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In the autumn of 1193, a cavalry column led by the Turkish general Bakhtiyar Khilji arrived at the walls of a monastery-city in the Magadha region of Bihar. What happened over the following days was recorded by the Persian chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani in the Tabakat-i-Nasiri, written some sixty years later. Khilji’s forces killed the monks, burned the buildings, and set fire to a library so large that, according to tradition, the smoke rose for three months. The men who survived were scattered. The institution they had inhabited for seven centuries was not rebuilt.
The place was Nalanda. At the moment of its destruction, it was probably the largest centre of organised learning in the world. Students from China, Korea, Tibet, Java, Persia, and Turkey had been travelling to study there for generations. Its library held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. Its faculty included the finest logicians, physicians, and grammarians of the Buddhist scholarly tradition. None of this saved it.
The king who decided a monastery should become a university
The story of Nalanda ancient university India begins not with a dramatic founding gesture but with an act of royal patronage that started small. The Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, who ruled the Magadha region from approximately 415 to 455 CE, granted the revenues of a village to support a sangha, a community of Buddhist monks, at a site already associated with the Buddha himself. Tradition held that the Buddha had taught at Nalanda, and the Jain tradition claimed that Mahavira had spent fourteen rainy seasons nearby. The land carried weight before a single lecture hall was built.
Kumaragupta’s donation was not unusual. Wealthy patrons across northern India endowed monasteries as a form of merit-making. What made Nalanda different was what subsequent donors decided to do with the foundation. Kumaragupta’s son Skandagupta added a monastery. Later Gupta rulers, and then a succession of local rulers and foreign kings, continued adding: more monasteries, libraries, temples, lecture halls, and guest quarters for visiting scholars. Each generation of donors found an institution that had grown more prestigious than the one the previous generation had funded, and each new endowment made it more prestigious still.
By the time the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang arrived in 629 CE, the site had been accumulating this compound interest in reputation and stone for nearly two centuries.
What Xuanzang found when he arrived
Xuanzang had already walked thousands of miles by the time he reached Nalanda. He had left Chang’an without imperial permission, crossed the Gobi Desert, travelled through Central Asia, and descended into northern India over the Hindu Kush. He was twenty-seven years old and had come specifically to study at Nalanda, which Chinese Buddhist scholars knew of as the supreme source of authentic doctrine. He would spend the next five years there.
His account, recorded in the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions and supplemented by his biography written by his disciple Huili, gives the fullest picture of Nalanda at its height. The compound stretched across roughly thirty acres. There were eight separate halls and three hundred apartments, built in a line running north to south with a corridor connecting them. Ten temples stood within the walls. The dormitories housed, by Xuanzang’s estimate, ten thousand monks and students at any one time, served by two hundred villages whose tax revenues supported the institution.
Xuanzang describes the admissions examination administered at the gate. A scholar-doorman questioned each applicant on grammar, logic, and Buddhist philosophy before deciding whether they were qualified to enter. Most were turned away. Of those admitted, Xuanzang notes, the majority could master only twenty works from the curriculum; the exceptional scholar might command thirty. The complete curriculum, running from the Vedic texts through Buddhist logic, medicine, Sanskrit grammar, and heterodox philosophy, was beyond any single student to exhaust.
The abbot when Xuanzang arrived was Shilabhadra, then in his late nineties, who had declined an invitation from the king of Magadha to die in a sacred place in order to remain and continue teaching. Xuanzang studied under him directly, reading the Yogacarabhumi-shastra, a foundational text of the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy that Shilabhadra had spent decades interpreting. The relationship between the elderly Indian abbot and the young Chinese monk is one of the more affecting scholarly partnerships in the ancient world, across a language barrier that Xuanzang had spent years working to overcome.
The library that took three months to burn
The Dharmaganja, the library complex at Nalanda, occupied three large buildings known as the Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi, and Ratnaranjaka: the Ocean of Jewels, the Sea of Jewels, and the Jewel-adorned. These names were not metaphorical in the way such names usually are. The buildings were filled with manuscripts. The Ratnodadhi alone was said to be nine storeys high, housing texts that monks had been copying, protecting, and annotating for centuries.
What these manuscripts contained is partly recoverable from Xuanzang’s curriculum notes and from the works that scholars carried out of Nalanda before and after its destruction. They included medical texts, astronomical treatises, Sanskrit grammatical works, Vedic commentaries, the complete range of Mahayana Buddhist philosophical literature, and texts on logic that represented the most sophisticated formal reasoning produced anywhere in the ancient world. The logician Dharmakirti, who studied and taught at Nalanda in the 7th century, developed theories of inference and perception that would not be matched in rigour, according to several contemporary philosophers, until Gottlob Frege in the 19th century.
