. The baby was named Bindusara, because he was touched by a drop (bindu) of blood having poison.