Rajgir

Rajgir lies in a valley enclosed by five hills, and the enclosure is the point: the older city was defended by a cyclopean wall of unmortared stone running for miles along the ridges, long stretches of which survive, and it served as the capital of Magadha through the reigns of Bimbisara and his son Ajatashatru before the seat moved north to Pataliputra. Both kings appear constantly in Buddhist and Jain narrative, Bimbisara as a patron and Ajatashatru as a parricide who later repents, and the two traditions tell overlapping stories about them with different endings.

The Buddha spent long periods there. Bimbisara gave him the Bamboo Grove on the edge of the town, the first property the monastic community held; the physician Jivaka's mango grove was another such gift; and Vulture Peak, a modest rock outcrop reached by a stone path up the hillside, is the setting the discourses name more often than any place except Shravasti. Mahavira passed fourteen rainy seasons in the same valley, and the Jain temples on the surrounding hills are still in use.

The hot springs at the foot of Vaibhara hill have been bathed in continuously for as long as the place has been described at all. Ajatashatru is credited in Buddhist sources with building the wall, and the same sources have him consulting the Buddha about attacking the Vajjis, which places the fortification and the campaign in one narrative. Archaeology confirms the wall and a long occupation but cannot date either to a reign, so the story and the stones agree in outline and cannot be matched in detail.

Tradition places the First Buddhist Council at Rajgir in the rainy season immediately following the Buddha's death, in a cave called Sattapanni on the slope above the old city, with the patronage of Ajatashatru. The account has five hundred arhats assembled under the presidency of Mahakassapa, who is said to have proposed the meeting after hearing a monk remark that they were now free of the teacher's rules.

Upali recited the monastic discipline and Ananda recited the discourses, each answering questions about where and to whom a given text had been delivered, and the pattern of those answers is why every discourse opens by naming a place and an audience. Ananda was admitted only after attaining arhatship overnight, and was then charged with a list of minor faults, among them failing to ask the Buddha which of the lesser rules might be dropped, a question the council could not answer and therefore resolved by changing nothing.

Historians treat the council as a later account of how the canon was thought to have been formed rather than as a datable event, since the different schools describe it differently and a full recitation of the material now in the canon could not have taken place in the time allowed. What the story does record reliably is that the community understood its texts to rest on collective memory checked in assembly rather than on a document.