Place · monastic university · India

Nālandā mahāvihāra

Also known as Nalanda University, Nalanda University (revived), Nalanda University Act 2010, Nalanda University, Rajgir, Rajgir

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Buddhist monastic records; Xuanzang's account

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

25.136, 85.444

Worth knowing

The account that its library burned for months comes from a Tibetan source written centuries later, and is almost certainly exaggerated. The site was already in decline. What is certain is that it operated as a residential university for some seven hundred years.

Connections (28)

• Succeeds atBihar Sharīf

  The Firdausi shrine of Sharfuddin Yahya Maneri at Bihar Sharif grew up a few kilometres from Nalanda's ruins, on ground where a Buddhist university had taught for seven hundred years until its destruction in the 1190s. One institution of learning and devotion replaced another on the same plain, in a different language and religion, and the town's name — Bihar, from vihara, monastery — kept the older one and eventually gave it to the state.

• Monastic transmissionRatnagiri (Odisha)

  The Odisha monasteries at Ratnagiri, Lalitgiri and Udayagiri went on functioning after the Gangetic viharas were destroyed at the end of the twelfth century, and Ratnagiri's Vajrayana sculpture is among the latest Buddhist work in India. The diamond triangle sits a short distance from Jajpur's Biraja and from Puri, so the region's Buddhist and Shakta landscapes overlap directly — and the absorption of one into the other is visible on the ground.

• Teaching lineageShāradā Peeth

  Sharada Peeth in Kashmir and Nalanda in Magadha were the northern and eastern poles of the medieval learning network, and scholars moved between them: Kashmir sent Buddhist and Shaiva texts east and south, and the Sharada script carried Sanskrit manuscripts across the north for centuries. Both were libraries as much as institutions, and both are ruins — one destroyed in the thirteenth century, the other abandoned by degrees and now on the wrong side of a line of control.

• Traveller routeBodh Gayā / Mahābodhi Temple

  Xuanzang studied at Nalanda for several years under Shilabhadra and made repeated visits to Bodh Gaya, ten kilometres from Gaya and about seventy from the monastery — the two places anchoring his Indian residence. The route recorded here is a representative dated reconstruction from the Great Tang Records, with many stops omitted; his actual itinerary through Magadha doubled back many times over sixteen years.

• Nalanda to Tang ChinaChang’an / Xi’an, China

  Nalanda was the destination and Chang'an was where the results were deposited. Xuanzang studied there for years, Yijing counted its buildings and described its daily routine, and the manuscripts they carried back went into imperial translation bureaus at the Tang capital — Xuanzang's own, at the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, employed dozens of scholars for two decades. The texts that shaped East Asian Buddhism for a millennium came out of this one institution.

• Milindapanha knowledge linkSagala / Sialkot

  Sagala, generally identified with Sialkot, is the setting of the Milindapanha, in which the Indo-Greek king Menander questions the monk Nagasena about the self, continuity and rebirth — a genuine philosophical dialogue between a Greek ruler and a Buddhist teacher, whatever its historicity as a conversation. Nalanda five hundred years later was the institution where that kind of argument was conducted professionally. This is a link in the history of a discipline rather than a route anyone travelled.

• Site adjacencyGayā / Vishnupada

  Gaya and Nalanda are closely connected through the ancient Buddhist landscape of southern Bihar. Gaya, especially Bodh Gaya, became one of Buddhism’s most important pilgrimage centres, while Nalanda developed as a major monastic university. Their proximity enabled movement of monks, pilgrims, teachers and students between two major centres of Buddhist learning and pilgrimage.

• Teaching lineageMithilā / Janakpur

  Mithilā's Nyāya and Nālandā's Buddhist logic are the two great logical traditions of the eastern plain, three hundred kilometres apart. Dignāga and Dharmakīrti argued against the Naiyāyikas and were answered by them; when Nālandā fell, Navya-Nyāya at Mithilā carried the technical vocabulary forward alone. Gangeśa's Tattvachintāmani of about 1300 launched the new logic at Mithilā roughly a century after Nālandā's destruction, so one tradition's end and the other's renewal nearly coincide.

• Life routeXuanzang

  Xuanzang spent about five years at Nālandā in the 630s, studied under Śīlabhadra, and left with six hundred and fifty-seven manuscripts. His account is the fullest description of an Indian monastic university by anyone who lived in one, and much of what is known about Nālandā's scale comes from it.

