Place · monastic university · India
Vallabhī
Also known as Vallabhi, Valabhi, Vala, Vallabhipura
Maitraka capital in Saurashtra and, with Nālandā, one of the two great monastic universities Xuanzang and Yijing both name. It taught Hīnayāna against Nālandā's Mahāyāna, drew students from across western India, and its copper-plate grants are a principal source for sixth- to eighth-century Gujarat.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.888, 71.880
Connections (3)
- Shared site withNāgārjunakonda
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.
- Shared sacred geographyJaisalmer Fort
The Śvetāmbara Jain canon was fixed by council at Vallabhī in the fifth century, and the bhandars at Jaisalmer, Patan and Cambay are where the copies were kept and recopied on a schedule for the next eight hundred years. Jain libraries are the single largest reason early Indian manuscripts survive at all, and they preserve Buddhist and Brahminical texts whose own traditions lost them entirely.
- AnalogueNālandā mahāvihāra
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Nagarjunakonda excavation reports, ASI
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