The republic
In the age of the Buddha, north India was divided between kingdoms and a number of states governed by assemblies of clan chiefs, often called republics, gana-sanghas. The most powerful was the Vajji confederacy north of the Ganges, led by the Licchavis, with its capital at Vaishali. Buddhist texts describe its assembly, which met often and decided matters together, and the Buddha is said to have told Ajatashatru's minister that the Vajjis would not decline as long as they kept to these customs. Vaishali was described as a rich and crowded city.
The Buddha at Vaishali
The Buddha visited Vaishali several times. The courtesan Amrapali, one of the city's famous figures, invited him and his monks to a meal and gave them her mango grove, in preference to the Licchavi nobles who had asked the same honour. By tradition the order of nuns was founded at Vaishali, when the Buddha's aunt Mahaprajapati and other women came there to seek ordination. On his last journey, the Buddha passed through Vaishali and announced that he would die within three months.
About a century after his death, by tradition, a dispute over the monastic rules, including whether monks might accept money, led to the second council at Vaishali.
Mahavira
Jain tradition places the birth of Mahavira at Kundagrama, a suburb of Vaishali, into a Kshatriya clan connected by marriage with the Licchavis. Shvetambara and Digambara traditions differ in detail, and the identification of the site is disputed, but the region is revered by Jains as his birthplace.
Conquest and remains
Ajatashatru of Magadha fought a long war against the Vajjis and conquered them, a victory that, by Buddhist tradition, he prepared by sowing dissension among the clans. Vaishali later lost its independence, though the Licchavis survived as a prominent family; the Gupta emperor Chandragupta I married a Licchavi princess, Kumaradevi, and coins celebrate the union.
At Kolhua, near the village of Basarh, stands an Ashokan pillar with a lion capital, unbroken and uninscribed, beside a brick stupa and a tank. In 1958 the archaeologist A. S. Altekar excavated a small mud stupa at Vaishali and found a stone casket containing ashes, which he identified with the Licchavis' share of the Buddha's relics. The identification is widely accepted but not certain. The relics are in the Patna museum.
Near the stupa is a large tank identified locally as the Abhisheka Pushkarini, the coronation tank in whose water, according to the texts, the Licchavi chiefs were consecrated. The Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang both visited Vaishali and described its stupas and ruins; by Xuanzang's time, in the seventh century, the city was largely deserted.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Sharma, R. S. India's Ancient Past. Oxford University Press, 2005
- Strong, John S. The Buddha: A Short Biography. Oneworld, 2001
See also
- Vajji confederacy — The Vajji confederacy was a league of clans in north Bihar governed by an assembly at Vaiśālī rather than by a king, and the best-documented of the gaṇa-saṅgha polities of early India.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Licchavi dynasty of Nepal — The Licchavis ruled the Kathmandu valley from about 400 to 750 CE, the first historically documented dynasty of Nepal, and left the earliest inscriptions and temples of the valley.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.