________________
THE KĀŠīs
109
In the Asātarūpa Jātaka, we read that the kingdom of Benares was once seized by the king of Kośala who marched with a great force against Benares, killed the king, and carried off his queen. But the king's son escaped, and later collected a mighty force and came to Benares. He pitched his camp close to the city, and sent a message to the king of Kośala, demanding that he should surrender the kingdom or else give battle. The king informed him that he would give battle. But the young prince's mother sent word to her son advising him not to fight, but to blockade the city on every side, so that the citizens would be worn out for want of food and water. The prince acted on this advice, and the citizens were famished and on the seventh day they beheaded their king and brought his head to the prince. Thus the prince succeeded in regaining his paternal kingdom. On another occasion the kingdom of Benares was seized by a king of Sāvatthi (Śrāvasti) named Vanka, but was soon restored.2
There seems to have been friendly intercourse between the chieftains of Benares and the kings of Magadha, as instanced by the fact that King Bimbisāra sent his own physician Jivaka to attend the son of the Treasurer of Benares, when the young man had twisted his internal organs through practising acrobatics.
The Cambridge History of India (p. 316) informs us that at different periods Kāśi came under the sway of the three successive suzerain powers of N. India—the Purus of Vatsa, the Iksvākus of Kośala and the kings of Magadha; but it seems to have enjoyed independent power between the decline of Vatsa and the rise of Košala, when King Brahmadatta conquered Kośala, possibly about a century and a half before the Buddha's time.
As we have seen, in the early days, Kāśi and Kośala are represented as two independent countries whose kings fought with each other.4 Kāśi and Kośala are frequently mentioned together in literature (e.g. Arguttara Nikāya, V, 59). In the Buddha's time, Kośala was already the paramount power in India. We have seen how several successful invasions of Kāśī had been carried out by the kings of Košala. Kāśi's absorption into Kośala was an accomplished fact before the accession of Pasenadi, for Pasenadi's father Mahākośala gave his daughter a village of Kāśi (Kāsigāma) as 'bath money', on the occasion of her marriage with King Bimbisāra of Magadha.
1 Tātaka, I, p. 409. 2 Ibid., III, pp. 168-9. 3 Vinaya Texts, Pt. II, pp. 184-5 (Mahāvagga, VIII, I). 4 D. R. Bhandarkar, Car. Lec., 1918, p. 55. 5 Jataka, IV, 342; II, 403.
