Nalanda, Ancient India's Great University

Near the ancient city of Rajagriha in present-day Bihar, archaeologists have uncovered the sprawling brick remains of what is widely regarded as the world's earliest surviving example of a residential university: Nalanda (Archaeological Survey of India, Nalanda Mahavihara excavation record^[3]). Founded in the early fifth century CE and active for roughly the next seven to eight hundred years, Nalanda drew students and teachers from across Asia to study Buddhist philosophy, its founding subject, along with grammar, logic, medicine, astronomy, and the Vedas (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Nalanda"^[2]). Ancient India had other notable centers of higher learning, including the much older, less formally structured teaching center at Taxila (Takshashila) in the northwest, and the later Vikramashila, founded under the Pala dynasty, but Nalanda's scale, documentation, and longevity make it the best-known example of ancient India's tradition of organized higher education (NCERT, chapter on ancient Indian centres of learning^[1]).

Who founded Nalanda?

Nalanda was most probably founded by the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, who reigned from about 415 to 455 CE. No founding inscription survives, so the answer is pieced together. Xuanzang's seventh-century account names the founder as a king called Shakraditya; historians, comparing this name with Gupta titles and with royal seals excavated at the site, generally identify Shakraditya with Kumaragupta I, whose titles included Mahendraditya (Sukumar Dutt, Buddhist Monks and Monasteries of India, p. 329^[4]). That places Nalanda's founding in the same Gupta period that also produced Aryabhata's astronomy and Kalidasa's poetry.

Who kept Nalanda going after the Guptas?

Kumaragupta's successors continued to expand the institution, and later rulers well beyond the Gupta dynasty kept supporting it: the seventh-century emperor Harsha granted revenue from a hundred villages to support Nalanda's upkeep, and inscriptions show that not all of its patrons were Buddhist: some donor seals carry images of Hindu deities such as Lakshmi and Shiva, a sign that its royal and elite support reached beyond Buddhists. From around the eighth century, the Buddhist Pala dynasty of Bengal and Bihar became Nalanda's principal patrons, and the university's teaching increasingly reflected the Palas' own preference for the Vajrayana, or tantric, tradition of Buddhism, alongside its older Mahayana curriculum.

What was it like to study at Nalanda?

By the account of the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who studied at Nalanda in the 630s CE under the renowned teacher Shilabhadra, the university housed over a thousand teachers and maintained a demanding curriculum and admissions process open to visiting scholars from across Asia. The figure of ten thousand resident monks, given by Xuanzang's biographer Huili, is treated with some skepticism by modern historians, who note that the excavated residential and teaching space at the site would struggle to support a population that large (Sukumar Dutt, pp. 339–40^[4]), though Nalanda clearly operated at a scale unmatched by any other institution of its time. Xuanzang eventually returned to China with several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts, and he spent the rest of his life translating them; a second Chinese pilgrim, Yijing, spent about a decade at Nalanda later in the seventh century and likewise carried Sanskrit texts and Buddhist relics back to China (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Nalanda"^[2]). Through pilgrims like these, Nalanda functioned as one of the major channels through which Indian Buddhist philosophy, along with Indian achievements in logic, grammar, and the sciences, reached East Asia.

When was Nalanda destroyed? The 1200 CE attack and the evidence behind it

Nalanda's life as a great university ended around 1200 CE, but how it ended is less settled than the popular story suggests. The usual account credits the Turkic commander Bakhtiyar Khilji, whose forces raided Bihar in the last years of the twelfth century, part of the Turkic conquests that would found the Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The main written source for that campaign, Minhaj-i-Siraj's Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, written some sixty years later, describes the sack of a fortified monastery full of shaven-headed "Brahmans" and books, but it does not name Nalanda; many historians think it describes nearby Odantapuri (Sukumar Dutt, p. 347^[4]). A raid on Nalanda itself in the same campaign is likely but is inferred rather than recorded (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Nalanda"^[2]). On the ground, excavators found a thick layer of ash across many of the site's buildings, consistent with a major fire, though archaeology alone cannot say who set it, and the site also shows signs of earlier fires and rebuilding.

The clearest eyewitness is the Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin, who reached Nalanda in 1235. He found it damaged and largely deserted but still functioning on a much smaller scale: a small community of monks studying under the elderly teacher Rahula Shribhadra, supported by a local lay patron, and hiding when soldiers came through (Sukumar Dutt, pp. 341, 347–48^[4]). Nalanda was also already weakened before any raid. The Pala kings who had funded it for four centuries lost power in the twelfth century, newer monasteries such as Vikramashila competed for students and patrons, and Buddhism itself was shrinking in north India. The vivid story of a library that burned for months comes from Tibetan histories written centuries afterwards, which also give other culprits, and is best read as legend. Most historians now describe a violent blow falling on an institution already in decline, followed by a slow fade, rather than one day of destruction.

The Archaeological Survey of India began systematically excavating the site in 1915, work that continued in phases through the twentieth century, and in 2016 UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara as a World Heritage Site, recognizing it as physical evidence of more than seven centuries of organized higher education (UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara"^[5]).

Nalanda timeline