The city in the hills
Rajagriha, "house of the king", also called Girivraja, "the enclosure of hills", lay in a valley surrounded by five hills south of the Ganges plain. The Mahabharata names it as the capital of Jarasandha, king of Magadha, whom Bhima killed. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE it was the capital of the Haryanka kings of Magadha, Bimbisara and his son Ajatashatru, under whom Magadha began its rise to dominance in the Ganges valley.
The city's defences are among the oldest surviving stone fortifications in India. A wall of large undressed stones, laid without mortar, runs for about forty kilometres along the ridges of the surrounding hills. Its date is not certain, but it is generally placed in or before the Mauryan period. Inner walls enclose the old city on the valley floor, and Ajatashatru built a new fort, New Rajagriha, at the valley's mouth.
The Buddha and Mahavira
Rajagriha appears constantly in early Buddhist and Jain texts. Bimbisara became a patron of the Buddha and gave the community the Bamboo Grove, the Venuvana, its first property. The Buddha often stayed on the Vulture Peak, the Gridhrakuta, where many sutras are set, and the physician Jivaka gave the community a mango grove. Ajatashatru, who imprisoned and killed his father according to the Buddhist texts, later came to the Buddha in remorse. Mahavira, the last Jain tirthankara, spent many rainy seasons in Rajagriha, and Jain texts present Bimbisara, whom they call Shrenika, as a Jain.
By Buddhist tradition, the first council was held in the Saptaparni cave on one of the hills soon after the Buddha's death, when five hundred monks under Mahakashyapa recited the teachings and the monastic rules.
Later history
The capital of Magadha moved to Pataliputra, on the Ganges, under Ajatashatru's successor Udayin, and Rajagriha declined. It remained a place of pilgrimage. Faxian and Xuanzang described its ruins and sacred places, and the great monastery of Nalanda grew up nearby. Among the later monuments are the Son Bhandar caves, two rock-cut chambers at the foot of the Vaibhara hill with a Jain inscription of about the fourth century, and the Maniyar Math, a cylindrical brick shrine whose stucco figures of serpent deities show that the cult of the nagas flourished at Rajagriha alongside Buddhism and Jainism. Today Rajgir is a pilgrimage town for Buddhists, Jains and Hindus, with hot springs sacred to Hindus, Jain temples on the hills, a modern Peace Pagoda on the Ratnagiri hill and a ropeway to it.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Bronkhorst, Johannes. Greater Magadha: Studies in the Culture of Early India. Brill, 2007
- Strong, John S. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oneworld, 2001
See also
- Magadha — Magadha was an ancient kingdom of the eastern Gangetic plain, centered on present-day Bihar, that grew from one of the sixteen mahajanapadas into the political core of the Nanda, Maurya, and Gupta empires.
- Ajatashatru — Ajatashatru was a king of Magadha's Haryanka dynasty, traditionally dated to about 492–460 BCE, whose military campaigns against the Licchavi confederacy and the kingdom of Kosala established Magadha as the dominant power of the Gangetic plain.
- Buddhist councils — The Buddhist councils were assemblies of the monastic community held to recite and settle the teaching and discipline, and the occasions on which the order divided.
- Gautama Buddha — Gautama Buddha, born Siddhartha Gautama, was a Shakya prince of ancient India whose renunciation and enlightenment, traditionally dated to the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, became the founding event of Buddhism.
- Mahavira — Mahavira was the twenty-fourth and last tirthankara of the present cycle in Jain tradition, an older contemporary of the Buddha whose teaching gave Jainism its historical form.
- Nalanda — Nalanda was a major Buddhist monastic university in ancient Magadha, in present-day Bihar, active from roughly the 5th to the 12th century CE and among the earliest and most influential centers of higher learning in the premodern world.
- Pataliputra — Pataliputra was the capital of the Magadha kingdom and later of the Mauryan and, intermittently, Gupta empires, located at the confluence of the Ganga, Son, and Gandak rivers on the site of modern Patna, Bihar.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.