The vast Buddhist monastic university — a mahavihara — of eastern India that, for some seven centuries, drew students from across Asia to study philosophy, logic, medicine, and astronomy — endowed by the Gupta and Pala kings, recorded by Chinese pilgrims, and destroyed around 1200 CE in a loss that became a symbol of the end of Buddhist learning in its Indian homeland.
Long before Oxford or Paris, a walled city of monks rose on a plain in eastern India, and to enter it, by the old accounts, you had to pass an examination at the gate. Nalanda housed thousands of students and hundreds of teachers, who studied Buddhist philosophy beside grammar, medicine, and the stars. A multi-storeyed library held so many manuscripts that legend says it burned for months when the end came. Around 1200, raiders sacked the monasteries and the monks scattered, near the end of a long fading of Buddhism from the land where the Buddha had walked. What had been one of the world's first great universities became a field of buried brick, dug up only in the last two centuries.