The Nine Storeys of Nalanda — A Library That Burned for Months

The Examination at the Gate

Around 427 CE, Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I endowed a monastery near his summer capital that would grow into something the ancient world had no other word for than itself: Nalanda. Its entrance procedure was unique — aspirants debated the scholars seated at the main gate, and those who lost were turned away before crossing it. As the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang recorded, even learned men of other lands feared this door.

A City Devoted to Questions

At its height Nalanda housed some two thousand teachers and ten thousand students drawn from Tibet, China, Korea, Central Asia and beyond. The curriculum ran far beyond Buddhist philosophy into Vedic study, logic, grammar, medicine and astronomy. Monastic dormitories of red brick still stand in rows — each cell once home to a student whose homeland might be a thousand miles from his neighbor's. Xuanzang studied here for years under abbot Silabhadra before carrying hundreds of texts back to China, making Nalanda the wellspring from which much of East Asian Buddhism drank.

Ratnodadhi — the Ocean of Jewels

The library complex, called Dharmaganja, centered on the Ratnodadhi, a nine-storey tower of manuscripts accumulated over seven centuries: sutras, commentaries, grammars, medical treatises, works of logic. Around 1193 the raider Bakhtiyar Khalji sacked the region; tradition holds that the library was put to the torch so thoroughly that smoke rose from the smoldering collections for months. What could not be copied in time perished.

The Idea Refuses to Die

The ruins slept until colonial archaeology uncovered them in the 19th century. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2016 — and in 2014 a new Nalanda University opened nearby, again admitting students from across Asia, again through rigorous selection. The buildings burned; the habit of the place did not.