Bimbisara
Bimbisara was the king of Magadha who made a hill kingdom on the lower Ganges the state that would become India's first empire, by marriage, by conquest and by roads, and who is remembered in the Buddhist and Jain scriptures as the patron of both founders and in all the traditions as the father whom his son starved to death in prison. He came to the throne about 544 BC at fifteen, according to the chronicles, of a kingdom whose capital was Rajagriha, a fortress ringed by five hills with the iron mines of the south behind it. The iron was the point, since it made tools for the forest clearance and weapons for the army that the other Ganges kingdoms did not have. He married a princess of Kosala who brought a village of Kashi as her dowry, a princess of the Licchavi confederacy of Vaishali, and a princess of Madra in the Punjab, which gave him three frontiers he did not have to fight on, and he took Anga to the east, with its port of Champa on the river, which gave him the trade of the delta. The administration the sources describe is the first in India with named officers. There were village headmen answerable to the king, officers for the revenue, a standing army, and a road system with the king's own inspection of it. The Buddha came to Rajagriha as a young ascetic and Bimbisara offered him a share of the kingdom, the texts say, and was refused. After the enlightenment the king gave him the Bamboo Grove outside the city as the order's first monastery, and the Jains claim him as Mahavira's disciple with equal confidence. Around 492 BC his son Ajatashatru, impatient, imprisoned him and, by the account the Buddhists preserved, let him die of hunger, or by the Jain account drove him to suicide before the son repented. The dynasty of parricides that followed, the Haryanka, held Magadha until the Nandas took it, and the Nandas until Chandragupta.
- Lived: 558 BCE – 491 BCE
- Nationality: Magadhan
- Roles: king, monarch
