Nalanda Mahavihara was truly an international melting pot during the time of its existence; a place where scholars flocked from all directions. Those who came there either took the northern land route from China, Korea, Tibet, Nepal, Central and West Asia or the southern sea route via Java, Sumatra, the Straits of Malacca, the coast of Burma and Arakan, to Tamralipti (Purba Medinipur, West Bengal) on the eastern coast of India. Here, the voyage ended, and the scholars proceeded on foot to Nalanda.
Many monks must have visited Nalanda over the centuries of its existence, though we only have the records of a few mentioned by Chinese monks Xuanzang and Yijing.
They came to study at Nalanda and copied various sutras from its famous library, Dharmaganja. Both Xuanzang and Yijing spent years studying at Nalanda and played a vital role in chronicling and preserving its glorious history.
When Xuanzang studied Buddhist texts in China, he found that they contained a lot of discrepancies owing to multiple interpretations of Buddha’s teachings. He realised that if there was one complete version of the Yogacarabhumi-sutra (Discourse on the Stages of Yogic Practice), the disagreements arising from multiple interpretations could be removed. A monk advised Xuanzang to go to Nalanda to study there. So he made the journey to learn the original teachings of Buddhism, collect Buddhist manuscripts to carry back to China and pay homage to the sacred places associated with the Buddha.
In 629 CE, the Tang Dynasty had plunged into chaos. King Taizong had usurped the throne by committing fratricide and forced his father to abdicate the throne. There was widespread civil unrest, and subjects of the state were not allowed to leave the empire and travel abroad. Thus, when Xuanzang asked the king for permission to go to India, he refused to permit him. Left with no choice, Xuanzang decided to go to India secretly. He got lost in the Mo-kia-Yen (Gobi) desert and wandered for several days. He almost lost hope of surviving when his horse miraculously led him to a spring, and he was saved.
Xuanzang passed through the Taklamakan desert, Turfan, Karasahr, Kucha, Tashkent, and Samarkand. He then passed beyond the Iron Gates into Bactria, across the Hindu Kush into Kapisha, Gandhara, and Kashmir in northwest India. From there, he travelled to Mathura, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, and then to Nalanda, the holy land of Buddhism in the eastern reaches of the Ganges, where he arrived in 633 CE.
Xuanzang came across the central Asian kingdoms such as Yanqi (Agni), Kuchi (Kucha) and Khotan, which used a modified Indic script. He recorded the Buddhist legends and miracles associated with the sites he visited, the Buddhist relics he saw on his way to India in great detail, and his interaction with the Indian ruler, Harsavardhana.
He spent five years at Nalanda. He was warmly welcomed at Nalanda Mahavihara, where he received the Indian moniker Mokshadeva and studied Yogacara philosophy under the mentorship of Silabhadra, the venerable head of the institution at the time. Moreover, he also took courses in grammar, logic and Sanskrit and later taught at the Mahavihara. He carried 657 sacred texts along with him to China when he returned and left behind a detailed account of the time he spent in Nalanda:
An azure pool winds around the monasteries, adorned with the full-blown cups of the blue lotus; the dazzling red flowers of the lovely kanaka hang here and there, and outside groves of mango trees offer the inhabitants their dense and protective shade.
Xuanzang successfully petitioned the Tang Emperor for a Nalanda-like Tower for Sanskrit scriptures to protect the manuscripts he had brought back. The result was the Great Wild Goose Pagoda, a 210-foot-tall spectacular sutra library that still stands in Xi’an, China, today. ‘Empress Wu Zetian commissioned a stunning colossal 55-foot-high image of Vairocana Buddha introduced to China by the Tantric Buddhist texts brought from Nalanda by Xuanzang.’ His adventures inspired Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century novel, Journey to the West, which refers to India as ‘Buddha’s pure land.’
Unlike Xuanzang, Yijing came to India via the sea route. He arrived in India in the seventh century (673 CE) and stayed for fourteen years, spending most of these years at Nalanda Mahavihara. When he returned to China in 695, he carried with him 400 Sanskrit manuscripts, which were subsequently translated into Mandarin. Empress Wu Zetian gave him a grand welcome. Yijing’s account mainly focused on the practice of Buddhism in India and detailed descriptions of the life of the monks at the monastery.
His main purpose in visiting India was to improve the practice of monastic rules in Chinese–Buddhist monasteries by copying the rules followed at Indian monasteries. He stayed at Nalanda for ten years (675–685) and recorded the customs and way of life of the monks and teachers at Nalanda Mahavihara.
In his Memoirs of Eminent Monks who Visited India and Neighboring Regions in Search on the Law during the Great Tang Dynasty, Yijing highlights that Chinese Buddhist monks visited India in large numbers despite the perilous nature of the journey. Some returned to China, while many died during their return journey or stayed back in India.
