The group I brought to Nalanda were Austrians who had converted to Buddhism. This is a detail that matters enormously to what happened there. They were not tourists visiting a heritage site. They were practitioners of a living tradition walking through the ruins of the place where that tradition was most completely and systematically expressed, before it was most completely and systematically destroyed. They came to Bihar on a pilgrimage — the footsteps of the Buddha, Bodh Gaya to Rajgir to Nalanda — and they arrived at Nalanda carrying something that a standard heritage group does not carry: a personal relationship to the loss.
We walked through the ruins. Red brick walls, open to the Bihari sky, the roofless cells where monks once lived and studied, the lecture halls where the greatest Buddhist scholars of the ancient world once taught. The scale of what had been here is difficult to hold in your mind even when you are standing in it. Ten thousand students at its height. Two thousand teachers. A library of manuscripts so vast that accounts speak of it burning for three months after the attack. All of it gone. Brick foundations and open sky where the most advanced university in the medieval world once stood.
We had been walking for perhaps an hour when one of the women in the group came to me. She had been quiet for most of the morning, which was not her usual manner. She stood beside me for a moment looking at the ruins and then she asked me a question.
"Vishal — why did the Muslim invaders destroy all this knowledge?"
"Winners always write history from their own perspective. For an invader to demonstrate the supremacy of his religion in India, he first had to destroy the only place from which the local people could have understood the depth of their own. A people who cannot access their own knowledge cannot defend it. And a culture that cannot be defended can be replaced."
"I had never thought of it this way. By destroying learning centres you can take away everything that gives a culture credit for itself."
She was silent for a long time after that. We all were. The ruins had a different quality after that exchange — they were no longer simply the remnants of something that had been destroyed, but evidence of a method. A demonstration of how power actually operates on knowledge. And standing in the middle of it, in the Bihari sun, with a group of European Buddhists who had come here to walk where the Buddha walked, the weight of that method was very close.
What was here
Nalanda Mahavihara was established in the 5th century CE and flourished for seven hundred years. At its height it was the largest residential university in the world, drawing scholars from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia. The curriculum was not confined to Buddhist philosophy — it encompassed logic, grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and the full range of what a civilisation that takes knowledge seriously considers worth preserving and transmitting.
The Chinese scholar Xuanzang, who spent years at Nalanda in the 7th century and whose account of the university is one of the most detailed records we have, described a place of extraordinary intellectual vitality and rigour. Students were admitted through oral examination. The standards were high enough that most applicants failed. The library — the Dharmaganja, or Treasury of Truth — occupied three large buildings, the tallest nine stories high.
Most visitors to Nalanda encounter it as an archaeological site — important, melancholy, well-documented. The Austrian Buddhists encountered it as a wound. They knew the tradition that had been centred here. They practised it in Vienna, adapted and translated and carried across centuries and continents, surviving in fragments of what had once been whole. Standing in the ruins, they were standing in the place where the wholeness had existed before it was taken apart.
What moved them most was not the scale of the destruction but the sophistication of what had been destroyed. They had assumed India at this period — the 5th to 12th centuries — as a place of spiritual knowledge. What the ruins showed them, and what the academic records confirm, is that Nalanda was a place of scientific knowledge in the fullest sense: mathematics that anticipated European developments by centuries, astronomical calculations of extraordinary precision, medical understanding that would not be equalled in the West for hundreds of years. They saw how far ahead India had been. Not spiritually ahead — intellectually, scientifically, academically ahead. The religion was the vehicle for the knowledge, not the limit of it.
A religion that did not believe in violence
There is a particular sadness to Nalanda that is different from the sadness of other destroyed places. It is the sadness of the Austrian woman's realisation — the recognition that what made this civilisation great was also what made it vulnerable. Buddhism, at its philosophical centre, does not believe in violence. The scholars of Nalanda were not warriors. The monks who maintained the library were not soldiers. When the destruction came, there was no defence that was consistent with the values of the tradition being defended.
This is the deepest paradox of the ruins. A civilisation so advanced, so confident in the power of knowledge and reason and compassionate inquiry, that it had not built walls adequate to protect those things from a force that operated by different principles entirely. The pride and the sadness are inseparable at Nalanda. You cannot feel one without the other. You stand in the ruins of something that was far too civilised for the world it was living in, and you feel both the achievement and the cost of that civilisation simultaneously.
Walking in the footsteps of the Buddha
The itinerary that brought my Austrian group to Nalanda was one I have always considered among the most meaningful programmes I design. The footsteps of the Buddha through Bihar is not a tourist route. It is a pilgrimage for those who undertake it properly — Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree; Rajgir, where he taught and debated in the hills and the bamboo groves; Nalanda, where his teachings became the foundation of the world's greatest university; Vaishali, where he announced his parinirvana; Sarnath near Varanasi, where he gave his first sermon after enlightenment.
For my Austrian group, who had converted to Buddhism in Europe and practised within a tradition that arrived in their country long after it had been separated from these physical origins, walking this circuit was a form of reconnection. Not sentimental reconnection — they were serious people with serious practice — but the particular kind of understanding that comes from standing in a place rather than reading about it. Bodh Gaya gave them the tree. Rajgir gave them the hills. Nalanda gave them the ruins. And the ruins, as the Austrian woman's question showed, gave them something that no text could have given them: the full weight of what had been here, what it had meant, and what its loss had cost.
Bihar — the chapter that rewrites the story
Bihar is not on most luxury itineraries. It is perceived as difficult, as infrastructure-poor, as lacking the visual spectacle that Rajasthan or Kerala offer. All of this is true in certain practical senses and irrelevant in every meaningful one. Bihar is where Indian civilisation reached some of its greatest heights. The Magadha Empire, the Maurya Empire, the Gupta Empire — the political structures that unified and shaped the subcontinent — were centred here. The Buddha walked here. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, was born here. Chanakya, the political philosopher whose Arthashastra is one of the most sophisticated texts on statecraft ever produced, taught here. Nalanda was here.
A properly designed Bihar programme — Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Nalanda, Vaishali, Patna's museums — tells a story about India that the standard Golden Triangle cannot tell. It is the story of a civilisation at the height of its intellectual and spiritual ambition, before the disruptions that came after. It is a story about what India was before it became what most visitors expect to find. For the traveller who has already seen the forts and the palaces and the wildlife reserves and who is asking what India has left to show them — the answer is Bihar. It is one of the deepest chapters in the book.
We were far too civilised. That is what the ruins of Nalanda say, if you stand in them long enough and listen to what they are not saying. A people so confident in the power of knowledge and inquiry and non-violence that they did not imagine a world in which those values required defending by other means. They were right about the knowledge. They were right about the inquiry. They were right, even, about the non-violence. They were simply — and at great cost — too far ahead of the time they were living in. That gap between what a civilisation is capable of and what the world around it is ready for is the saddest space in history. You can stand in it at Nalanda. You should.
Vishal Mehra · vishalmehra.com