Chapter 1: The Burning of Nalanda

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"When memory burned, wisdom migrated."

The year was 1193. A Turkish military commander named Bakhtiyar Khalji rode into the province of Bihar, eastern India, at the head of a small but ruthless force. He was a newcomer to the region, recently installed by the Delhi-based Ghurid rulers. His orders were expansion. His methods were scorched earth.¹

When his cavalry reached the red sandstone walls of Nalanda, they encountered no army. No resistance. Just rows of quiet monks, rows of ancient buildings, and the murmured recitations of students and scholars. Nalanda had stood for nearly 700 years. It was not just a monastery. It was the largest and most influential university in the Buddhist world.

Inside its halls were manuscripts—hundreds of thousands of them. Philosophical treatises, commentaries on the Prajñāpāramitā, esoteric tantric rituals, medical texts, lexicons, histories, arguments for and against every major school of Indian thought. The library was divided into three multi-story buildings, the tallest known as Dharmaganja, the Treasury of Truth.²

Bakhtiyar Khalji set it all on fire.

Eyewitnesses reported that the flames burned for days. One later chronicler claimed the smoke of the manuscripts choked the skies. Another wrote that the ruins smoldered for months.³ Centuries of knowledge reduced to ash—without even a recorded reason. Khalji's campaign was not theological. He had no fatwa to issue, no religious rationale for the destruction. It was conquest, pure and simple. And conquest, in that moment, required obliteration.

Nalanda's loss was neither unique nor entirely unexpected. The monastery had already faced mounting pressures: declining state patronage as regional rulers shifted allegiances, earlier raids that had weakened its defenses, and the broader challenges facing Buddhist institutions across northern India.⁴ Yet its destruction marked a definitive rupture in one of history's greatest intellectual traditions.

The monks were executed or exiled. The libraries incinerated. But not the memory.

At its height, Nalanda drew students from across Asia: Tibetans, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians. It offered rigorous debate in Sanskrit, Pāli, and Prakrit. It had dormitories, teaching halls, and structured degrees. In many ways, it functioned like a modern university centuries before the rise of Oxford or Bologna. But unlike those later institutions, Nalanda's purpose was not just the transmission of facts or skills—it was the cultivation of awakening.⁵

Its curriculum combined deep metaphysical speculation with logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy, and ethics. It trained some of the most important Buddhist philosophers in history: Śāntarakṣita, who helped establish Buddhism in Tibet; Dharmakīrti, whose epistemological works shaped centuries of Indian logic; and generations of scholars who kept Nāgārjuna's legacy alive through layers of commentary and debate.

The library's destruction didn't just erase books. It disrupted living intellectual lineages. Generations of oral commentary, layered scholarship, and interpretive nuance vanished overnight—a pattern that would repeat across Asia as Buddhist centers fell to military campaigns, natural disasters, and shifting political fortunes.⁶

Nalanda's fall marked more than the end of a monastery. It symbolized the abrupt rupture of Indian Buddhism's scholastic continuity. Though Buddhism had already begun to decline in India due to shifting patronage and the rise of devotional Hinduism, Nalanda had remained a vital intellectual stronghold. Its erasure accelerated the collapse of Indian monastic centers and scattered the remaining Buddhist communities.

But something unexpected happened in the aftermath. Tibetan and Chinese monks—many of whom had studied at Nalanda—became the guardians of what remained. They returned home with memory, not manuscripts. And with memory, they rebuilt.

In Tibet, the Kangyur (translated words of the Buddha) and Tengyur (commentaries) emerged as massive textual canons, many of which included works lost in India. Chinese pilgrims like Xuanzang and Yijing, who had visited Nalanda centuries earlier, had already translated dozens of treatises into Chinese. Their travelogues preserved names, lineages, and doctrines that would otherwise have vanished.⁷

Without Nalanda's destruction, Tibetan Buddhism might never have developed the distinctive scholastic system it now possesses. The lineage of lam-rim (stages of the path) teaching, the synthesis of Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna thought, and the integration of memory-based preservation—all grew in response to loss. Destruction, ironically, catalyzed creation.

