Place · Buddhist monastic city · India

Nāgārjunakonda

Also known as Nagarjunakonda island museum

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Ikshvaku inscriptions

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

16.522, 79.244

Worth knowing

In the 1960s the excavated monuments were cut apart, numbered, carried uphill and reassembled on what became an island in the reservoir. Its inscriptions record donors from Sri Lanka and beyond — so a university town that once drew students across the Bay of Bengal now sits in a lake, reached by boat.

Connections (6)

• Shared site withVallabhī

  Nagarjunakonda and Vallabhi are both monastic universities that Chinese pilgrims named and that have left almost nothing — Nagarjunakonda because the valley was flooded by a dam in the 1960s and its monuments moved to a hilltop island, Vallabhi because the Maitraka capital in Saurashtra was destroyed and never excavated on any scale. Both were of the first rank in their day, and one of them is now a museum on an artificial island.

• Buddhist Krishna valleyAmarāvatī Mahāstūpa

  Nagarjunakonda and Amaravati are the twin Buddhist capitals of the lower Krishna, raised under the Satavahanas and their Ikshvaku successors and carved in the same limestone idiom — the drum slabs, the crowded narrative panels, the lotus medallions. Nagarjunakonda had monasteries built explicitly for monks from Sri Lanka and from as far as Gandhara, which makes it one of the earliest documented international monastic settlements anywhere.

• Teaching lineageNāgārjuna

  Nāgārjuna is associated by tradition with the lower Krishna valley and the Sātavāhana court, which is why the Ikshvāku monastic city there carries his name. Whether he taught at this site or not, Madhyamaka is the philosophy the valley's monasteries were exporting to Sri Lanka and beyond. His Mūlamadhyamakakārikā argues that nothing has an independent essence, not even emptiness, and it is still the core curriculum in Tibetan monastic education eighteen centuries later.

• TransmissionAnurādhapura

  Nāgārjunakonda's inscriptions record monasteries built specifically for monks from Sri Lanka, and donors from the island — the earliest documentary evidence of a two-way monastic traffic across the Bay of Bengal. The Cholas later crossed the same water with a fleet rather than a delegation. The inscriptions also name donors from as far as the Mediterranean, which makes this Ikshvāku valley the best-documented case of an Indian monastery funded from outside India.

• Succession in timeDamodar

  Nagarjunakonda was dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground for the Nagarjuna Sagar dam, and the Damodar was embanked and dammed by the river valley corporation of the same decade — two faces of the 1950s conviction that a dam was the obvious answer. One moved a monastic city; the other moved population. Both were carried out by a young state that regarded large water engineering as the visible form of development, and both are now argued about.

• Monument relocationAmarārāma, Amarāvatī

  Nagarjunakonda was moved uphill onto an island before the reservoir filled; Amaravati's sculpture was carried off in the nineteenth century to Madras and London. The Krishna valley holds the two opposite fates of Indian Buddhist archaeology — a site relocated to save it and a site dispersed to study it — within sixty kilometres of each other.

On these journeys

• Monastic universities
• Monuments that were moved
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• Krishna–Godavari & eastern Andhra

Sources

Standard reference accounts; site and museum records

• Wikipedia