Place · monastic university · India
Vikramashilā
Also known as Vikramashila, Vikramaśilā & the Pala vihara plan, Vikramaśīla Mahāvihāra, Vikramshila
Vikramaśīla, on the Ganga near Antichak in Bhagalpur district of Bihar, was the greatest tantric Buddhist university of the Pala period, founded by king Dharmapala in the late 8th century. Along with Nalanda and Odantapuri it formed the triangle of Pala-era mahāvihāras that transmitted late Indian Mahayana and Vajrayana to Tibet and East Asia. The university's abbot Atiśa Dīpaṃkara travelled to Tibet in 1042 and spent his last 13 years there, founding the Kadam school from which the Gelug tradition of the Dalai Lamas descends. The site was sacked by Bakhtiyar Khalji's cavalry around 1203 and lay forgotten until the ASI excavations of 1960-69 revealed the great central stupa, 208 cells of the monastic quadrangle, and the attached library building.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Pala monastic records; Tibetan histories
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.323, 87.286
Connections (10)
- CampaignGaur (Lakhnauti)
Vikramashila's destruction is dated to Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaign in Bihar around 1200, the same series of raids that ended Nalanda and Odantapuri. Gaur and Pandua, the Bengal sultanate capitals that grew afterwards, are the successor political centres of the same territory. The monasteries did not simply fall to violence: they depended on Pala royal endowment, and when the dynasty went the institutions had no other source of income.
- Site adjacencyAnga kingdom
Bhagalpur and Vikramashila are connected through the famous Buddhist university established near the Ganga during the Pala period. Vikramashila became one of India’s great centres of Buddhist learning, alongside Nalanda and Odantapuri. Its location near Bhagalpur demonstrates the region’s importance as a centre of scholarship, monastic culture and intellectual exchange in eastern India.
- Life routeAtiśa Dīpankara Śrījñāna
Atiśa was abbot at Vikramaśilā when the Guge kings of western Tibet asked for him, and left about 1040 at nearly sixty. He never came back. The Indian tradition's transmission to Tibet runs through this one monastery's appointments in its last century and a half. The Guge kings' invitation is said to have cost a weight of gold and the life of an earlier king taken hostage trying to raise it, which is what the transmission was worth to them.
- Teaching lineageNālandā mahāvihāra
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.
- Teaching lineageOdantapuri
Odantapurī, Vikramaśilā, Nālandā and Somapura were Pāla foundations operating as a single system within about two hundred kilometres of each other, with scholars moving between them and a shared curriculum. When Bakhtiyar Khalji's campaigns reached Bihar around 1200 the whole network went at once. Tibetan accounts describe monks fleeing north with manuscripts, and much of what Nālandā taught survives today only in Tibetan translation rather than in any Indian language.
- TransmissionTabo Monastery, Spiti
Scholars leaving Vikramaśilā carried tantric Buddhism north into the western Himalaya and Tibet, and Tabo was founded in 996 by the Guge kings who were buying that transmission. Atiśa, Vikramaśilā's abbot, passed through on his way to Tibet in the 1040s. Tabo has never been abandoned since 996, which makes it the oldest continuously functioning Buddhist monastery in India and the best-preserved interior of that transmission anywhere.
- Monastic transmissionRumtek Monastery, Sikkim
Vikramashila's destruction around 1200 scattered its teachers, and the Tibetan lineages they had already founded became the institutional memory of Indian Vajrayana. Shakyashribhadra, its last abbot, fled to Tibet in 1204 with a body of texts and ordained widely there. What was taught on the Ganges at Bhagalpur is now taught at Rumtek, Hemis and the Kagyu and Gelug monasteries, in Tibetan translation, from manuscripts that left in the same decade the buildings came down.
- Monastic university withNālandā mahāvihāra
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.
- Monastic foundationAtiśa Dīpaṃkara
Atiśa Dīpaṃkara was the senior abbot of Vikramaśīla mahāvihāra on the Ganga before king Yeshe-Ö of Guge invited him to Tibet in 1042. Vikramaśīla, founded by the Pala king Dharmapala in the late 8th century, was the greatest tantric Buddhist university of its age and the primary training ground of the generation of Indian masters who transmitted late Mahayana to Tibet.
- Studied atAtiśa Dīpaṃkara
Atiśa was abbot of Vikramaśīla before his invitation to Tibet in 1042.
On these journeys
Sources
Vikramashila — ASI; Pala period Buddhist universities
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