On another occasion, Cāṇakya wished to test the youths, so while Candragupta was sleeping, he ordered Pabbata to remove his woolen thread without breaking it or waking the owner, which Pabbata was unable to do. When Candragupta was set the problem, however, he solved it after the manner of Alexander and the Gordian knot: he cut off Pabbata’s head, and Cāṇakya was not the man to be displeased at this.
—a tale from the Mahāvamsa, not canon in this story, as told by Thomas Trautmann (1971), Kauṭilya and the Arthaśāstra: a statistical investigation of the authorship and evolution of the text, p 14.