His memoir provides short accounts of the lives of fifty-six monks who visited India in the seventh century, highlighting the zeitgeist among them to visit Buddhist sites and study at Nalanda. Some prominent ones included Hyecho, Hui-yieh and Aryavarma from Korea; Tao Hsi and Wu-hsing from China; and Bodhidharma from Tukhara (Bactria), among others.
Hyecho (704–787 CE), or Prajnavikrama, was a Korean Buddhist monk from Silla, one of the three kingdoms of Korea, whose Memoir Of The Pilgrimage To The Five Kingdoms Of India in Chinese was found in the famous cave library in Dunhuang in Western China. Since then the text, the first and last part of which went missing, has widely attracted scholars’ attention.
His travelogue tells us that he studied at Nalanda Mahavihara, like many of his East Asian fellow monks who went to India during the Tang period (618–917). He studied under Subhakarsimha (637–735) and Vajrabodhi (671–741). A Pala bronze discovered in Potala Palace, Lhasa, has been discovered, bearing an awkwardly inscribed Chinese inscription on an Indian piece of art with some details about him.
Bodhidharma, a man of the Tukhara country (Bactria), of great bodily size and strength, first went to China and became a monk there. He studied Hinayana Buddhism. Afterwards, he came to India to adore the sacred vestiges of Buddha. Yijing’s account states that he met him at Nalanda. He was very fond of long journeys. From Nalanda, he again proceeded to North India at the age of fifty.
Thonmi Sambhota (seventh century CE) was the son of Anu, a minister of King Songsten Gampo of Tibet. He visited India to study Sanskrit and other Indian languages from Lipidatta, noted for proficiency in the art of writing. He learnt the sections of Nagari and Gatha characters from him and then proceeded to Nalanda Mahavihara, where he studied under the guidance of Acharya Devavidya Simha. While he was studying at Nalanda, the great Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited the monastery.
The texts that Thonmi Sambhota brought along with him are said to be the first Buddhist texts to enter Tibet from India. He devised scripts for the Tibetan language based on the Devanagari and Kashmiri scripts. The scripts he invented were based on the Gupta scripts, which had been in use in India since the mid-fourth century CE.
He simplified the Tibetan alphabet by shortening thirty-four consonants and sixteen vowels of Devanagari into thirty consonants and four vowels in the Tibetan alphabet. He also composed six texts on Tibetan grammar based on Sanskrit grammar.
Wu-hsing, or Prajnadeva, was from Jiang-ling in Jing-zhou, Hubei, China. He studied the classics thoroughly and was considered the most learned man in his province. He went to Nalanda with his constant companion, Chih-hung, and heard discourses on Yogacara. He also studied Kosa and the canonical rules of the Vinayas with great interest. Before his return to China, he completed translations of the Vinayas of the Sarvastivada school.
Once, Yijing and Wu-hsing climbed the Vulture Peak in Rajagriha and made devotional offerings there. They felt extremely grieved at heart when they looked towards their own land from the top of the mountain. Yijing composed this poem expressing his feelings in mixed metres:
We witness the transformation of the sacred
mountain peak and glance at the ancient city of Rajagriha.
Thousands of years had already passed
but the water of the lake remains pure and clear as it was before, and the bamboo grove
remains evergreen. The vague reminiscence
of the past had thrown back it’s reflection
on the hard roads (of the city),
but everything is in ruins.
Dharmasvamin (1197–1264) was probably the last foreign scholar to visit Nalanda before it faded into oblivion. He was a Tibetan monk who travelled to India between 1234 and 1236. His aim was to visit Bodh Gaya and to study the Buddhist texts with the Indian scholars. However, by the time he reached India, the Buddhist sites in eastern India had been destroyed.
According to Dharmasvamin’s biography, when he visited Uddandapura (Biharsharif), it was the residence of a Turushka (Turkic) military commander. Vikramashila had been completely destroyed by the Turushka army. At Nalanda, there were eighty- four small viharas, which had been abandoned after being damaged by the Turushkas, and only two of the viharas were functional. Less than a hundred monks resided there, and a local king named Buddhasena of the Pithapati dynasty financially supported Nalanda’s ninety-year head Rahula Shri Bhadra.
Rahula Shri Bhadra accepted Dharmasvamin as a student, and the two men translated Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Tibetan. Dharmasvamin mastered Sanskrit in Tibet under the guidance of his uncle and by studying the ninth-century dictionary Mahāvyutpatti; his command over the language was so strong that he was mistaken for an Indian when he visited Bodh Gaya.
These are but a few monks in the historical records who visited Nalanda over centuries. The number of foreign scholars visiting the famed Mahavihara must have been many times greater during its centuries of existence.
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