We approached the gates of the ancient Buddhist Nalanda University and waited while Jagdish paid our entry fee at the gatehouse and wallahs approached us as usual. “Hallo, madam! Postcards?” I wouldn’t think many people would be in a shopping mood when they’re waiting at a gate or walking down a road, but I could be wrong. I was glad when we crossed to the other side of the gate, where salespeople are not allowed, and we started walking along a lengthy and gravelly straight path that lead to the ruins. Flowers, shrubbery, and some trees decorated the grounds on either side of the path.
Tibetans and Bhutanese came and went; in many cases they wore colorful and festive traditional clothing. They were stepping out in style. Many Tibetan women wore the traditional chupa, or jumper, mostly in dark wools, and if they were married they wore bright and multicolored striped aprons. A Bhutanese guy wore a bright orange plaid jacket or tunic that fastened to the side and had a big puff just over the waistband. I liked the bold plaid, which reminded me of Tibetan lama’s robes in thangkas, and it was surprising seeing such a print in real life. I’ve looked at such paintings and felt dubious about whether monks would actually have worn bold plaids, but now I realize it’s possible. But don’t tell me they’d wear tam-o’-shanters or play bagpipes. While the print is attractive, the tunic’s construction is not a flattering style for most people: like a fashionable Western dress from the nineteen-thirties, it sort of simulates boobs drooping down to the waist.
To our right on the walkway, a few feet beyond the university gate, a big archeological dig was in progress, with numerous extremely skinny guys in turbans carrying gigantic bowls on their heads and digging amid the brick foundations of a monastery or some such building. These ruins included not only low brick walls forming squares, but also a big circular well. Some of the workers paused to stare back at the weird foreigners. A brick building stood before us, and the path was flanked by rows of bright, colorful flowers that a gardener was tending. Some of the flowers looked like big pompoms, about a foot across, and someone explained that they’re dahlias, but they’re so much bigger than the dahlias that grow in North America. “And that’s without Miracle Grow,” Liz said.
During our tour of the university ruins, I took notes on what Shantum and a tour guide, Mishra, told us. Nalanda was a university that Buddhist books mention often enough that I easily recognized its name. If nothing else, I remember the origins of Shantideva’s book, and I recollect that the introduction to the classic Chinese fantasy novel, The Journey to the West, mentions that the monk Hsuan Tsang visited Nalanda and picked up lots of manuscripts there, which was the main point of his pilgrimage to India fifteen hundred years ago.
“The Buddha himself sometimes visited Nalanda, as did Mahavira, the founder of Jainism,” Shantum said. Of course, it couldn’t have been a Buddhist university before the Buddha got there, so maybe it was just a town at first. I surmise that the Buddha’s visits would have been an inspiration that triggered the founding of the university. Shantum said, “The legendary teacher Nagarjuna taught here, and Emperor Ashoka visited.” Hey, where’s the pillar?
Shantum said, “To get into the university, a prospective student had to answer questions at the gate, and only eight or ten students were allowed in a class,” so anyone who wanted to study there had to be mighty smart. Fortunately, nobody asked us any such questions; that must be because of the bribery money Jagdish pushed through the gatehouse window. Oh. Never mind, that was a fee for taking photos. Or so he told us.
We admired the giant flowers and walked through what is now the front entrance, a narrow brick archway that was briefly dark and cavernous before it opened up to reveal a long brick wall on our left and red brick ruins on our right. The latter created an uneven skyline, since some walls were taller or more intact than others. This structure included a big staircase leading up to a flat surface, and people, particularly children, were climbing and walking around the staircase and on these walls. Some members of our sangha joined them before we moved further on.
One of the first things Shantum told us was about the legendary Buddhist monk Shantideva, whose book I’ve read, and how, because he came off as a total slacker, the university held a competition to weed out bad monks, particularly Shantideva, who seemed lazy and worthless. He was challenged, so he got up in front of a crowd of smirking and contemptuous monks and gave a talk that became the book we have today: The Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life.
I imagine Shantideva sitting cross-legged on a brick surface with a cushion under his reputedly lazy butt and projecting his voice for a change, although he may have customarily been soft-spoken. I imagine him reciting in a clear voice what became his phenominal bestselling book.
The book expresses high aspirations for practicing selflessness, loving-kindness and compassion, and I need to set aside rage, depression, and bitterness and take those words to heart. But the same could be said for a great many people, despite all attempts people have made to convince me that I am extraordinarily inadequate. I think Shantideva even has a pretty name; the last part means “deities” or “spirits” and the first part means “peace.” So it more or less means “divine peace.”
The ruins that we see today were built in the fifth, seventh, and ninth centuries, and the layers are built onto each other. We stood above a rectangular underground section and looked down while Shantum explained this, and indeed I observed that the bricks in the walls of this section looked slightly different in color and texture depending on when they were built.
