Dear Dr. Karp,
I'm not sure if this is any help, but I've recently come across
Shankar Goyal's RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE AGE OF HARṢA
(ABORI 72/73, No. 1/4, Amrtamahotsava
(1917-1992) Volume (1991-1992)), pp. 331-361 on Jstor, where he,
while eulogising the work of S. R. Goyal, writes:
p351: "S. R. Goyal… in connection with the Maukharis
refers to the
confusion between the terms Maurya and Maukhari which seems to have
been quite
common during the post-Gupta period.
He rejects the observation of Cunningham that the
Maukharis
and the Mauryas were connected and that the name Moriya was actually
a Pkt form
of the name Maukhariya"
I don't know where Cunningham made this observation, but this may be
a point to start more investigation.
As for deriving Maurya from Murā, I wonder where this is first
found. Monier-Williams refers to the Viṣṇupurāṇa for murā as "N. of
the wife Nanda and mother of Candragupta" but I can't find this in
Pargiter's Puranic List of Dynasties, nor by a quick search in the
etext of the VP, though it is full of typos so Murā may be there in
it somewhere.
The story about the dethronement of the Nandas in the
Kathāsaritsāgara does not even have the name Maurya, only
Candragupta.
Hemacandra's Pariśiṣṭaparvan (chapter 8; I haven't got the exact
reference) says that Candragupta was raised in a village called
Mayūrapoṣaka. Hemacandra apparently does not explicitly say that is
why he was called Maurya, but this is certainly a trace of the
Buddhistic derivation from Moriya.
Murā is certainly there in late sources, such as Ḍhuṇḍhirāja's (18th
century) prelude to the Mudrārākṣasa, which says
murā prāsūta tanayaṃ mauryākhyaṃ guṇavattaram|
sunandā bahugarbhāḍhyāṃ māṃsapeśīm asūta sā||32||
(note that in this version of the story, Candragupta is the son of
this Maurya, i.e. a grandson of Murā and Nanda)
There is a very similar account in the Cāṇakyakathā of Ravinartaka
(or Ravikartana, probably 17th century), and in the
Mudrārākṣasanāṭakakathā of Mahādeva (which may have been the basis
of the Cāṇakyakathā).
All the best,
Dániel Balogh
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