Place · Magadhan capital city · India

Rājagriha / Rajgir

Also known as Rajgir, Rajgir (Rajagriha), Rājagriha

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Maurya / Magadha

Tradition

Pali canon; Jain agamas

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

25.028, 85.420

Worth knowing

Three traditions attach to the same ring of hills because all three began inside this kingdom, and the Jain temples on the five peaks are still walked as a circuit. Bimbisara's jail, the bamboo grove monastery Bimbisara gave the order, and the springs are all shown, and the Japanese-funded peace pagoda above them was built in 1969.

Connections (10)

• Life routeSārnāth

  Sarnath is where the Buddha first taught, to the five ascetics who had abandoned him; Rajagriha is the Magadhan capital where he spent much of the following forty years under Bimbisara's protection, and where the first council met after his death. The route between them is the spine of the eight great places: the teaching begins near Varanasi and the institution is built in Magadha, and everything else in early Buddhism follows that road.

• Life routeShrāvastī

  Rajagriha was the Magadhan capital and Shravasti the capital of Kosala, the other great power of the day, and the Buddha moved between the two for decades — spending most rainy seasons at the Jetavana monastery at Shravasti, which the merchant Anathapindika is said to have bought by covering the ground in gold coin. The early sangha was a creature of these two cities and of the road between them.

• Traveller routeXuanzang

  Rajagriha, modern Rajgir, was described by Xuanzang as an ancient Buddhist landscape filled with stupas, monasteries, caves and sacred mountains. He visited sites including Vulture Peak, Pippala Cave and other places associated with Buddhist traditions. His account preserves memories of a city whose political importance had declined but whose religious significance remained strong.

• Life routeThe Buddha

  Rājagriha was Magadha's capital under Bimbisāra, his first royal patron, and the site of the council held immediately after his death at which five hundred monks recited the teaching into fixed form. The canon exists because a community that had lost its teacher decided to agree on what he had said.

• Succession in timePātaliputra

  Magadha's centre moved from Rājagriha to Pātaliputra under Ajātaśatru and his successors, from a hill-ringed fort to a city at the Ganges–Son confluence. The shift is from a defensible stronghold to a river port, and it is what made the Mauryan empire's logistics possible. Pātaliputra sat where the Son joins the Ganges, so it commanded the river traffic of the whole eastern plain, and Megasthenes describes its wooden palisade with five hundred and seventy towers.

• Site adjacencyPāvāpurī

  Pāvāpurī, Rājgir and Nālandā lie within about twenty kilometres of each other in south Bihar. Mahāvīra died at one, the Buddha taught at another and a Buddhist university stood at the third — the whole of what the renunciant movements produced, inside one district. Mahāvīra and the Buddha were contemporaries in this same country, and the Pali canon reports their followers arguing, so the two movements began within sight of each other.

• In the same set asVaishālī

  Rajgir and Vaishali are fifty kilometres apart and between them hold the first and second Buddhist councils, the founding of the order of nuns, a major Jain temple landscape, Mahavira's Svetambara birthplace and a Hindu hot-spring tirtha. Both renunciant traditions that reshaped Indian religion began inside one small region, within a generation of each other.

• CampaignMathurā

  Jarasandha ruled from Rajagriha, and the Mahabharata's account of his death — Bhima wrestling him there at Krishna's instigation — is the episode that removes the threat the Yadavas had already fled. Magadha as the aggressor and Mathura as the place that could not hold is the epic's own political geography, and Magadha is the kingdom that in fact went on to absorb everything.

• AnalogueItkhori

  Itkhori holds a Bhadrakali temple, a thousand-Buddha stupa and Jain sculpture in one enclosure; Rajgir holds the Vulture's Peak, a Jain temple landscape on five hills and a Hindu hot-spring tirtha. Both are on the road between the Gangetic plain and the plateau, and both are places where three traditions settled on one site rather than replacing each other.

• Site adjacencyPāwāpuri

  Pāwāpuri sits in the Nalanda-Rajgir landscape — the cluster of five Jain kalyanak kshetras that includes Pawapuri (parinirvana), Rajgir (first sermon by Mahavira), Nalanda (five chaturmas spent here), Kundalpur (Mahavira's birth) and Guniyaji (meditation site). All five are within an eighty-kilometre radius in Nalanda district, and traditional Jain pilgrimage walks them as one circuit. Rajgir itself was Mahavira's teaching centre and later the first Buddhist council site, so the landscape carries Jain and Buddhist first-origin memory together.

On these journeys

• Eight Great Places (Buddhist)
• Shared & layered sites
• Capitals of Magadha and the middle Ganges
• Uttarāpatha — the Great Northern Road
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• Yijing — the sea road to Nālandā (671–695)

Sources

Wikipedia, “Rajgir”. The Pāli Vinaya and Sutta accounts of the first council; Xuanzang, Da Tang Xiyu Ji; Archaeological Survey of India, Patna circle records.

• Wikipedia — Rajgir