Bihar holds founding sites for four religions within a few hundred kilometres, which few regions of comparable size anywhere can match.
At Bodh Gaya, on the bank of the Neranjana, the Buddha is held to have reached awakening under a tree, and the Mahabodhi temple stands on the spot with a descendant of that tree beside it. Sarnath, where he first taught, is just over the border in Uttar Pradesh, but the rest of the early Buddhist landscape is here: Rajgir, where kings patronised the new community, Vulture Peak above it, and Nalanda, the monastic university that taught thousands of monks from across Asia until it was destroyed in the twelfth century.
Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara and the historical founder of Jainism in its present form, taught in the same country at the same period, and Pawapuri, where he is held to have died, is among the tradition's principal pilgrimage sites. Vaishali, associated with his birth, was also a republic whose assembly the Buddhist texts describe.
Patna, the ancient Pataliputra, was the capital of the Maurya empire under Ashoka, whose edicts are the earliest datable evidence for Buddhism as a state-supported religion. It is also the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh, which makes it one of the five seats of Sikh temporal authority. Islam entered with the sultanates and remains a substantial presence.