Nalanda: The University That Taught the World, Then Was Burned for Three Months

In a flat field 90 km east of Bodh Gaya, a brick rectangle the size of fourteen football pitches stretches towards the horizon. The cells are empty now. The lecture halls stand without roofs. But for almost 800 years — from the 5th century to the 12th — this was Nalanda, the world's first residential university, and arguably the most important centre of learning ever built on the Indian subcontinent.

Ten thousand students, two thousand teachers

By the 7th century, when Xuanzang — the Chinese monk who would inspire the novel Journey to the West — arrived after a sixteen-year overland trek, Nalanda was already legendary. He stayed five years. His diary, still preserved in the Imperial Library in Beijing, describes 10,000 students from across Asia: Tibetans, Chinese, Sumatrans, Persians, Koreans. Two thousand teachers held lectures in eight monasteries. Eight separate libraries — including one nine storeys tall, called Ratnodadhi ('Sea of Jewels') — held tens of thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts on logic, astronomy, medicine, grammar, philosophy and mathematics.

Admission was brutal: a verbal exam at the gate where two in every three applicants were turned away. Once inside, students paid no fees — the entire university ran on the income from 200 villages donated by the Gupta and Pala emperors. The curriculum was famously secular for its time: a Buddhist monastic academy that nonetheless taught Vedic Hinduism, Jainism, Sankhya philosophy, Sanskrit grammar and even the medical surgery of the Charaka Samhita.

1193: the fire that took ninety days to die

In 1193 CE, the Turkic warlord Bakhtiyar Khilji — having sacked Bihar a year earlier — turned south from his base near Patna. The Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj, who interviewed eyewitnesses, recorded what happened: Khilji's soldiers, finding shaved-headed Buddhist monks and assuming they were soldiers, killed every monk in the compound. Then they piled the manuscripts in the Ratnodadhi library and set them alight. The fire, Minhaj wrote, smouldered for three months — the loss to the world's intellectual heritage was effectively complete. Buddhism, which had been Nalanda's lifeblood, retreated within a generation to Tibet, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. India would not have a university of comparable scale until the British founded the University of Calcutta in 1857.

What survives — and what to look for

• The Stupa of Sariputra — the largest single structure on the site, dedicated to the Buddha's chief disciple and rebuilt seven times in seven centuries. Each layer of brick is visibly different.
• The Monastic Cells — Vihara No. 1 and No. 4 still show drainage channels, fireplaces, and the stone bowl every monk used for begging.
• The Bronze Buddha torso (Archaeological Museum) — a Pala-period masterpiece dredged from a well, considered one of the finest surviving examples of Indian metal-casting.
• Nava Nalanda Mahavihara (10 km) — the new university opened in 2014 as a deliberate inheritor of the old, with students from 22 countries.
• {{strong|Hieun Tsang Memorial} (1.5 km) — a Sino-Indian monument to the Chinese pilgrim who studied here for five years.

The Buddhist Circuit, completed

Nalanda is the academic anchor of Bihar's Buddhist Circuit. Most travellers spend the morning at Nalanda, lunch in the small bazaar, then drive 12 km south to Rajgir for the chairlift up to the Vishwa Shanti Stupa and the hot springs. From Rajgir, Bodh Gaya is 80 km — the place where it all began. The traveller who follows the route in reverse — Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Nalanda — walks the same path the Buddha walked in the 5th century BCE, and the same path Xuanzang walked twelve hundred years later. Browse all Bihar destinations or other heritage sites.