Śiśunāga dynasty

Accession

The dynasty takes its name from Śiśunāga, described in the Purāṇic lists as an official raised to the throne by the people of Magadha after the last of Bimbisāra's line — a house the chronicles present as a sequence of parricides — became intolerable. The Buddhist and Purāṇic accounts differ in their ordering and in the reigns they assign, and the chronology of the whole period is one of the least settled in early Indian history.

Śiśunāga is said to have ruled from Vaiśālī, the old Vajjian centre, before the seat returned to Pāṭaliputra.

Avanti

The dynasty's substantial achievement was the destruction of Avanti, the last of the four great powers still standing against Magadha. With Malwa taken, the Magadhan state controlled the Ganga plain from the Punjab marches to the delta and the western route to the ports, and the framework of a subcontinental empire was in place a century before the Mauryas assembled it.

Kālāśoka, Śiśunāga's successor in the Buddhist accounts, is remembered as the king under whom the second Buddhist council was held at Vaiśālī, a hundred years after the Buddha's death — the meeting that addressed disputes over monastic discipline and stands at the beginning of the sectarian divisions.

End

The Śiśunāgas were overthrown by Mahāpadma Nanda. The chronicles describe the killing of Kālāśoka's sons and the seizure of the throne by a man of low birth, which is the standard idiom in these texts for a usurpation from outside the recognised lineages.