Journey
Monastic universities
Endowed residential monasteries that taught logic, grammar, medicine and astronomy alongside doctrine, admitted foreign students by examination at the gate, and were funded by land grants rather than fees. Between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries they were the largest organised teaching institutions anywhere. Nalanda, Vikramashila and Odantapuri were destroyed within a few decades of each other around 1200, and the lineages that survived did so in Tibet.
Stops (10)
- Takshashilā / Taxila · Takshashilā — before the mahāvihāras
Not a university in the later sense but a city where teachers took pupils, named in the Jātakas as where princes were sent and traditionally where Pānini and Chānakya studied. Its Dharmarājikā stupa and Aramaic Ashokan inscription mark a place where Achaemenid, Greek, Mauryan and Kushan worlds all passed through.
- Nālandā mahāvihāra · Nālandā — the debating engine
A Gupta foundation that ran for seven hundred years with several thousand resident students, admitted by examination at the gate, funded by two hundred villages. Madhyamaka and Yogāchāra were argued out here, and Xuanzang stayed five years. Bakhtiyar Khalji's raid about 1200 ended it.
- Vikramashilā · Vikramaśilā — tantra and the road to Tibet
A Pāla foundation set up partly to oversee Nālandā's standards, and the last great centre of tantric Buddhist learning. It appointed the scholars who went north: Atiśa was its abbot before Guge bought him for Tibet, which is how the Indian tradition survived its own destruction.
- Odantapuri · Odantapurī — the plan that travelled
The earliest Pāla mahāvihāra, at Bihar Sharif, and the one whose ground plan Tibetan tradition says was copied for Samye, Tibet's first monastery. Almost nothing of it survives above ground; what it exported is better preserved than what it was.
- Somapura Mahāvihāra, Paharpur · Somapura — the largest of them all
At Pāharpur in Bengal, a Pāla quadrangle of a hundred and seventy-seven cells around a cruciform central shrine — the largest Buddhist monastery south of the Himalaya. Its plan is the model for monastic building in Burma, Java and Cambodia, and the terracotta plaques on it run to thousands.
- Vallabhī · Vallabhī — the western rival
Maitraka capital in Saurashtra and the one western Indian centre Xuanzang and Yijing both rank with Nālandā. It taught Hīnayāna where Nālandā taught Mahāyāna, and a Jain council held there fixed the Śvetāmbara canon — so its influence runs into two religions.
- Ratnagiri (Odisha) · The diamond triangle — Ratnagiri, Lalitgiri, Udayagiri
Three Odishan monasteries within a few kilometres, a Vajrayāna centre that flourished long after Buddhism thinned elsewhere in India. Ratnagiri's carved doorway is the finest of its kind surviving, and the complex was still active when the Bengal mahāvihāras had gone.
- Nāgārjunakonda · Nāgārjunakonda — endowed by queens
An Ikshvāku monastic city on the Krishna whose inscriptions record women of the royal house as the principal donors, and monasteries built specifically for monks from Sri Lanka and from as far as the Mediterranean. The valley was flooded by a dam in the 1960s and the monuments moved to an island.
- Lalitagiri · Lalitagiri — the relic casket
The oldest of the three Odishan monastic sites, with brick viharas, an apsidal chaitya and a hilltop stupa in which a casket of gold, silver and steatite holding bone relics was found intact in 1985 — the only excavated relic deposit in Odisha. Kharoshthi-marked sherds here point to contact with the north-west.
- Udayagiri (Odisha) · Udayagiri — the monastery that names itself
The largest excavated Buddhist complex in Odisha: two monasteries, a stepped stupa, rock-cut Buddhas, and a stone well whose inscription gives the establishment's own name, Madhavapura Mahavihara. Most Indian monasteries are known only by the modern name of the mound they lie under, which makes this unusual.