Kāśī

An old kingdom

Kāśī is named in the later Vedic literature and treated as a long-established realm by the time the Buddhist and Jain sources begin. Its capital Vārāṇasī, at the confluence of the Ganga and the Varuna, sat on the trunk route between the eastern plain and the west, and the Jātakas return to it constantly as the default setting for a story about a prosperous city.

The kingdom's wealth is repeatedly associated with cloth. Kāśī textiles are the standard example of a luxury good in early Buddhist texts, and the phrase for fine cloth in Pali is simply the adjective for Kāśī-made.

Loss of independence

Kāśī was absorbed by Kosala at some point before the fifth century BCE — the sources record the annexation as accomplished but not its circumstances. A village of Kāśī then passes as a marriage endowment between the Kosalan and Magadhan houses and becomes the pretext for their war, so the kingdom's territory outlives its throne as a disputed asset.

Vārāṇasī itself lost nothing by this. The Buddha delivered his first discourse at the deer park of Sarnath, a short walk from the city, and Vārāṇasī grew into the pre-eminent Hindu pilgrimage centre of northern India — a status that has outlasted every state that has held it.