A brahmin ascetic who went from Sāvatthī to Dakkhiṇāpatha and lived on the banks of the Godhāvarī in a hermitage which lay half in the territory of Assaka and half in that of Alaka.

He received the revenue of a village near by and held a great sacrifice, spending all he possessed. Then to him came a brahmin of terrible mien, demanding five hundred pieces.

When Bāvari told him of his poverty, the brahmin cursed him saying that his head would split in seven pieces. Bāvarī was greatly distressed, but a devatā, seeing his trouble, reassured him by saying that the brahmin knew neither the meaning of “head” nor of “the splitting of it.” “Who then knows it?” asked Bāvarī, and the devatā told him of the appearance in the world of the Buddha. Forthwith he sent his sixteen pupils—Ajita, Tissametteyya, Puṇṇaka, Mettagū, Dhotaka, Upasīva, Nanda, Hemaka, Todeyya, Kappa, Jatukaṇṇī, Bhadrāvudha, Udaya, Posāla, Mogharāja and Piṅgiya to Sāvatthī to see the Buddha and to find out if his claims to Buddha-hood were justified. The pupils went northward, through Alaka, Patiṭṭhāna, Māhissati, Ujjeni, Gonaddha, Vedisa, Vanasavhya (or Tumbava, v.l. Vanasāvatthi), Kosambī, Sāketa and Sāvatthī; then, finding that the Buddha had gone to Rājagaha, they followed him there to the Pāsāṇaka cetiya, passing through Setavyā, Kapilavatthu, Kusinārā, Pāvā, Bhoganagara and Vesāli. When they arrived before the Buddha, they greeted him in the name of Bāvarī, and being satisfied that he bore the characteristic signs of a Great Being, Ajita asked Bāvarī’s question of the Buddha, and when that had been answered, each of the pupils asked him a question in turn, to which the Buddha replied. Snp.976–1148

At that time he was one hundred and twenty years old. Bāvarī was the name of his gotta. He bore on his body three of the marks of a Great Being. Snp.1019