Almost none of the Dharmaganja’s contents survive. A small number of texts were carried out by pilgrims like Xuanzang, who returned to China with hundreds of manuscripts in his luggage and spent the remaining twenty years of his life translating them. Others were preserved in Tibetan translation by scholars like Atisha Dipankara, who studied at Nalanda in the early 11th century before travelling to Tibet at the age of sixty to teach. What Atisha carried northward into the Himalayas is a significant portion of what Tibetan Buddhism became.
The scholars who made Nalanda what it was
Beyond Xuanzang and Shilabhadra, Nalanda produced or housed a remarkable succession of individuals whose work shaped Buddhist and Indian intellectual history.
Dharmapala, abbot in the late 6th century, wrote extensive commentaries on Dignaga’s works on logic and perception, establishing the Yogacara school’s philosophical position against its critics. His student Silabhadra, the same man Xuanzang would find still working in his nineties, carried this tradition forward and gave it to the Chinese tradition through Xuanzang’s translations.
Dharmakirti, who taught at Nalanda in the 7th century, is the figure whose reputation sits most uneasily with the institution’s relative obscurity in Western scholarship. His seven treatises on logic and epistemology, particularly the Pramanavarttika, argue with extraordinary technical precision about the foundations of valid knowledge. He was controversial in his own time, his arguments were contested by Brahmanical scholars and by other Buddhist schools, and his influence spread east to Tibet and China rather than west.
Yijing, a second Chinese pilgrim who arrived at Nalanda in 671 CE, stayed for ten years before returning to China by sea via Southeast Asia. He translated seventy-two texts into Chinese, a figure that suggests the rate at which a single dedicated scholar could work through the library’s contents. His account of Nalanda is notably more prosaic than Xuanzang’s, focused on the daily schedule of prayer, study, and debate, and on the 3,500 monks he counted in residence during his time there.
Atisha Dipankara, born in Bengal around 980 CE, came to Nalanda after studying with masters across Bengal and Bihar. He became head of Nalanda’s philosophical faculty, or something equivalent to it; the exact institutional terminology is uncertain, before departing for Tibet at the invitation of the Tibetan king Jangchub Ö. His systematic presentation of the Buddhist path, the Bodhipathapradipa, became the founding document of one of Tibet’s major monastic traditions.
Why a cavalry general burned a library
The question of what exactly happened in 1193 is one the sources do not fully answer. Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani’s account in the Tabakat-i-Nasiri is the primary written record of the destruction. Juzjani was not present; he was writing sixty years after the event, in a court context that celebrated Khilji’s campaigns in Bengal and Bihar as victories of Islam over infidel territory. His account of Nalanda is brief, ambiguous in detail, and subject to considerable scholarly dispute.
What seems clear from the archaeology is that Nalanda was burned, and burned comprehensively enough that the excavations carried out by the Archaeological Survey of India from 1915 onward found a consistent layer of ash across the site. The burning was not incidental; it was thorough. Whether it occurred in a single assault or across several raids, and whether Khilji himself directed it or whether it was carried out by soldiers acting without specific orders, remains contested.
The condition of Nalanda before Khilji’s arrival also matters. The institution had been weakening for a century. The Pala dynasty, which had been Nalanda’s most reliable source of royal patronage since the 8th century, collapsed in the 1160s and 1170s under pressure from the Sena kings, who were Brahmanical rather than Buddhist in their religious orientation. The endowments that had supported ten thousand monks required sustained royal patronage; without it, the institution had been contracting. How many monks were still in residence in 1193, and what the library still contained, is unknown.
The shock of the destruction was real regardless of the institution’s condition. Tibetan histories record laments for Nalanda as a catastrophe for Buddhist learning. The surviving scholars scattered, some northward to Tibet, some eastward to Bengal and Southeast Asia. The tradition they carried with them was incomplete.
What the ground still holds
The site of Nalanda was located with reasonable confidence by archaeologists in the early 20th century based on Xuanzang’s detailed directional notes and distance measurements, and systematic excavation began in 1915 under the Archaeological Survey of India. The excavations revealed a series of monasteries and temples arranged in the pattern Xuanzang described, confirming both the general layout and the scale of the compound.
What the excavations also found was an institution that had been rebuilt multiple times. Each monastery, when stripped down to its foundations, revealed an earlier monastery beneath it, and an earlier one beneath that. The compulsive reconstruction was partly devotional, building over and incorporating an earlier sacred structure was itself an act of merit, and partly practical: each generation of patrons wanted to associate their names with a living institution, which meant building new structures that incorporated rather than replaced the old.
