Nalanda Mahavihara
— — the library that burned for three months.
Not only on a wall.
“The brick ruins of the oldest residential university in the world, in the plains of Bihar southeast of Patna. From the fifth century to the twelfth, scholars from across Asia came to study Buddhist philosophy, logic, medicine, and astronomy here. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang stayed for years and carried hundreds of manuscripts home. The library was burned around 1200; what stands now is the slow excavation of what was left.
Nalanda Mahavihara, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Nalanda Mahavihara sits in the Nalanda district of Bihar, about ninety kilometres southeast of Patna and twelve kilometres north of Rajgir. Founded in the fifth century under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, it operated for roughly seven hundred years as a residential monastic university, one of the earliest in the world. At its peak it housed an estimated ten thousand students and two thousand teachers from across Asia. The site was excavated by the Archaeological Survey of India beginning in 1915 and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. The excavated complex covers about twelve hectares.
What stands at Nalanda today is brick — long ranges of monastic cells, votive stupas, and the great Stupa of Sariputta with its surrounding chapels. The masonry is laid in lime mortar and once carried plaster and painted stucco; some of the niche figures and the relief panels at the base of the main stupa survive. The Hiuen Tsang Memorial Hall, north of the ruins, was built in 1957 as a joint Indian and Chinese tribute to the seventh-century pilgrim Xuanzang, who studied here under the abbot Silabhadra and carried 657 manuscripts back to Tang China.
The monastery was sacked and burned around 1200 by forces under Bakhtiyar Khilji during the Ghurid expansion into Bihar. Persian sources record the library, known as Dharmaganja, or Mountain of Truth, burning for three months. Surviving monks scattered to Tibet, Bhutan, and Southeast Asia, carrying tantric and logical traditions with them. The site fell into use as farmland until Francis Buchanan-Hamilton identified the mounds in 1812 and Alexander Cunningham mapped them in 1861. Systematic excavation began in 1915 and continues in seasons. The new Nalanda University, a few kilometres away, opened in 2014.