When you walk the red-brick ruins of Nalanda today — the monastic cells, the lecture platforms, the great stairwell of the Sariputra stupa — you are walking through a place described, in astonishing detail, by a man who lived there thirteen centuries ago. His name was Xuanzang, and without him we would understand these ruins far less than we do.
The walk from Xi'an
Xuanzang was a Chinese monk who, in 629 CE, left the Tang capital of Chang'an — modern Xi'an — against imperial orders, and walked west. He crossed the Gobi, skirted the Taklamakan, went over the Tian Shan, through the Central Asian oasis kingdoms, over the Hindu Kush and down into India. It took him years. He came for one reason: the sutras reaching China were partial, garbled, contradictory, and he wanted to study the dharma at its source. The source, everyone told him, was Nalanda.
Five years a student
He arrived around 637 and stayed, on and off, for some five years. His account — the Records of the Western Regions, written for the Tang emperor on his return — is our best window into the living university. He describes a walled campus of many monasteries, ponds of blue lotus, towers "lost in the mists of morning," and a community of thousands of monks who, he says, kept the rules so naturally that the disciplinary officer had little to do. He studied under the abbot Shilabhadra, then over a hundred years old, learning the Yogachara philosophy that he would carry back to China.
He came because the copies were bad. He stayed because the teachers were the originals.
Two years a teacher
What is less often told is that the student became a master. By the end of his time in India, Xuanzang was famous enough that a great debate was convened — some accounts say before tens of thousands — at which he defended Mahayana positions and, the tradition holds, no one rose to refute him. He was offered every inducement to stay. He refused, because he had made a promise to bring the texts home, and in 645 he walked back to Chang'an with hundreds of manuscripts loaded on horses, and spent the rest of his life translating them.
Reading him against the trenches
Here is what moves me, walking the site with pilgrims. The archaeologists who began uncovering Nalanda in the 19th century used Xuanzang as a map. He described the orientation of the great temple, the position of the stupas, the layout of the cells — and again and again, when the spades went in, the ground matched the diary. His measurements of the Sariputra stupa are close to what excavation found. His account of the monasteries facing a central avenue is the plan we walk today.
So when we stand in the excavated cells, I read his words aloud, and the effect is uncanny: a seventh-century Chinese monk narrating the very bricks in front of us. The university was burned around 1200, its library said to have smouldered for months. For centuries Nalanda was a name and a legend. It is a physical place again partly because one determined traveller wrote down what he saw — and because other travellers, a thousand years later, believed him enough to dig.