Scholars of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism have often speculated on how the history of the Dharma might have unfolded differently if Nalanda had survived. If Nalanda and its sister universities had continued to thrive, Indian Buddhism might not have faded so thoroughly from the subcontinent. Its scholastic lineages could have coexisted with Hindu Advaita and Bhakti movements, enriching South Asian intellectual pluralism. Historian Romila Thapar notes that the absence of institutional Buddhist centers left later Indian religious identity narrowed and shaped primarily through Hindu revivalist frames.⁸

If Tibetan scholars had not had to reconstruct the tradition from memory and fragments, the Tengyur might look very different. Certain texts—especially minor commentaries or ritual manuals—were preserved because they were easier to memorize or were brought by specific teachers, not because they were considered essential. Jan Nattier observes that the very structure of Tibetan scholasticism—its dialectical training, memorization systems, and the curriculum of the Geshedegree—was shaped by the trauma of that loss.⁹

Some scholars argue that had Nalanda persisted, it could have served as a pan-Asian interfaith and intellectual hub, influencing Christian and Islamic thinkers during the high medieval period. Philosopher Purushottama Bilimoria suggests that Buddhist logic and epistemology might have entered early Islamic philosophy via shared trade routes, had its textual bases remained available.¹⁰

While Nalanda was a male monastic university, its broader ecosystem likely included women as preservers of regional or vernacular Buddhist practices. The loss of its network may have contributed to the erasure of feminine ritual and oral traditions—lines which later resurfaced in Himalayan nunneries but without a direct Indian anchor.

Contemporary scholars debate the extent of Nalanda's actual influence and the degree to which its loss truly shaped later Buddhist development. Jan Nattier emphasizes the role of oral memory in preserving Indian Buddhist texts after Nalanda, especially through Tibetan and Central Asian translators. She argues that "transformation through translation" rather than simple transmission defined the Tibetan response to destruction.¹¹

Ronald Davidson sees Nalanda's loss as the end of Indian Vajrayāna's experimental phase. Without its laboratory of debate and commentary, tantric Buddhism lost its grounding in logic and scholastic training—developments that fundamentally altered how esoteric practices were understood and transmitted.¹²

Gregory Schopen, by contrast, cautions against romanticizing Nalanda's influence. He points out that much of Indian Buddhism had already become decentralized, and Nalanda's fall was part of a larger trend. "The idea of a singular, golden intellectual center," he writes, "may be shaped more by modern nostalgia than medieval reality."¹³

Tansen Sen, a historian of Sino-Indian relations, reminds us that Chinese and Southeast Asian preservation efforts were not secondary but parallel. "We should see Nalanda not as a lost archive," he writes, "but as part of an evolving Buddhist network that absorbed loss into migration."¹⁴

Today, a rebuilt Nalanda University stands near the ruins—an international effort to revive cross-cultural scholarship. But the real legacy of Nalanda lives elsewhere: in Tibetan monasteries rebuilt in exile, in Chinese commentaries now digitized, in Southeast Asian chants passed down orally across centuries, and in the manuscripts preserved at institutions like the British Library and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center.¹⁵

Its loss reminds us that no sacred text is safe without active stewardship. Memory, even when scorched, can still spark illumination. Across the chapters ahead, we'll see this pattern repeat: where words are burned, voices remember. Where archives collapse, communities improvise. Where loss occurs, new forms of faith—and preservation—emerge.

The sacred is fragile. But it is not defenseless.

Notes

Minhaj-i-Siraj, Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, trans. H.G. Raverty (London: Gilbert & Rivington, 1881), 551–553. The account of Khalji's campaign is corroborated by multiple Persian chroniclers, though specific details about Nalanda's destruction come primarily from later Buddhist sources.
Hirananda Sastri, Nalanda and Its Epigraphic Records (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1942), 23–28. Archaeological evidence supports the existence of multiple library buildings, though the exact number and names derive from Tibetan pilgrimage accounts.
Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, 553. The duration of the fires is mentioned in several sources, though the timeframe varies between accounts.
Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India (Pearson, 2008), 584–588. Singh provides crucial context for understanding the broader decline of Buddhist institutions in northern India.
Tansen Sen, The Formation of Chinese Maritime Culture: From Guangzhou to Quanzhou, 1200–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 156–159. Chinese pilgrimage accounts provide the most detailed descriptions of Nalanda's educational structure.
Richard Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (London: Routledge, 1996), 145–152. Gombrich contextualizes Nalanda's loss within broader patterns of institutional Buddhist decline.
Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions by Xuanzang (Berkeley: Numata Center, 1996), 234–248. Xuanzang's accounts remain our primary source for understanding Nalanda's curriculum and international character.
Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (Oxford University Press, 2000), 510–522.
Jan Nattier, "Reconstructing the Buddhist Past: The View from Central Asia," in Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection (Oslo: Hermes, 2000), 89–104.
Purushottama Bilimoria, "Buddhist Logic and the Possibility of Cross-Cultural Philosophy," Sophia 50, no. 1 (2011): 81–96.
Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 23–28.
Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (Columbia University Press, 2002), 287–294.
Gregory Schopen, "Archaeology and the Lost Practices of Indian Buddhism," in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks (University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), 1–22.
Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade (University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 93–112.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) at bdrc.io and the digitization projects of the British Library's Asian and African Studies department.

Notes

Further Reading