Nalanda, Vikramshila and Ancient Learning in Bihar

For nearly seven centuries the monasteries of Bihar were the centre of higher learning for the whole of Asia. Students came from Tibet, China, Korea, Java and Sri Lanka to study logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy and the Buddhist canon at Nalanda, Vikramshila and Odantapuri, and the accounts those travellers left behind are the main evidence historians still use. The word Bihar itself comes from vihara, the Sanskrit and Pali term for a Buddhist monastery, because this land was covered with them. BPSC, Bihar Police and BSSC papers ask a steady set of facts from this chapter, so learn the founder, the patron, the famous teacher and the destroyer of each institution.

Nalanda Mahavihara

Nalanda stands in Nalanda district near Rajgir, at the village of Bargaon. The monastic university was founded in the fifth century by the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta the first, who is remembered in the records by the title Shakraditya, and later rulers added to it, among them Harshavardhana of Kanauj and the Pala kings of Bengal and Bihar. Its teaching was chiefly Mahayana Buddhism, but it also taught the Vedas, logic, grammar, medicine and the Samkhya philosophy, and admission was famously hard, the gatekeeper scholar questioning every applicant before he was allowed in. Nalanda is also associated with Sariputta, the chief disciple of the Buddha, who is said to have been born and to have died near it. Excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India have uncovered rows of monasteries facing a line of temples, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016.

The travellers and the library

The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, also written Xuanzang, reached Nalanda in the seventh century during the reign of Harshavardhana and studied there for several years under the abbot Shilabhadra, leaving a detailed description of its courts, towers and daily routine in his travel account. A second Chinese monk, I Tsing, also written Yijing, stayed in the following decades and wrote about the rules that governed the monks. The library of Nalanda was called Dharmaganja, the treasury of truth, and had three buildings, Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka, Ratnodadhi being described as nine storeys high. Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Dharmapala, Dharmakirti and Shantarakshita are among the scholars connected with the tradition of Nalanda.

Vikramshila and Odantapuri

Vikramshila was founded in the late eighth century by the Pala king Dharmapala at Antichak in Bhagalpur district, on a bluff above the Ganga, as a rival and a complement to Nalanda. Its special subject was Tantra, the Vajrayana form of Buddhism, and its best known head was Atisha Dipankara Srijnana, who left for Tibet in the eleventh century and reformed Buddhism there, which is why Vikramshila matters so much in Tibetan accounts. Odantapuri, at present day Biharsharif in Nalanda district, was founded by Gopala, the first Pala king, and is the monastery from which the name Bihar is usually traced. Telhara, the ancient Tiladhaka, is a fourth monastic site of the region now under excavation.

Destruction and memory

At the end of the twelfth century Bakhtiyar Khalji, a commander in the service of the Ghurids, overran this part of the Ganga plain and sacked the monasteries. Odantapuri and Vikramshila were destroyed around the same campaign and Nalanda was laid waste soon after, the monks killed or scattered and the libraries burnt. With the monasteries gone, organised Buddhist learning in eastern India came to an end, and the tradition survived mainly in Tibet, carried there by scholars such as Atisha and Shantarakshita.

Nalanda in our own time

The modern Nalanda University was set up at Rajgir by an Act of Parliament passed in 2010, as an international university supported by partner countries of the East Asia Summit, and it admitted its first students in 2014. It is deliberately placed near the ancient ruins so that the new institution carries forward the name. For examinations it is enough to remember that the ancient Nalanda Mahavihara and the new Nalanda University are different institutions separated by more than eight hundred years, and that the ruins and the new campus both lie in Nalanda district of Bihar.