Introduction
Pasenadi was king of Kosala, ruling from his capital at Savatthi, and one of the Buddha's most significant royal patrons and lay followers alongside Bimbisara of Magadha.
Family
- No further family relationships recorded in this tree.
A King in Dialogue
The Pali Canon records numerous conversations between Pasenadi and the Buddha, covering topics from kingship and justice to grief and impermanence, making him one of the most frequently depicted lay interlocutors in the entire canon and a valuable window into how the Buddha's teaching engaged with the practical and emotional concerns of a ruling monarch of the period.
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.