• Architectural modelOdantapuri

  Nālandā, Odantapurī, Vikramaśilā and Somapura are four Pāla-period mahāvihāras within about two hundred kilometres, deliberately run as a system with shared appointments and standards. Odantapurī's plan went to Samye in Tibet and Somapura's to Southeast Asia; the network exported its architecture as well as its texts. All four were destroyed within a few years of each other around 1200, so a system built over four centuries ended in a single campaign season.

• Teaching lineageTakshashilā / Taxila

  Taxila and Nālandā are the two ends of Indian higher learning and are not the same kind of thing: Taxila was a city where individual teachers took pupils, and Nālandā an endowed corporation with a curriculum, an examination and land revenue. Seven hundred kilometres and eight centuries separate them. Nālandā admitted foreign students by examination at the gate and was funded by the revenue of two hundred villages, an arrangement Taxila's individual teachers had nothing resembling.

• TransmissionDunhuang, China

  Dunhuang's sealed library held Sanskrit and Khotanese manuscripts beside Chinese and Tibetan ones, including texts whose Indian originals are lost entirely. What Nālandā taught survives in some cases only because somebody carried it to a desert oasis and somebody else walled it up. The cave held some fifty thousand manuscripts in seventeen languages and was sealed about 1000, then opened in 1900 and largely dispersed to European and Japanese collections within a decade.

• Teaching lineageVikramashilā

  Vikramaśilā was founded by Dharmapāla partly to supervise Nālandā's standards, and the two ran as one Pāla system with shared appointments. Nālandā was the older and larger; Vikramaśilā became the tantric centre and the one that supplied Tibet with teachers in the last century before both were destroyed. Atiśa was Vikramaśilā's abbot when the Guge kings bought him for Tibet, so the last great Indian transmission north went out through this monastery's appointments.

• CampaignGaur (Lakhnauti)

  Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaigns in Bihar around 1200, run from the Bengal base that became Gaur, are the point after which Nālandā ceases to appear in any record as a working institution. Tibetan accounts describe monks fleeing north with manuscripts; the libraries are said to have burned for months. Minhaj-i-Siraj, writing a generation later, describes a fortified place full of shaven-headed men and books, and says the defenders were killed before anyone could read what was there.

• Maritime routeTamralipta / Tamluk

  Yijing came by sea rather than over the passes, stopping in Srivijaya to learn Sanskrit, landing at Tāmralipta and going up to Nālandā where he stayed about ten years. His account of monastic discipline is the most detailed description of how an Indian mahāvihāra actually ran day to day. He also lists what a monk might own, how meals were timed and how the rains retreat was kept, in the kind of administrative detail no Indian source of the period bothered to write down.

• Succession in timeSharafuddin Manerī

  Sharafuddin Manerī's khānqāh at Bihar Sharīf stands about twelve kilometres from Nālandā, which had been destroyed some hundred and fifty years earlier. A Sufi teaching centre grew on the same ground, in the same district, teaching a different religion out of the same manuscript-and-master arrangement — the second great learning tradition of south Bihar occupying the space the first had left.

• Teaching lineageLuang Prabang

  Luang Prabang's thirty-odd monasteries keep a Theravada practice whose Pali canon, ordination lineage and daily alms round descend in an unbroken institutional line from the Magadhan sangha — by way of Sri Lanka, which preserved the canon when north Indian Buddhism collapsed, and then Thailand. Nalanda's Mahayana scholasticism went east and north and did not survive in India either; the Pali tradition went south, survived, and came back only in the twentieth century.

• Teaching lineagePalembang / Srivijaya

  Yijing stopped at Srivijaya for six months on his way to India in 671 and for several years on the way back, and wrote that a Chinese monk intending to study at Nalanda should spend a year or two at Palembang first to learn Sanskrit grammar. A Sumatran port was a recognised preparatory school for an Indian university. Srivijaya's rulers also endowed a monastery at Nagapattinam under Chola licence, so the traffic was institutional in both directions.

