Nalanda

Nalanda's monastery is traditionally said to have been founded in the fifth century CE under the patronage of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, in the ancient region of Magadha already closely associated with the Buddha's own life and teaching centuries earlier, and the site grew over succeeding reigns into a walled monastic complex of considerable size, supported by grants of land and revenue from a succession of Indian rulers including the later Pala dynasty.

By the seventh century, when the Chinese pilgrim monk Xuanzang studied and later taught there, Nalanda had become the preeminent center of Buddhist scholarship in Asia, housing, according to Xuanzang's own account, several thousand resident monks and students studying not only Buddhist philosophy and scripture but also Hindu philosophical schools, Sanskrit grammar, logic, medicine and astronomy, taught by a faculty of renowned scholars. The monastery maintained an extensive library complex known as the Dharmaganja, or Treasury of Truth, housed in several multistory buildings and reputed to hold hundreds of thousands of manuscripts covering both religious and secular subjects, making Nalanda as much a general university as a specifically religious institution in the modern sense. Its reputation drew students and pilgrim scholars from across Asia, including China, Korea, Tibet and Southeast Asia, several of whom, like Xuanzang and the later pilgrim Yijing, left detailed written accounts of the institution that remain primary sources for its history today.

Nalanda's decline began before its final destruction, as Buddhism's institutional position in India weakened relative to a resurgent Hinduism and, from the twelfth century, the arrival of Turkic Muslim military campaigns into the Gangetic plain, but the university remained an active center of study into the final decades of the twelfth century.

In 1193 the Turkic military commander Bakhtiyar Khilji, leading a campaign into Bihar, attacked and destroyed the monastery, and later Persian chronicles, along with the account of the Tibetan historian Taranatha writing some centuries afterward, describe the library being burned and many resident monks killed, though the precise scale and circumstances of the destruction remain debated among modern historians working from limited and sometimes contradictory sources.

The destruction of Nalanda is conventionally treated as one of the defining episodes in the broader decline of institutional Buddhism in India, alongside the destruction of other major monastic universities such as Vikramashila in the same period, after which Buddhism survived in the subcontinent mainly in peripheral regions rather than as a major organized institutional presence.

The site was rediscovered and excavated by British colonial era archaeologists beginning in the nineteenth century, and the extensive ruins now form an Archaeological Survey of India protected site inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, while a newly established Nalanda University, founded nearby in 2010 as an international initiative, invokes the ancient institution's name and legacy without claiming direct institutional continuity with it.