Mahajanapadas, the Rise of Magadha, Buddhism & Jainism

• Bimbisara (Haryanka dynasty; traditionally c. 544–492 BCE, though his dates move with the Buddha’s) — contemporary of both the Buddha and Mahavira. He grew by marriage as much as by war: Kosaladevi, sister of Prasenajit of Kosala, brought as dowry a Kashi village yielding a hundred thousand coins in revenue; Chellana was a Lichchhavi princess; Khema came from Madra in the Punjab. He annexed Anga and kept friendly ties with Avanti, sending his royal physician Jivaka to treat King Pradyota.
• Ajatashatru (c. 492–460 BCE) — seized the throne, by tradition by killing his father. He fought Kosala and broke the Vajji confederacy, using two new war engines described in Jaina texts — the mahashilakantaka (a stone-throwing catapult) and the rathamusala (a chariot fitted with a mace). He fortified the village of Pataligrama on the Ganga, and the First Buddhist Council met at Rajagriha under his patronage.
• Udayin (Udayabhadra) — son of Ajatashatru, who built the new capital Pataliputra (Kusumapura) at the confluence of the Ganga and the Son, a site that would remain the seat of empire for a thousand years.
• Shishunaga — a minister who replaced the Haryankas, destroyed the power of Avanti (Magadha’s great rival) and briefly shifted the capital to Vaishali. His son Kalashoka (Kakavarna) moved it back to Pataliputra and patronised the Second Buddhist Council at Vaishali.
• The Nandas — Mahapadma Nanda founded the first empire ruled by a family of humble (non-Kshatriya) origin. The Puranas call him Ekarat (sole sovereign) and Sarvakshatrantaka (destroyer of all Kshatriyas); Kharavela’s Hathigumpha inscription remembers a Nanda king who dug a canal in Kalinga. The last Nanda, Dhana Nanda — the "Agrammes" of the Greek writers — was rich, unpopular and ruling when Alexander reached the Beas. Chandragupta Maurya, guided by Chanakya, overthrew him around 321 BCE.

Buddhist texts speak of 62 rival schools of thought and Jaina texts of 363. Something had unsettled the old order, and historians point to several causes working together. Later Vedic ritual had become long, costly and controlled by priests. The varna order was hardening, and Kshatriyas resented Brahmana claims to superiority — both the Buddha and Mahavira were Kshatriyas. A new class of merchants (setthis) had money but little status, and the Dharmasutras frowned on their money-lending. The farming economy needed cattle for the plough, and mass animal sacrifice wasted them. And the new teachers spoke in the people’s Prakrit, not in Sanskrit.

• Four Noble Truths (Arya Satya) — (1) life is dukkha (suffering); (2) suffering has a cause, samudaya — desire or craving (tanha); (3) suffering can end, nirodha; (4) there is a path to its end, magga.
• The Eightfold Path (Ashtangika Marga) — right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. It is the Middle Path (Madhyama Pratipada), avoiding both indulgence and extreme self-torture.
• Three marks of existence — everything is impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory (dukkha) and without a permanent self (anatta). The Buddha accepted karma and rebirth but rejected the authority of the Vedas, animal sacrifice and birth-based superiority, and was silent on a creator god.
• The Three Jewels (Triratna) — the Buddha, the Dhamma (his teaching) and the Sangha (the order of monks and nuns, open to all castes and, after initial hesitation, to women at the request of Mahaprajapati Gautami and Ananda).

The canon is the Tripitaka ("three baskets"), in Pali: the Vinaya Pitaka (rules for the sangha), the Sutta Pitaka (the Buddha’s discourses, including the Jatakas, stories of his previous births) and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (philosophy). Other texts that recur in questions: the Milindapanho (dialogue between the Indo-Greek king Menander and the monk Nagasena), the Sri Lankan chronicles Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, and Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacharita, a Sanskrit life of the Buddha. The great Bodhisattvas are Avalokiteshvara (Padmapani), Manjushri, Vajrapani and Maitreya, the Buddha who is still to come.

Jainism claims a far older lineage than Buddhism: twenty-four tirthankaras ("ford-makers" who show the crossing over the river of rebirth), beginning with Rishabhanatha (Adinatha). Only the last two are taken as historical. The 23rd, Parshvanatha, a prince of Varanasi, taught four vows — non-violence (ahimsa), truth (satya), non-stealing (asteya) and non-possession (aparigraha). The 24th, Vardhamana Mahavira, added the fifth — brahmacharya (celibacy).

• Birth — at Kundagrama near Vaishali, to Siddhartha, head of the Jnatrika clan, and Trishala, sister of the Lichchhavi chief Chetaka (which made Mahavira a relative of Bimbisara’s queen Chellana).
• Family — married Yashoda; their daughter Anojja (Priyadarshana) married Jamali, who became Mahavira’s first disciple and, later, the leader of the first schism.
• Renunciation and kaivalya — left home at 30; after 12 years of extreme austerity attained kaivalya (perfect knowledge) at 42, under a sal tree at Jrimbhikagrama on the bank of the Rijupalika. He was now Jina (conqueror — hence "Jaina"), Kevalin and Mahavira; his followers were Nirgranthas, "free from fetters".
• Death — at 72, at Pavapuri near Rajagriha. Jaina tradition dates his life to 599–527 BCE; many historians, tying him to the Buddha’s chronology, place him around c. 540–468 BCE.

The goal is to free the soul (jiva) from the matter (karma) that clings to it, through the Triratna — right faith (samyak darshana), right knowledge (samyak jnana) and right conduct (samyak charitra). Jainism holds that everything has a soul — stones and water included — which is why its ahimsa is the strictest in Indian thought. It does not accept a creator god. Its theory of knowledge is anekantavada ("many-sidedness"), expressed through syadvada: every statement is true only "in some respect" (syat), and the doctrine sets out a sevenfold scheme of possible judgements. The voluntary fast unto death of a mendicant is sallekhana (santhara).

The north-west, divided among small states, was the first part of India to fall to foreign empires. The Achaemenid king Cyrus (c. 558–530 BCE) is said to have reached the Gandhara region, and Darius I (c. 522–486 BCE) made it certain: Gandhara appears among his provinces in the Behistun inscription, and Hindush (the Indus country) in his inscriptions at Persepolis and Naqsh-i-Rustam. The Greek historian Herodotus calls India the twentieth satrapy of the empire and its most populous, paying a tribute of 360 talents of gold dust. Indian soldiers marched in the Persian army of Xerxes against Greece.

Alexander founded two cities on the Jhelum — Bucephala, named after his horse, and Nicaea — and left governors who did not last long. The campaign’s real effects were indirect. It broke the small states of the north-west, clearing the way for Mauryan unification; it opened land and sea routes between India and the Hellenistic world; and the Greek accounts of Arrian, Plutarch, Curtius and Diodorus give Indian history its first firm date — 326 BCE — from which much of the chronology of this period is reckoned.

The economy that carried all this was new. Paddy transplantation raised yields in the middle Ganga plain. Craftsmen and traders organised themselves into guilds (shreni) headed by a jetthaka; rich merchants were setthis, and some, like Anathapindika of Shravasti who bought the Jetavana grove for the Buddha, became the great lay patrons of the new faiths. Money changed hands as punch-marked coins, and the grammarian Panini, whose Ashtadhyayi is usually placed around the 5th–4th century BCE, already knew a world of towns, coins and janapadas.