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Nalanda stands in the Magadha plains of Bihar, about 90 kilometres southeast of Patna, on a site that Buddhist tradition associates with the life of the historical Buddha and with several of his great disciples. The institution that made Nalanda famous was a mahavihara — a great monastery — that grew from a collection of smaller monasteries into a massive walled complex housing multiple viharas (residential colleges), temples, libraries, lecture halls, and gardens. The complex at its height covered approximately 14 hectares of formal structures within a larger campus extending over perhaps 400 hectares.
Nalanda was funded primarily by the Gupta emperors (5th–6th century CE), particularly Kumaragupta I (r. 415–455 CE), who is traditionally credited with founding the institution, and by his successors. The Pala dynasty (8th–12th century CE) was equally important as later patrons, expanding the complex significantly. A succession of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims — Faxian (c. 405 CE), Xuanzang (629–645 CE), and Yijing (671–695 CE) — visited and studied at Nalanda, and their detailed accounts are the primary historical source for its scale and curriculum.
Xuanzang, who spent approximately 17 years in India and spent several years at Nalanda, describes a complex of eight viharas and ten temples, with a library in three separate buildings — one of which, he says, was nine stories tall. He counted 10,000 students and 1,500 teachers simultaneously in residence, studying the full range of Buddhist philosophy, logic, Vedic literature, grammar, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Students arrived from across Asia: China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Java, and Central Asia all sent scholars to study here. The curriculum was demanding — only one in five applicants was admitted after a rigorous oral examination by a "doorman scholar."
The destruction of Nalanda in 1193 CE by the forces of the Khilji commander Bakhtiyar Khilji is one of the defining cultural catastrophes of the medieval world. The libraries — reportedly containing hundreds of thousands of manuscripts — were burned. Contemporary accounts say the libraries burned for three months. Surviving monks fled to Tibet, Nepal, and Southeast Asia, carrying manuscripts and oral traditions with them. The destruction effectively ended institutional Buddhism in the land of its birth.