How Nalanda, the legendary university that transformed the world, worked

The winter morning was shrouded in a thick mist. Our car meandered past the horse-drawn carts, a mode of transportation still popular in the rural parts of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, with the trotting beasts and turbaned coachmen that looked like dim apparitions in the pearly haze.

After spending the night in the village of Bodhgaya, a legendary settlement where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, I leave in the morning for Nalanda, whose reddish brick ruins are all that remains of one of the great centers of knowledge. the ancient world.

Founded in 427 AD C., Nalanda is considered to be the first residential university in the worlda kind of medieval institution in the style of Ivy League universities, which housed nine million books and attracted 10,000 students from all over East and Central Asia.

Here they gathered to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and above all the Buddhist principles dictated by the most respected scholars of the time. As the Dalai Lama once said, “The source of all knowledge [budista] that we have comes from Nalanda.

liberal tradition

During the more than seven centuries that Nalanda prospered, there was nothing like it in the world. The monastic university anticipated the universities of Oxford, Salamanca and Bologna by more than 500 years, the latter the oldest in Europe. In addition, the liberal approach to philosophy and religion would shape Asian culture long after the university ceased to exist.

Interestingly, the monarchs of the Gupta Empire who founded the Buddhist monastic university were devout Hindus, but sympathetic and tolerant of Buddhism and the growing Buddhist intellectual fervor and philosophical writings of the time. The liberal cultural and religious traditions that developed during his reign would become the core of Nalanda’s multidisciplinary academic curriculum, which combined intellectual Buddhism with higher knowledge in various fields.

The ancient Indian medical system ayurveda, which is based on natural cures, was widely taught in Nalanda and later spread to other parts of India through his students. Other Buddhist institutions took inspiration from the campus design with its open courtyards surrounded by prayer rooms and classrooms. And the stucco produced here would influence the ecclesiastical art of Thailand, just as the art of metalworking migrated from here to Tibet and the Malay Peninsula.

But perhaps Nalanda’s deepest and most enduring legacy is his own achievements in mathematics and astronomy.

Aryabhata, considered the father of Indian mathematics, is said to have presided over the university in the 6th century. “We believe that Aryabhata was the first to assign zero as a number, a revolutionary concept that simplified mathematical calculations and helped develop more complex ways such as algebra and calculus,” said Anuradha Mitra, a Calcutta-based mathematics professor.

“Without zero, we wouldn’t have computers,” he added. “He was also a pioneer in the extraction of square roots and cube roots, and in the application of trigonometric functions to spherical geometry. He was also the first to attribute the moon’s glow to the reflection of sunlight.

His work would profoundly influence the development of mathematics and astronomy in South India and the entire Arabian Peninsula.

University regularly sent his best scholars and teachers to places like China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sri Lanka to propagate Buddhist teachings and philosophy. That ancient cultural exchange program helped to spread and shape Buddhism throughout Asia.

Today, the archaeological remains of Nalanda UNESCO world heritage. In the year 1190, the university was destroyed by a band of raiders led by the Turkish-Afghan military general Bakhtiyar Khilji, who tried to destroy the center of Buddhist learning during his conquest of northern and eastern India. The campus was so vast that the fire started by the attackers would have burned for three months.

Today, the 23 acres excavated at the site are likely a fraction of the original campus, but wandering among the many monasteries and temples evokes a sense of what it must have been like to learn in this storied place.

I wandered around the porches and porches of the monasteries and the niches of the temples. After passing through a corridor with high reddish brick walls, I entered the courtyard of a monastery. The cavernous rectangular space was dominated by a high stone platform. “This was a classroom that could accommodate 300 students. And the platform was the teacher’s podium,” said Kamla Singh, my local guide, who led me through the ruins.

I entered one of the small rooms that surrounded the patio, where students lived from as far away as Afghanistan. Two niches, one opposite the other, were intended to hold oil lamps or personal belongings, and Singh explained that a small square niche at the entrance of the cell served as each student’s personal mailbox.

wisdom repository

Like today’s elite universities, admission was difficult. The hopeful students had to pass a rigorous oral interview with Nalanda’s lead teachers. The lucky ones were taught by an eclectic group of scholars from different parts of India and collectively operated under the most revered Buddhist masters of the time, such as Dharmapala and Silabhadra.

