Imagine a university so renowned that students travelled for months — across deserts, mountains and seas — for the mere chance to sit an oral entrance exam at its gates, where most applicants were turned away. Imagine a library so vast that, according to later tradition, it burned for days after being destroyed. This was Nalanda, a monastic university in eastern India that flourished for some seven centuries and shaped the intellectual life of much of Asia.

Founded more than 1,500 years ago, Nalanda predates Europe’s oldest universities, Bologna and Oxford, by several centuries. It is often described as the world’s first great residential university — a place where teachers and students lived together on a single campus, following a structured curriculum. Today its excavated ruins in the state of Bihar are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

When and how Nalanda began

Much of what we reliably know about Nalanda comes from three kinds of evidence: archaeology, inscriptions, and the writings of foreign pilgrims who studied there. Piecing these together, scholars place the founding of the monastic university in the fifth century CE, during the reign of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I (who ruled roughly 415–455 CE).

The site itself was older and sacred long before the university rose. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, passing through the area around 400 CE, noted a stupa associated with Sariputra, one of the Buddha’s closest disciples, but did not describe a monastery — suggesting the great institution had not yet been built when he visited. A few decades later, under Gupta patronage, the Mahavihara (“great monastery”) was established, and it grew steadily over the following centuries under successive dynasties, including the emperor Harsha of Kannauj and, later, the Pala kings of eastern India.

A campus of thousands

At its height, Nalanda was enormous. Later accounts describe a community numbering in the thousands of students and hundreds of teachers, housed across a complex of monasteries, lecture halls, shrines, dormitories and ornamental ponds. Excavations have revealed rows of monastic residences built of red brick, each with small cells for students, facing larger temple structures — a physical layout that matches the descriptions left by visitors.

The institution was supported not by tuition fees but by royal endowments. Inscriptions and traveller accounts record that the revenues of villages — by one account a hundred, later two hundred — were assigned to maintain the university. This generous patronage freed students and teachers from earning a living and allowed them to devote themselves entirely to study and debate.

What students learned

Although Nalanda was, at its core, a Buddhist monastic centre — especially associated with Mahayana philosophy — its curriculum ranged far wider. According to the accounts of pilgrims and later scholars, students studied Buddhist philosophy alongside the Vedas, grammar, logic, medicine, mathematics, astronomy and other subjects. It was a place for advanced study, not basic schooling.

Admission was famously competitive. Aspiring students had to face a rigorous oral examination at the gate, conducted by senior scholars, and only a minority were admitted. Once inside, they joined a community led by some of the most celebrated thinkers of the age. The roll of teachers and alumni associated with Nalanda includes towering figures of Buddhist philosophy — Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, Dharmapala, Shilabhadra and others — whose works shaped intellectual traditions across Asia.

The pilgrims who recorded it

We owe much of our vivid picture of daily life at Nalanda to two Chinese Buddhist monks who travelled to India and studied there in the seventh century. Xuanzang (sometimes written Hsuan-tsang) arrived in the 630s, studied under the venerable abbot Shilabhadra, and left detailed descriptions of the campus, its scholars and its routines. When he returned to China, he carried hundreds of Sanskrit manuscripts and devoted the rest of his life to translating them — work that profoundly shaped East Asian Buddhism and earned him lasting fame as the monk who carried Buddhist learning eastward.

A second pilgrim, Yijing, arrived later in the same century and stayed in India for many years, ten of them at Nalanda. While Xuanzang described the geography and culture of India broadly, Yijing focused on the practical life of the monastery — its rules, customs and daily discipline. Together, their writings give us an unusually intimate window into an ancient seat of learning.

A magnet for the whole of Asia

Nalanda’s reputation drew students from far beyond India — from China, Korea, Tibet, Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Its influence flowed outward through these scholars, carrying Indian philosophy, logic and science across the continent. Archaeological evidence even records a connection with the Shailendra dynasty of Indonesia, one of whose kings is said to have endowed a monastery within the complex. In this sense Nalanda was not merely an Indian institution but a genuinely international one, a hub in a vast network of learning that linked much of Asia.

Decline and rediscovery

Like all institutions, Nalanda eventually declined. From around the ninth century its fortunes gradually waned as new monastic centres rose nearby and the religious landscape shifted. Its final blow came at the end of the twelfth century, when the campus was sacked during the Turkic conquests of northern and eastern India. Tradition holds that its great library held so many manuscripts that it burned for a long time; only a handful of palm-leaf volumes survived, carried away by fleeing monks, some of which survive in museums today.

For centuries afterward the site lay buried and largely forgotten. It was surveyed in the 1860s by Alexander Cunningham, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, and systematic excavations through the twentieth century gradually revealed the scale of the complex. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed the archaeological remains of Nalanda Mahavihara as a World Heritage Site, recognising a monastic and scholastic institution whose roots reach back more than two thousand years.

Why Nalanda still matters

Nalanda endures as a symbol of a time when the subcontinent was a global centre of learning — when knowledge moved freely across borders and a campus in eastern India shaped minds from Korea to Sumatra. Its model of residential, multidisciplinary, debate-driven education feels strikingly modern. As the Dalai Lama has observed, much of the Buddhist knowledge preserved today traces back to the scholars of Nalanda. More than eight centuries after its destruction, the ruins still speak of an age when India taught the world.

Sources

  • UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar” (whc.unesco.org)
  • Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nalanda” (britannica.com)
  • Scroll.in, “What the ruins of the original Nalanda university tell us about an old civilisation of India” (scroll.in)
  • BBC / BiharConnect, “Nalanda: The university that changed the world”
  • Accounts of Xuanzang and Yijing, as summarised in scholarly surveys of the site