Ajatashatru
Ajatashatru took Magadha from his father Bimbisara by imprisoning him, conquered the Licchavi republic of Vaishali in a sixteen-year war with catapults and a covered chariot with blades that the texts describe as new inventions, built the fort on the Ganges at the village of Pataligrama that became Pataliputra, and was the king in whose reign the Buddha and Mahavira died and the first Buddhist council met; he was killed by his own son, as his father had been by him, and the chronicles say the same of the next three. He came to the throne about 492 BC. The war with Kosala began at once, because the king of Kosala took back the village that had been his sister's dowry when he heard how her husband had died, and ended with Ajatashatru captured, released and married to the Kosalan king's daughter, with the village. The war with Vaishali was the one that mattered. The Licchavis were an oligarchy of clans across the river, the model of the republics the Buddha praised, and the texts have him send a minister to ask the Buddha whether they could be beaten, be told that they could not while they kept their assemblies and their unity, and set his minister to sowing discord among them for three years until they could. The fort at the confluence, built as a base against them, became the capital of every empire of northern India for the next eight hundred years. He was the patron the Buddhist texts had to explain. He was a parricide who came to the Buddha and confessed, was told that his crime was too great for the fruit of the path in this life, and who nevertheless claimed a share of the relics after the cremation at Kushinagar, built a stupa over them at Rajagriha, and sheltered the five hundred monks who fixed the canon in the cave outside the city in the rains after the death. The Jains have him as Mahavira's devotee and give the same story of the father with a different ending. He was killed about 460 BC by his son Udayin, who moved the court to the fort his father had built.
- Lived: 520 BCE – 460 BCE
- Nationality: Magadhan
- Roles: king, monarch
