Place · republic city · India

Vaishālī

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Maurya / Magadha

Tradition

Pali canon; Jain tradition

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

25.992, 85.128

Worth knowing

One of the few Ashokan pillars still standing where it was raised is here, with a lion capital and a brick stupa beside it, and the relic stupa excavated in 1958 held one of the eight original divisions of the Buddha's ashes. The assembly hall of a republic and the founding of an order of nuns belong to the same generation in the same town.

Connections (7)

• Life routeThe Buddha

  At Vaishālī he agreed to ordain women, after refusing three times and being argued round by Ānanda on behalf of Mahāpajāpatī. The bhikkhunī order that followed is the earliest organised community of women renunciants anywhere, and the conditions attached to it have been argued about ever since. He also announced his own death there three months in advance, and the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta's account of the last journey begins from that announcement.

• Mythic sequenceKushinagar

  The last journey runs from Vaishālī, where he announced he would die in three months, north to Kushinagar — about a hundred and fifty kilometres, with the meal at Pāvā and the stop at Kesāriya on the way. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta narrates the whole of it stage by stage. He chose Kushinagar, a small town, over the great cities, and Ānanda objected; the reply recorded is that it had once been a capital, which is the sutta's only concession to grandeur.

• Mythic sequenceSānkāshya / Sankisa

  Sānkāshya and Vaishālī are the westernmost and easternmost of the eight great places apart from Shrāvastī, about four hundred kilometres apart. The whole circuit fits inside the middle Ganges plain, which is the single most striking fact about the geography of the Buddha's life. Everything the tradition records of his forty-five years of teaching therefore happened within about four hundred kilometres of the middle Ganges, in a country he could walk across.

• Mythic sequenceKesāriya stupa

  Leaving Vaishālī on his last journey, the Buddha is said to have given the Licchavis his begging bowl and turned to look at the city one final time. Kesāriya's stupa, possibly the tallest in India, stands where the tradition places that farewell. Kesāriya's stupa mound is about forty metres high and was largely unexcavated until the 1990s, so one of the largest Buddhist monuments in India was effectively unknown until recently.

• Life routeMahāvīra

  Mahāvīra was born in the Vaishālī region to a Jñātrika kshatriya family with Licchavi connections, and taught in the same Magadha and Kosala the Buddha did, in the same decades. Two renunciant movements came out of one urbanising river plain within a generation. He appears in the Pali canon as Nigantha Nātaputta, a named rival teacher whose doctrine is reported and rejected, which is a rare case of two Indian religions recording the same contemporary.

• CampaignPātaliputra

  Ajātaśatru took Vaishālī by sending a minister to live among the Licchavis for three years and set them against one another, because the Buddhist texts say the confederacy could not be defeated while it kept meeting in full assembly and deciding together. Whether or not the story is accurate, it is how the tradition explains the end of republican government in the Ganges plain, and the same texts have the Buddha citing the Licchavi procedure as a model for the sangha's own.

• In the same set asRājagriha / Rajgir

  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.

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)

Sources

Wikipedia, “Vaishali”. The Mahāparinibbāna Sutta; A.S. Altekar's excavation report on the Vaishali relic stupa (1958); Hultzsch, Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. I.

• Wikipedia — Vaishali
• Wikipedia