• AnalogueVallabhī

  Xuanzang ranks Valabhi with Nalanda — a hundred monasteries and six thousand monks under Maitraka patronage in Saurashtra — and almost nothing of it has been excavated, while Nalanda is a World Heritage site. One monastic university survives as ruins and the other as a sentence in a Chinese itinerary, which is a fair summary of how this period's evidence works.

• Teaching lineagePhuktal

  Alexander Csoma de Kőrös spent a winter in the cave at Phuktal in the 1820s compiling the first Tibetan-English dictionary, which is where Tibetan lexicography begins. The Buddhist learning that Nalanda lost in about 1200 had by then been carried over the passes and kept in places like this, and a Hungarian in a Zanskari cave is how Europe first got at it.

• Teaching lineageThe Drukpa Kagyu

  Bhutan's state religion traces its authority to a Magadhan monastery. The Drukpa Kagyu descends from Tilopa and Naropa — Naropa taught at Nālandā and later at Phullahari in Bihar — through Marpa the translator, who crossed the Himalaya repeatedly to fetch texts and take teaching, then Milarepa, Gampopa, and Tsangpa Gyare who founded the school about 1180. The tantric corpus it practises is Indian, translated into Tibetan, and recited in Bhutanese dzongs eight centuries later in a language no Bhutanese speaks at home.

• TransmissionDzongkha and the Bhutanese script

  The alphabet Bhutan writes in came from India. The Tibetan script was devised in the seventh century from an Indic model — generally identified as a Gupta-period Brahmi derivative — by an envoy sent south for the purpose, and Bhutan writes it in two hands of its own, the formal ucen and the cursive joyi used by the dzongs. The classical language of Bhutanese religion is literary Tibetan, which exists largely as a vehicle for translated Sanskrit, so the script and its cargo both travelled the same way.

• Site adjacencyKundalpur (Nalanda)

  Kundalpur is a Jain siddhakshetra tied to the birth of Mahavira in the villages of Nalanda district; the Nālandā mahāvihāra is the great Buddhist monastic university a short distance away. They share the district but belong to different religious ensembles.

• Monastic university withVikramashilā

  Vikramashila, Nalanda and Odantapuri together formed the three great Buddhist monastic universities of eastern India through the ninth to twelfth centuries, all three under Pala royal patronage and sharing abbots, teachers and students across their roughly two-hundred-kilometre spread along the Ganga plain. Atisha Dipankara, Vikramashila's most famous abbot, had earlier studied at Nalanda, and the two universities' libraries catalogued and exchanged manuscripts routinely. Both were destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khilji's armies around 1200 CE.

• PatronageDevapāla

  Devapala extended Pala royal patronage of Nalanda through his reign (c. 810–850), expanding the monastic university's endowments and adding substantial building programmes. The Nalanda copper plate charter of his reign records the Shailendra king Balaputradeva of Sumatra endowing a monastery at Nalanda — the earliest documented southeast Asian royal patronage of an Indian institution, which Devapala's own charter made possible by granting five villages' revenue to maintain the Sumatran-founded monastery.

• Monastic foundationŚāntarakṣita

  Śāntarakṣita was the senior abbot of Nālandā mahāvihāra before king Trisong Detsen summoned him to Tibet in the 760s. His Yogācāra-Madhyamaka synthesis is the characteristic Nalanda late-phase scholastic philosophy and the lens through which Tibetan Buddhism continues to read Indian Mahayana.

• Life routeThonmi Sambhota

  Thonmi Sambhota was sent by king Songtsen Gampo in the mid-7th century to study at the Buddhist mahāvihāras of northern India — Nalanda primary among them — and to bring back a usable writing system for Tibetan. He returned with the Lantsa-descended Siddhamātṛkā script of 6-7c north India and devised the Tibetan uchen script from it, used continuously for the 1,350 years since.

• Studied atŚāntarakṣita

  Śāntarakṣita was abbot of Nalanda before his mission to Tibet in the 760s.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• Monastic universities
• Ghurid conquest & the Delhi Sultanate
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Pala & the eastern viharas
• Indian medicine - Āyurveda, Siddha, Unani, Sowa Rigpa
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• Yijing — the sea road to Nālandā (671–695)
• India–China: Buddhist & knowledge exchange
• Tibetan Buddhism — India, Tibet, Mongolia

Sources

Nalanda Mahavihara — UNESCO; Xuanzang travel accounts

• Wikipedia