Nalanda Mahavihara

For seven centuries, Nalanda was the intellectual centre of the Buddhist world — a vast monastic university where logic, medicine, grammar, astronomy and every school of Buddhist philosophy were debated and taught to students from across Asia.

Ten thousand monks

At its height, Nalanda housed some ten thousand monks and two thousand teachers within a walled campus of red brick. Its library, the Dharmaganja, was said to occupy three multi-storeyed buildings and to hold hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang studied here for five years in the 7th century and left the fullest account we have of it; the Tibetan tradition traces much of its philosophical lineage to Nalanda masters such as Nagarjuna, Aryadeva and Shantideva.

Walking the ruins

What survives today — excavated from the 19th century onward and still being uncovered — is a magnificent field of monastic cells, lecture platforms, stupas and stairwells in warm red brick. You can walk into the cells where monks slept, see the stone bases where they sat to study, and climb the great stupa of Sariputra. We read from Xuanzang's diary as we walk, matching his descriptions to the ground beneath our feet.