In his new book Nalanda, breathtaking in its sweep and lyrical in its glory, the poet-diplomat Abhay K unearths with tender precision the most luminous jewel, nestled amid lush mango groves and ringed by an azure pool, of “the Buddha’s pure land” — Nalanda Mahavihara, one of the ancient world’s most hallowed centres of learning. Mirroring the exacting expeditions that scholars from across the globe — from shores as far as Korea, Japan, China, Tibet, and Indonesia on the one hand, and Persia and Turkey on the other — would make to Nalanda, Abhay traverses the tracks of time, bringing to life a university that flourished centuries before Oxford and Cambridge were even gleams in their founders’ eyes; and where the inter-disciplinary study of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, art and architecture, translation, poetry, and logic (to list but a few subjects on offer) paved the way for the modern conception of a university, as also for an education in the humanities, upon which an “enlightened” Europe, in the throes of Renaissance, would only chance much later.

We follow in the footsteps of a succession of scholar-explorers, drawn to Nalanda as bees “to a flower seeking nectar,” such as Xuanzang, who — returning to China with over six hundred Buddhist texts after many academically lucrative years at Nalanda — demanded that the Tang emperor build a “Nalanda-like Tower of Sanskrit scriptures to protect the manuscripts he had brought back.” Thus was born the Great Wild Goose Pagoda of Xi’an, which stands tall still. Nalanda, woefully, does not. Yet even as he chronicles the destruction of this fount of knowledge — whose library, Dharmaganj (nine-storeys tall and brimming with priceless texts, sacred and secular alike), swirled in flames for days on end, its burning books turning night into day — at the hands of Bakhtiyar Khalji, “a petty plunderer,” Abhay allows no rancour, least of all religious, to creep into his voice, and thus rises above the sordid politics of our age. He laments the desolation of Nalanda as a debilitating blow to education, religion, and culture—a loss that impoverished not only India or Buddhism but history as a whole, robbing it of one of its most industrious seats of........

© Mathrubhumi English