Person · Pala emperor · India
Dharmapāla of Bengal
The second Pala ruler, who held Kannauj for a time and made his dynasty the dominant power of the eastern plain, and who founded Vikramashila and Somapura — the two institutions that carried Indian Buddhism's last scholastic phase and exported it north.
- Date
- 770–810
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.323, 87.286
Worth knowing
The Palas are the last Indian dynasty to endow Buddhism on a large scale, and they did it for about four hundred years while their own subjects were becoming Vaishnava and Shakta. When Pala patronage ended in the twelfth century the monasteries had no other income and did not survive the decade.
About the place
Placed at Vikramashila, which he founded and which is the monument most securely attributed to him. His capitals were at Pataliputra and Monghyr; no Pala palace site has been excavated.
Connections (3)
- PatronageSomapura Mahāvihāra, Paharpur
Somapura at Paharpur is Dharmapala's foundation and the largest Buddhist monastery ever built south of the Himalaya — a cruciform terraced shrine inside a square of a hundred and seventy-seven cells, faced in terracotta plaques of a startlingly secular kind: wrestlers, musicians, animals, couples. The plan travelled: the cruciform terraced temple appears afterwards at Pagan in Burma and in Java, carried by monks rather than by any conquest.
- CampaignMihira Bhoja
The Pratiharas, the Palas and the Rashtrakutas fought over Kannauj for a century and a half — the tripartite struggle, in which each took the city at least once and none could hold it. Dharmapala installed his own candidate on its throne; Mihira Bhoja eventually held it for a generation. The contest exhausted all three and is the immediate reason the north had no single power when the Ghurids arrived three centuries later.
- SucceededDevapāla
Devapala succeeded his father Dharmapala about 810 CE as the third Pala ruler, inheriting the Vikramashila and Somapura monastic foundations his father had made and extending the dynasty's reach to its maximum under his reign — from Kamarupa east to Kannauj west, Himalayas north to Vindhyas south. His forty years at the Pala throne are the dynasty's territorial and institutional peak before the slow erosion that began under his nephew Vigrahapala.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Dharmapala of Bengal”. Taranatha, History of Buddhism in India (trans. Chattopadhyaya); Archaeological Survey of India excavation reports for Nalanda, Vikramashila, Paharpur and the Odisha sites.
Open Dharmapāla of Bengal in the repository →