The library of nine million manuscripts The palm frond was the world’s rich repository of Buddhist wisdom, and one of its three buildings was described by the Tibetan Buddhist scholar Taranatha as a nine-story structure that “floated in the clouds.” Only a handful of these palm leaf volumes and painted wooden folios survived the fire, rescued by the fleeing monks. They are now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA and the Yarlung Museum in Tibet.

Acclaimed Buddhist monk and Chinese traveler Xuanzang studied and taught at Nalanda. When he returned to China in 645, he took with him a cartload of 657 Buddhist scriptures from the institution. Xuanzang became one of the most influential Buddhist scholars in the world.and would translate some of these parts into Chinese to create his life treatise, the central idea of ​​which was that the whole world is nothing more than a representation of the mind.

His Japanese disciple, Dosho, would later introduce this teaching to Japan, and it would spread throughout the Sino-Japanese sphere, where it would remain a major religion ever since. As a result, Xuanzang is recognized as “the monk who brought Buddhism to the East.”

In his description of Nalanda, Xuanzang mentioned the Great Stupa, a huge monument built in memory of one of the Buddha’s foremost disciples. I stood before the ruins of the imposing structure, which had the shape of an octagonal pyramid.

Brick steps led to the top of the building, known as the big memorial. Numerous small shrines and stupas are dotted around the cobblestone terrace that wraps around the 100-foot (30 m) high temple and is adorned with beautiful stucco images in niches on the exterior walls.

“Actually, the Great Stupa predates the university and was built in the 3rd century by Emperor Ashoka. The structure has been rebuilt and remodeled several times over eight centuries,” explains Anjali Nair, a teacher from Mumbai, whom I met on the spot. “These votive stupas contain the ashes of monks who lived and died here and devoted their entire lives to the university,” he noted.

Three attacks and six centuries of oblivion

More than eight centuries after his disappearance, some scholars dispute the widely held theory that Nalanda was destroyed because Khilji and his troops felt its teachings competed with Islam. While the uprooting of Buddhism may have been a catalyst for the attack, one of India’s pioneering archaeologists, H. D. Sankaliya, wrote in his 1934 book “Nalanda University” that the fortress-like appearance of the campus and stories of its wealth were reason enough for the invaders to consider the university an attractive place to attack.

“Yes, it’s hard to pinpoint a definitive reason for the invasion,” said Shankar Sharma, director of the museum at the site, which displays 350 artifacts from Nalanda’s excavations, including stucco sculptures, bronze Buddha statues and pieces of ivory. . .

“It wasn’t the first attack on Nalanda, though,” Sharma said as we walked through the ruins. “It was attacked by the Huns under Mihirkula in the fifth century, and was damaged again by an invasion by King Gauda of Bengal, in the eighth century.”

While the Huns came to plunder, it is difficult to conclude whether the King of Bengal’s second attack was the result of a growing antagonism between his Hindu Shaivism sect and the Buddhists of the time. On both occasions, the buildings were rebuilt after the attacks and the grounds expanded with the help of the rulers’ imperial patronage.

“By the time Khilji invaded this sacred temple of teaching, Buddhism in India was in a general state of decline,” Sharma said. “With its internal degeneration, combined with the decline of the Buddhist Pala dynasty that had attended the university since the eighth century, the third invasion was the final blow.”

Over the course of the next six centuries, Nalanda would gradually fade into obscurity, buried until it was “discovered” by Scottish explorer Francis Buchanan-Hamilton in 1812and later identified as the former Nalanda University by Alexander Cunningham in 1861.

Standing in front of a miniature stupa, I saw a small group of young monks dressed in their crimson robes visit the site, before converging on a large plinth of what was once a temple. The young ascetics sat quietly in a meditative pose, their eyes fixed on the Great Monument, a silent tribute to a glorious past.