The copper plate inscriptions found at Nalanda are among the most significant documentary records of the institution. Issued by various Gupta and Pala rulers, they record the grants of villages to the monastery, naming the villages, the donors, and sometimes the purpose of the endowment. They are not student records in the way that a European university matriculation register would be; they are property documents and royal proclamations. But they establish the institution’s patrons, its geographic reach, and the incremental accumulation of endowments over centuries.
Genealogy research note: what records survive from Nalanda, and where to find them
Nalanda presents a categorically different archival situation from the European universities on this site. There are no matriculation registers, no degree certificates, no battels books recording what students ate and owed. The institution that Xuanzang attended kept records, almost certainly, but they burned with the Dharmaganja library. What survives has been preserved through different channels and is held in different kinds of repositories.
The Archaeological Survey of India holds the excavation reports from the Nalanda site, published from 1915 onward. These reports name the structures, describe the finds (seals, inscriptions, sculptures, coins) and provide the primary documentation of the physical institution. The site is now a UNESCO World Heritage property, and the ASI’s documentation is the closest equivalent to an institutional archive.
The copper plate inscriptions from Nalanda have been translated and published, principally in the Epigraphia Indica, the ASI’s long-running journal of Indian inscriptions. Volume II contains the Nalanda copper plate grants in translation. A researcher working on the history of Gupta and Pala patronage of Buddhist institutions will find in these grants the closest thing to a named-donor record.
The Chinese pilgrimage texts: Xuanzang’s Great Tang Records on the Western Regions and Yijing’s A Record of Buddhist Practices Sent Home from the Southern Sea – are available in scholarly English translation, the former by Samuel Beal (1884) and by Li Rongxi (1996) for the Buddhist Text Translation Society. Yijing’s text was translated by J. Takakusu (1896). These are primary source accounts of life at Nalanda and name dozens of monks, teachers, and visiting scholars. Any researcher tracing the transmission of Buddhist scholarship from India into East Asia will find these indispensable.
The Tibetan canon, available online through the BDRC (Buddhist Digital Resource Center, bdrc.io), contains texts translated at or transmitted through Nalanda, along with colophons that sometimes name the Indian scholar who provided the text, the Tibetan translator, and the location of the translation. These colophons are a significant source for named scholars associated with Nalanda in the 8th to 11th centuries.
The Bihar State Archives in Patna holds administrative records from the Mughal period onward, which will not illuminate Nalanda’s scholarly history but may be relevant for researchers tracing the post-medieval settlement of the region around the site. The Patna Museum holds seals and inscribed objects from the Nalanda excavations not currently on display at the site museum.
For researchers interested in the institution’s physical remains, the Nalanda Archaeological Museum (adjacent to the excavation site) holds the core collection, and the site itself is open. The ASI site report series, available through university libraries and in part through archive.org, is the essential documentary guide.
Named individuals index for Nalanda ancient university India
| Name | Dates | Role/connection |
|---|---|---|
| Kumaragupta I | r. c.415–455 CE | Gupta emperor; first royal patron of Nalanda |
| Skandagupta | r. c.455–467 CE | Kumaragupta’s son; continued endowment |
| Shilabhadra | c.529–645 CE | Abbot of Nalanda; teacher of Xuanzang |
| Dharmapala | c.530–561 CE | Abbot; Yogacara philosopher, teacher of Shilabhadra |
| Dharmakirti | c.600–660 CE | Nalanda logician; author of Pramanavarttika |
| Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang) | c.602–664 CE | Chinese pilgrim; studied at Nalanda 629–645; principal eyewitness source |
| Huili | c.615–c.695 CE | Xuanzang’s disciple; wrote his biography |
| Yijing (I-ching) | 635–713 CE | Chinese pilgrim; resident at Nalanda 671–681; translated 72 texts |
| Atisha Dipankara | c.980–1054 CE | Bengali scholar; head of Nalanda philosophical faculty; transmitted Nalanda tradition to Tibet |
| Jangchub Ö | early 11th century | Tibetan king who invited Atisha northward from Nalanda |
| Bakhtiyar Khilji | d. 1206 CE | Turkish-Afghan general; led the campaign that destroyed Nalanda |
| Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani | c.1193–c.1260 CE | Persian chronicler; author of Tabakat-i-Nasiri, primary written source for the destruction |
Further reading for Nalanda ancient university India
- Archaeological Survey of India, Search for Nalanda excavation reports
- Buddhist Digital Resource Center (manuscript colophons and Tibetan canon)
- UNESCO World Heritage listing, Nalanda Mahavihara
- Epigraphia Indica volumes (copper plate grants in English translation)
- Beal’s translation of Xuanzang’s Si-yu-ki
- Bihar State Archives, Patna: for regional records from post-medieval period
