Nalanda and Takshashila -- The Great Centres of Learning of Ancient India

In the far north-west of the subcontinent, near present-day Rawalpindi in Pakistan, stood the city of Takshashila -- Taxila to the Greeks. By the middle of the first millennium BCE it had become famous as a place of learning. It was not a university in the modern sense, with a single campus and a fixed curriculum: renowned teachers lived and taught there, each with his own students, who came from far across India and beyond. The Buddhist Jataka tales speak of princes and brahmin boys sent to Takshashila at sixteen to study the Vedas, archery, medicine and the arts.

Tradition links great names with it. Chanakya, the strategist behind the Maurya empire, is said to have taught there; the Buddhist texts say Jivaka, the Buddha's physician, trained there in medicine; and the grammarian Panini came from the same region. Whatever the details, Takshashila became the model of the Indian centre of learning: a city where knowledge was the reason people came.

Nalanda, in Bihar, was something different: an organised monastic university. It grew up in the fifth century CE under the Gupta emperors, traditionally beginning with Kumaragupta I, and was supported for some seven hundred years by successive dynasties, above all the Palas. Its excavated remains -- rows of monasteries with student cells, great temples and lecture halls -- stretch across a large site.

Nalanda was a Buddhist institution, and Mahayana philosophy was at its heart. But students studied much more: logic and epistemology, grammar, medicine, the Vedas and the arts, and the teachings of rival schools, which they had to know in order to debate them. Admission was famously hard; Chinese visitors wrote that only a minority of applicants passed the oral examination at the gate. Its library, according to Tibetan tradition, occupied three great buildings, named the Ocean of Jewels, the Sea of Jewels and the Delighter of Jewels.

Much of what we know of Nalanda comes from Chinese pilgrims. Xuanzang studied there for several years in the 630s and wrote of its thousands of monks and teachers, its towers and its learning; a few decades later Yijing spent about ten years there and described the daily routine in detail. Scholars from Nalanda carried Buddhism and Indian learning to Tibet, China and South-East Asia.

Nalanda's end came around the end of the twelfth century, in a period of decline for Buddhism in India and of invasion from the north-west; its destruction is generally attributed to the forces of Bakhtiyar Khalji, who sacked the monasteries of Bihar around 1200. Vikramashila and Odantapuri fell in the same years. The great libraries, accounts say, burned for a long time.

Both sites are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites -- Taxila since 1980, the excavated site of Nalanda Mahavihara since 2016 -- and a new Nalanda University, established by an act of Parliament in 2010, now teaches near the ruins.