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CHANDRAGUPTA
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marvellous career, in which he worked his way up from the position of a robber chief on the frontier to the mightiest throne then existing in the world, is reflected in the legendary nature of all the accounts that have reached us-Greek, Buddhist, and Hindu. He has suffered the fate of other great conquerors and rulers; and like Alexander and Charlemagne, has become the hero of popular romance.
The reader will recollect how such popular romance has woven a story about our King Alfred the Great, when a defeated refugee, and a peasant woman and her cakes. Just such an anecdote has been told of Chandragupta in the commentary on the Great Chronicle of Ceylon:
"In one of these villages a woman [by whose hearth Chandragupta had taken refuge] baked a chupatty and gave it to her child. He, leaving the edges, ate only the centre, and, throwing the edges away, asked for another cake. Then she said, “This boy's conduct is like Chandagutta's attack on the kingdom.' The boy said, 'Why, Mother, what am I doing, and what has Chandagutta done?' 'Thou, my dear,' said she, 'throwing away the outside of the cake, eatest the middle only. So Chandagutta, in his ambition to be a monarch, without beginning from the frontiers, and taking the towns in order as he passed, has invaded the heart of the country ... and his army is surrounded and destroyed. That was his folly.'”?
And Chandragupta overheard, and learnt the ? Literally " a frying-pan-cake," (kapalla priva). See Jāt. I. 345-7. . Mahāvamsa Tīkā, p. 123 (Colombo edition, 1995).
Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
