Indian History Quiz: Ancient Universities: Takshashila, Nalanda and Vikramashila

Xuan Zang, also written Hiuen Tsang, travelled in India in the seventh century of the Christian era, during the reign of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, which is roughly fourteen hundred years before our own time.

The Gupta ruler Kumaragupta I founded the Nalanda Mahavihara in the fifth century of the Christian era near Rajgir in present-day Bihar, and a seal bearing his name has been found at the site.

The Pala king Dharmapala founded Vikramashila at Antichak in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar about the turn of the ninth century, and it became famous for tantric studies and for the scholars called dvarapanditas who examined candidates at its gates.

Takshashila, called Taxila by Greek and later English writers, was the capital of the Mahajanapada of Gandhara in the north-west of the subcontinent, in what is now the Rawalpindi district of Pakistan, and it was already a famous centre of learning in the time of the Buddha.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang studied the Yogachara philosophy at Nalanda under Shilabhadra, who was then the aged head of the monastery, during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century.

Atisha Dipankara Srijnana was the most famous teacher of Vikramashila, the Pala monastery at Antichak in Bhagalpur, and in the eleventh century he was invited to Tibet, where he reformed Buddhist practice and is remembered as one of its great masters.

Gopala, the founder of the Pala dynasty in the eighth century, established the Odantapuri monastery in the region of Bihar Sharif, and its plan is said to have been followed when the first monasteries were built in Tibet.

Valabhi, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, was the capital of the Maitraka rulers and a famous centre of Hinayana Buddhist learning; the pilgrim I-tsing wrote that it stood beside Nalanda in reputation, and students went from there into royal service.

Later Tibetan accounts call the library of Nalanda Dharmaganja, the treasury of the law, and say that it consisted of three buildings named Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka, the tallest of which is described as a nine-storeyed structure.

Ikhtiyaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a commander in the service of the Ghurids, overran Bihar at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century and destroyed the monastic universities of the region, after which organised Buddhist learning in eastern India came to an end.

As Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall carried out long excavations at Taxila from 1913 onwards and published a detailed account of the city's successive settlements; the site was later inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.