Nalanda Housed Thousands of Monks on Endowed Village Revenue, and a Tibetan Pilgrim Found Classes Still Running There in 1235

Nalanda, a Buddhist monastery about 70 kilometres from Patna in Bihar, taught monks and visiting scholars for roughly 800 years, according to UNESCO. One of the earliest objects the Archaeological Survey of India dug out of its ruins is a coin of the Gupta king Kumaragupta I, who reigned from about 413 to 455. The coin is among the earliest physical clues to when the place began. How it ended has a longer paper trail and less agreement.

The written picture of its size and daily routine comes from three people who were there: the Chinese monks Xuanzang and Yijing in the seventh century, and a Tibetan pilgrim named Dharmasvamin in the thirteenth. Their figures differ from one another, and each is one traveller’s report.

A king named Sakraditya, and a coin under a floor

Xuanzang left China in 629 and, according to the historian Upinder Singh, spent over five years studying at Nalanda. He recorded a founding story. A king named Sakraditya chose the site and built a monastery, and his successors Buddhagupta, Tathagatagupta, Baladitya and Vajra each added another. A king from Central India then put a high wall with one gate around the lot. In Samuel Beal’s translation, Xuanzang dates Sakraditya “Not long after the Nirvana of Buddha,” which would put him long before the Gupta dynasty.

The excavators found nothing that old. Hirananda Sastri, the Survey’s epigraphist, wrote in his 1942 memoir that no relic had yet been recovered from the site that could definitely be dated before the Imperial Guptas. A. Ghosh, a Survey superintendent, wrote in the 1946 edition of the Survey’s guide that a Kumaragupta coin of the Archer type, found about three feet below a later floor in the lower monastery at Site 4, was one of the earliest finds at Nalanda.

Sastri also read a broken clay seal from the site whose legend includes the words “Sakraditya-karita,” which he took to mean something set up by Sakraditya, and he counted it in favour of Xuanzang’s list of kings. Father H. Heras, a Jesuit historian, argued in 1928 that Sakraditya is a title of Kumaragupta I, since Sakra and Mahendra are both names of the god Indra and Kumaragupta’s coins carry the title Mahendraditya. Counting back reign by reign from Baladitya, Heras put the foundation at about 427. Singh is more careful: “Kumaragupta I and Budhagupta may have built monasteries at Nalanda.”

UNESCO’s listing dates the remains from the third century BCE. The nomination papers, as ICOMOS (UNESCO’s advisory body for cultural sites) summarises them, credit Ashoka with raising the main stupa over relics of the Buddha’s disciple Sariputta. Singh notes that excavations at the site did not reveal pre-Gupta remains, though she adds that recent excavations have apparently revealed some. She also notes that the Chinese pilgrim Faxian, whose travels ran from 399 to 414, does not mention Nalanda.

Either way, the monastery grew up in Magadha, the old heartland of Chandragupta Maurya, under the dynasty whose “golden age” label historians now argue over. Singh adds that it kept royal patronage in the reigns of Harshavardhana and the Palas.

What the Chinese pilgrims counted

Xuanzang’s own Records say the priests of Nalanda numbered “several thousands.” His disciple Huili, in a biography Beal also translated, gives a bigger figure: residents and visitors together “always reach” 10,000. Huili adds that 1,000 of them could explain twenty collections of scriptures and commentaries, 500 could explain thirty, and about ten, Xuanzang among them, could explain fifty. Only the abbot Silabhadra had mastered the whole body. About 100 pulpits were set up for lectures every day.

Yijing, a monk from China who lived at Nalanda for ten years, probably from 675 to 685 by his translator’s reckoning, put the residents at more than 3,000. Takakusu notes that most manuscripts read 5,000 at that point but judges 3,000 correct, and that Yijing’s Memoirs give 3,500. Yijing counted eight halls and 300 apartments, and said the monastery’s lands held more than 200 villages given by kings of many generations. Huili has the king remitting the revenue of about 100 villages, with 200 householders in those villages supplying rice, butter and milk each day. On that income, Huili says, the students did not need to beg for what the text calls the four requisites.

The gatekeeper, and the syllabus

Xuanzang says outsiders who wanted to join the debates were stopped at the gate by a keeper who “proposes some hard questions.” Many could not answer and left. Beal renders the failure rate as “seven or eight to ten,” which reads as seven or eight failures in every ten. Inside, the Records say, the debating ran from morning to night: “The day is not sufficient for asking and answering profound questions.”

Huili lists what was studied: the Great Vehicle, the works of the eighteen schools of Buddhism, and also the Vedas, the Atharvaveda, the Sankhya philosophy, grammar, medicine and the science of causes, which Xuanzang’s Records describe as the method for deciding what is true and false.

Xuanzang was an honoured guest, and Huili records his daily allowance: 120 jambira fruits, 20 areca nuts, 20 nutmegs, an ounce of camphor and a peck of Mahasali rice, a fragrant rice that Huili says grows only in Magadha. Each month came three measures of oil, and attendants with a riding elephant went with him.

A day by the water clock

Yijing describes the routine in practical detail. A water clock set the hours, and when the first hour of the night ended, the sub-director announced it by striking a drum in a loft of the monastery. Because so many monks lived there, worship could not be held in a single place. A precentor, the monk who leads the chanting, went from hall to hall singing hymns, preceded by lay servants carrying incense and flowers. A signal was sounded every morning for the bath at the more than ten large pools near the monastery, and a hundred or a thousand monks would leave together, each with a bathing-sheet. Learned elders rode in sedan chairs and never on horseback.

