Kaushambi

An ancient city on the Yamuna, held to be the birthplace of Padmaprabha and a place where Mahavira spent a rainy season.

Kaushambi was capital of the Vatsa kingdom, one of the sixteen great janapadas of the Buddha’s era, and is among the better-excavated of the ancient cities the Jain birthplace tradition points to — which makes it, unusually for this corpus, a site where archaeology and scripture can be read side by side rather than tradition standing alone.

The city appears twice in the Jain record: as the birthplace of Padmaprabha, sixth of the Tirthankaras, born there to King Sridhara and Queen Susima of the Ikshvaku line; and, many centuries later in the timeline the tradition keeps, as a city Mahavira himself passed through, spending a rainy-season retreat there during his years of ascetic wandering.

Written for Jain Times. Corrections are welcome — see sources and licences.