Introduction
Anathapindika was a wealthy merchant of Savatthi and one of the Buddha's foremost lay patrons, whose generosity funded one of early Buddhism's most important monastic sites.
Family
- No further family relationships recorded in this tree.
Buying the Jeta Grove in Gold
According to the traditional account, Anathapindika wished to purchase Prince Jeta's grove near Savatthi to donate it to the Buddha and the Sangha, but Jeta, not wishing to sell, set an impossibly high price: as much gold as it would take to cover the entire grove's ground. Anathapindika accepted the challenge and did so, and the resulting Jetavana monastery became one of the most important sites in the Buddha's teaching career, where he is recorded as having spent a large portion of his later monastic residences and delivered many of the Pali Canon's discourses.
This article follows the Pali Canon and its commentarial tradition as the primary early Buddhist textual source; where sources genuinely disagree on a detail (such as an exact parentage), that disagreement is noted rather than resolved into a single invented certainty.