Journey
Pala & the eastern viharas
For four centuries the Palas endowed the largest monastic institutions in Asia, and Buddhism's last Indian phase was written, carved and cast inside them. When the dynasty went, the endowments went with it — and what these places taught survives in Tibet, in Java and in Burma rather than here.
Stops (10)
- Dharmapāla of Bengal · Dharmapāla — the founder of the system
The ruler who made the Palas the dominant power of the eastern plain and founded Vikramashila and Somapura. His dynasty endowed Buddhism on a scale nobody else in India was still doing, for four hundred years, while its own subjects were turning Vaishnava and Shakta around it.
- Nālandā mahāvihāra · Nālandā — the inheritance
Already six hundred years old when the Palas took it over, and made larger: nine million square feet of brick monasteries, a nine-storey library the Tibetan sources call Ratnodadhi, and a curriculum of logic, grammar, medicine and Madhyamaka that Xuanzang and Yijing both describe from the inside.
- Odantapuri · Odantapuri — the model for Tibet
A Pala foundation at Biharsharif whose plan is said in Tibetan sources to have been the model for Samye, the first monastery built in Tibet. Almost nothing of it survives above ground — the mound was built over — so the best evidence for what it looked like is a monastery a thousand kilometres north.
- Vikramashilā · Vikramashilā — the tantric college
Dharmapala's foundation on the Ganges in Bhagalpur district, laid out as a cruciform stupa inside a square of monastic cells, and the last great centre of Vajrayana scholarship in India. Its abbots were appointed by the Pala court and its graduates carried the Kalachakra and Guhyasamaja north.
- Atiśa Dīpankara Śrījñāna · Atiśa — the export
Abbot here before the king of Guge invited him to western Tibet in 1042, where he spent his last thirteen years reorganising monastic discipline and writing the graded-path text that runs through Tsongkhapa to the present. He is the single most consequential thing these monasteries produced.
- Somapura Mahāvihāra, Paharpur · Somapura, Paharpur — the largest
The biggest Buddhist monastery south of the Himalaya, a Pala foundation in what is now Bangladesh: a cruciform central shrine rising in terraces inside a square of one hundred and seventy-seven cells, with terracotta plaques set into the walls. Its plan was copied in Burma and in Java.
- Pāla bronze casting · The bronzes
Small lost-wax figures in an eight-metal alloy with silver-inlaid eyes, made for monastic and household use and portable enough to travel — which is how the style reached Tibet and Nepal and became theirs. Taranatha names Dhiman and Bitpalo as its founders, which is a rare case of Indian sculptors remembered.
- Lalitagiri · Lalitagiri — the oldest of the Odishan three
Brick monasteries, 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 named monastery
The largest excavated complex in Odisha, with two monasteries, a stepped stupa, rock-cut Buddhas and a stone well whose inscription gives the monastery's own name, Madhavapura Mahavihara — which is rare: most Indian monasteries are known by the modern name of the mound they lie under.
- Ratnagiri (Odisha) · Ratnagiri — the last phase
The largest and latest of the Odishan monasteries, with two great brick viharas, a stupa and a mass of Vajrayana sculpture, and occupation continuing after the Gangetic foundations had fallen. Tibetan tradition makes it a centre of the Kalachakra, which is why it appears in Tibetan sources at all.