What the spade found

The site was reduced to mounds near the village of Bargaon. Ghosh says Alexander Cunningham identified them as Nalanda in the 1860s, using the distances and directions the Chinese pilgrims gave, and ICOMOS says the Government of India acquired 48 acres in 1904. The Archaeological Survey began digging in 1915 or 1916, depending on the account, and ICOMOS dates the main excavation to 1916 through 1938.

UNESCO’s statement of the site’s value says the protected area is 23 hectares and holds 11 viharas (residential and teaching monasteries) and 14 temples, besides many smaller shrines. It also says the original complex was much larger. ICOMOS notes that mounds beyond the fence suggest an area of at least two square kilometres, and that Nalanda is said to have had more than 80 viharas at one point.

Ghosh describes the Great Stupa, Site 3, as the result of seven successive accumulations. It began as a very small structure, and the first three stupas, each under 12 feet square, lie buried inside the mound. Monastery Site 1 shows nine levels of occupation, rebuilt on top of one another. Ghosh also reports abundant signs of burnt wooden beams, doors, images and grain, which he reads as at least one general fire after which the people soon returned. A stone inscription found in 1863, dated to the eleventh year of the Pala king Mahipala I (who ruled about 992 to 1040 in Ghosh’s dating), records the destruction of Nalanda by fire and its restoration, according to Ghosh’s list of inscriptions. That fire came long before any Turkish raid.

The Survey went back in the 1970s. Its review of 1973 to 1974 reports that clearance of the Sarai mound, east of the excavated remains, brought out sculptures including Uma-Mahesha, Tara and a Bodhisattva, and a plastered brick wall 22 metres long with two structural phases.

UNESCO inscribed the site in 2016. The ICOMOS evaluation dated 11 March 2016 had recommended deferring the nomination. It said the case for treating Nalanda as a university, as opposed to a monastic complex, was weak, and that the nominated area might not include everything needed to show the site’s value.

The raid on “the fortress of Bihar”

The account usually linked to Nalanda’s end is in the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, written by the Persian chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj. In H. G. Raverty’s translation, Minhaj says he heard it at Lakhnauti in 641 AH (1243 to 1244) from Samsam-ud-Din, a soldier who had served under Muhammad-i-Bakhtiyar Khalji. Bakhtiyar rode to the gate of the fortress of Bihar with two hundred horsemen in armour and took it. Most of the inhabitants were Brahmans with shaven heads, Minhaj says, and those Brahmans were all killed. The fortress held “a great number of books,” and when the conquerors wanted them explained, every Hindu who could have done so was dead. They concluded that the whole fortress was a college, which Minhaj says is called Bihar in the Hindu tongue.

The passage does not name Nalanda, gives no year and says nothing about a fire. Raverty’s footnotes place Bakhtiyar’s move out of Bihar in 589 AH, about 1193.

Historians read it differently. Ghosh, writing for the Survey in 1946, thought it “not unlikely” that Nalanda was meant, and he also cited the 17th-century Tibetan historian Taranatha, who says the Turks did much damage at Nalanda and the monks fled. D. N. Jha, a historian formerly at the University of Delhi, argued in 2014 that the fortress was Odantapuri, the monastery at Bihar Sharif, and that Minhaj “does not refer to Nalanda at all.” Sastri’s memoir puts Bihar Sharif about seven miles from Nalanda and suggests the old fort there may contain Odantapuri. Singh’s textbook says Nalanda was destroyed by the Turks in the 12th and 13th centuries without fixing a date.

About 70 students in 1235

Dharmasvamin, a Tibetan translator and pilgrim, reached Nalanda in 1235 by the editor A. S. Altekar’s reckoning and stayed about six months. He studied under the abbot Rahula Sribhadra, who was over 90, with about 70 students reading under him. By Altekar’s summary he reported that Nalanda had once had seven temples and 14 large and 84 small monasteries. They were damaged and unattended, and only two viharas were usable. The surrounding wall and its east and west gates still stood, with paintings of Tara near the entrances.

Altekar’s introduction to the 1959 edition draws two conclusions. The first is that the library buildings seem to have been destroyed before 1235. The second is that “The general impression that Nalanda was completely destroyed by the beginning of the 13th century is not confirmed by Dharmasvamin’s account.” In the summer of 1235, he adds, about 300 soldiers came to Nalanda while Dharmasvamin and his teacher were sheltering in a temple, and they were not found. Altekar suggests Nalanda survived in part because it sat off the Delhi to Bengal road, was too large to wreck in one raid and had few stone buildings to quarry. Jha cites the same visit to argue that Bakhtiyar did not destroy Nalanda.

ICOMOS, summarising the nomination, says Nalanda was “ravaged and set ablaze” after the Pala rulers and kept running with a small community until about the 14th century. UNESCO’s own text refers to “the sack and abandonment of Nalanda in the 13th Century.”

An Act of Parliament and a campus at Rajgir

The East Asia Summit held at Cebu on 15 January 2007 agreed to support the revival of Nalanda University, and the Hua Hin summit of 25 October 2009 backed its establishment. Parliament passed the Nalanda University Act, No. 39 of 2010, dated 21 September 2010, to set up Nalanda University in Bihar “as an international institution for pursuit of intellectual, philosophical, historical and spiritual studies.” The university says it came into being on 25 November 2010 and was declared an institution of national importance.

Its permanent campus is at Rajgir, in Nalanda district. The Press Information Bureau reports that the Prime Minister inaugurated it on 19 June 2024. It has two academic blocks with 40 classrooms and seating for about 1,900, two 300-seat auditoriums, a hostel for about 550 students and a net-zero design with a solar plant and 100 acres of water bodies. Heads of mission from 17 countries attended. The release quotes the Prime Minister: “Nalanda is the proclamation of the truth that knowledge cannot be destroyed even though books would burn in a fire.”