Portugal, India signed agreement on Nalanda University

On October 9, 2015, at a ceremony in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Portugal became the seventeenth country to sign the Memorandum of Understanding on the Establishment of Nalanda University.

The Memorandum was signed from the Portuguese side by Ambassador Ana Martinho, Secretary General, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and from the Indian side by Dr. Jitendra Nath Misra, the Ambassador of India to Portugal.

Portugal is the first European country to sign the Memorandum, and the fourth outside the East Asia Summit. The seventeen countries to have signed the Memorandum are:

About Nalanda University

Nalanda University came into being with the notification of the Nalanda University Act on November 25, 2010. To further reinforce the university’s international character this inter-governmental Memorandum of Understanding came into force at the 8th East Asia Summit in October, 2013.

Located at Rajgir in the Nalanda District of the state of Bihar in India, the university is a non-state, non-profit, secular and self-governing international institution mandated to be engaged in the pursuit of intellectual, philosophical, historical and spiritual studies.

In the memory of the ancient Nalanda University

The university embodies the memory of the ancient Nalanda University and is premised on the shared desire of the Member States of the East Asia Summit to re-discover and re-invigorate educational co-operation, by tapping the East Asia Region’s centres of excellence in education, to enhance regional understanding and the mutual appreciation of heritage and history.

Teaching at the Schools of Historical Studies and Ecology and Environment Studies began in September, 2014, setting the university on the course of further growth.

About ancient Nalanda University

• Nalanda was an acclaimed Mahavihara, a large Buddhist monastery in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (modern-day Bihar) in India.
• The site is located about 95 kilometres southeast of Patna near the town of Bihar Sharif, and was a centre of learning from the fifth century CE to c. 1200 CE.
• Historians often characterize Nalanda as a university.

Rise and Decline

• Nalanda flourished under the patronage of the Gupta Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries and later under Harsha, the emperor of Kannauj.
• The liberal cultural traditions inherited from the Gupta age resulted in a period of growth and prosperity until the ninth century.
• The subsequent centuries were a time of gradual decline, a period during which the tantric developments of Buddhism became most pronounced in eastern India under the Pala Empire.

During the Peak Period

• At its peak, the school attracted scholars and students from near and far with some travelling all the way from Tibet, China, Korea, and Central Asia.
• Much of our knowledge of Nalanda comes from the writings of pilgrim monks from East Asia such as Xuanzang and Yijing who travelled to the Mahavihara in the 7th century.
• Archaeological evidence also notes contact with the Shailendra dynasty of Indonesia, one of whose kings built a monastery in the complex.

Destruction by Khiljis

Nalanda was very likely ransacked and destroyed by an army of the Muslim Mamluk Dynasty under Bakhtiyar Khilji in c. 1200 CE.

While some sources note that the Mahavihara continued to function in a makeshift fashion for a while longer, it was eventually abandoned and forgotten until the 19th century when the site was surveyed and preliminary excavations were conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India.

Excavations

Systematic excavations at Nalanda commenced in 1915 which unearthed eleven monasteries and six brick temples neatly arranged on grounds 12 hectares in area.

A trove of sculptures, coins, seals, and inscriptions have also been discovered in the ruins many of which are on display in the Nalanda Archaeological Museum situated nearby.

Nalanda is now a notable tourist destination and a part of the Buddhist tourism circuit.