More than 500 years before Oxford University was founded, India's Nalanda University was home to nine million books and attracted 10,000 students from around the world.

The winter morning was cloaked in thick fog. Our car swerved past horse-drawn carriages, a mode of transport still popular in the rural reaches of the eastern Indian state of Bihar, the trotting horses and turbaned coachmen looking like shadowy apparitions in the pearly-white mist.

After spending a night in the town of Bodhgaya, the ancient settlement where Lord Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment, I set out that morning for Nalanda, whose red-brick ruins are all that remain of one of the greatest centres of learning in the ancient world.

Founded in 427 CE, Nalanda is considered the world's first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era's most revered scholars. As the Dalai Lama once stated: "The source of all the [Buddhist] knowledge we have, has come from Nalanda."

In the more-than seven centuries that Nalanda flourished, there was nothing else like it in the world. The monastic university predates the University of Oxford and Europe's oldest university, Bologna, by more than 500 years. What's more, Nalanda's enlightened approach to philosophy and religion would help shape the culture of Asia long after the university ceased to exist.

Interestingly, the monarchs of the Gupta Empire that founded the Buddhist monastic university were devout Hindus, but sympathetic and accepting towards Buddhism and the growing Buddhist intellectual fervour and philosophical writings of the time. The liberal cultural and religious traditions that evolved under their reign would form the core of Nalanda's multidisciplinary academic curriculum, which blended intellectual Buddhism with a higher knowledge in different fields.



Aryabhata, considered the father of Indian mathematics, is speculated to have headed the university in the 6th Century CE. "We believe that Aryabhata was the first to assign zero as a digit, a revolutionary concept, which simplified mathematical computations and helped evolve more complex avenues such as algebra and calculus," said Anuradha Mitra, a Kolkata-based professor of mathematics. "Without zero, we wouldn't have computers," she added. "He also did pioneering works in extracting square and cubic roots, and applications of trigonometrical functions to spherical geometry. He was also the first to attribute radiance of the moon to reflected sunlight."

This work would profoundly influence the development of mathematics and astronomy in southern India and across the Arabian Peninsula.


More than eight centuries after its demise, some scholars contest the widely held theory that Nalanda was destroyed because Khilji and his troops felt its teachings competed with Islam. While uprooting Buddhism may have been a driving force behind the attack, one of India's pioneering archaeologists, HD Sankaliya, wrote in his 1934 book, The University of Nalanda, that the fortress-like appearance of the campus and stories of its wealth were reasons enough for invaders to deem the university a lucrative spot for an attack.



"It was not the first attack on Nalanda, though," Sharma said, as we strolled through the ruins. "It was attacked by the Huns under Mihirkula in the 5th Century, and again sustained severe damages from an invasion of the Gauda king of Bengal, in the 8th Century."

While the Huns came to plunder, it is difficult to conclude whether the second attack by the King of Bengal was the result of a growing antagonism between their Shaivite Hindu sect and the Buddhists at the time. On both occasions, the buildings were restored, and the facilities were expanded after the attacks with the help of imperial patronage from the rulers.

"By the time Khilji invaded this sacred temple of learning, Buddhism was on an overall state of decline in India," Sharma said. "With its internal degeneration, coupled with [the] decline of the Buddhist Pala dynasty that had been patronising the university since the 8th Century CE, the third invasion was the final death blow."


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