Shantum talked about the university’s vast library, with texts in sundry languages. This was a stopping place for scholarly Buddhists from all over Asia to come and study. Unfortunately, Muslims from Turkey invaded and did a lot of damage, and invading Hindus burned the nine-story library and much of its contents. This greatly contributed to the demise of Buddhism in India.
Back in St. Louis, I worked with my friend Jill in a bookstore, where she wore a button with the message, “They got the library at Alexandria, they’re not getting mine,” and now, as I learned about the destruction of Nalanda’s impressive library, I thought, “They got the library at Nalanda, they’re not getting mine.” It contained three hundred sixty-seven books, enough to read one every day of the year, that Hsuan Tsang took from Nalanda back to China, so they were saved before the fire and invasions. Whew. But no doubt the library had rather more books than that.
Standing on a high surface, I can easily see how the ruins now consist mostly of different, uneven levels, often crumbly at the top, and divided into rectangular rooms. Brick steps can take a visitor hither and thither, up and down almost as if on a hiking trail with uneven ground. On a lower level, we walked to a rectangular box with two arched entries; Shantum explained that this was used for grain storage. Occasionally we came upon a rectangular niche that obviously used to be a small shrine, even with a little brick lump where a Buddha statue would have stood.
It looked like the archeological staff may have built some of the stairs in order to get around, since the structure would have originally had many more walls and floors. The ruins have quite a few other steep staircases. While we wandered on a fairly high structure, Shantum showed us a couple red brick areas that previously displayed Buddha shrines and where we could still see the niches and plastered platforms, much like big benches, where large Buddha statues had been located. I asked, “What were the statues made of?”
Shantum said, “The Buddha statues of Nalanda were made of black stone. Later, in the fifth to seventh centuries, they were made of sandstone. We’ll see some of the statuary when we visit the Nalanda Museum after we leave the ruins.” No doubt, I thought, the sculptures are safer and taken better care of inside the museum rather than out here in the elements.
“Both monks and laypeople attended,” the tour guide Mishra explained. “Thirty-five monks lived in one block of dorms.” Seeing the rows and rows of little rooms, I have no trouble believing that; the rooms were about the same size in my college dorm. Mishra said, “The thickness of the walls meant it felt warmer during the colder season. All the brick was originally plastered, the turrets rose up into the clouds, and all the walls were painted.” Pretty. Now, of course, it’s all red brick and missing a lot of pieces. We walked along a brick corridor lined with identical little rooms, and when we turned a corner, the corridor continued much the same. Perhaps the floors used to be wood, but now they’re brick and each room’s floor has a ditch like an irrigation canal, but only a few inches deep and a few inches wide, that leads to a little pointed archway in the outer wall; it probably was part of the heating or cooling system. Each room also had a little niche, and one room looked like the Count of Monte Cristo may have started digging a tunnel into the next cell.
In one of the little dorm rooms, Dean showed Valerie and me dark scorch marks on a brick wall and said that twenty-five thousand degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which brick fuses. That must have been a very hot fire, when the Hindus invaded and burned the place down, and we can still see its effect on some of the bricks. After the place was attacked and inhabitants killed off, an invader finally asked what this place was and learned that it was a center of learning.
While clearly Buddhist pilgrims enjoy visiting places significant to Siddhartha Gautama, lack of interest for Buddhism in predominantly Hindu India is not very good for the historic places, if local people aren't particularly interested in keeping them up; in that respect, an interest in history would be useful.
Our wanderings at Nalanda included the most beautiful part of the ruins, where rows of elaborately carved reliquary stupas, a few feet high, stood in front of a tall block-like building called the Stupa of Shariputra. It’s also the largest remaining part of the ruins and a memorial to the Buddha. Walking past this tall building, Rikki commented on the long staircase leading up, up…to almost the top of what was left of that building. This inspired a sing-along of the Fiddler on the Roof song “If I was a Rich Man,” because of the lines:
There would be one long staircase just going up.
And one even longer coming down.
And one more leading nowhere, just for show (Stein, p. 40).
I could see Zero Mostel as Tevia dancing up those stairs. Who’d guess he was that graceful. The steps were steep with nothing to hold onto: no railing or banister, though that may have been different when the stairs were first built.
We moved around to the front of the Shariputra Stupa, but a slightly underground foundation of a big rectangular building was between the temple and us. So Shantum stepped down into this pit that was at most a couple feet deep, and we all followed like lemmings. I was more cautious than most people, since I didn’t want to have another nasty fall, and this time I would have fallen on brick rather than dirt and grass. I sat down on the sturdy ledge and slid forward to stand on the lower level. When I got to the other side, I didn’t leap up like others but rather climbed on a low square structure and stepped from it to the outer wall of the foundation. Thus I stood amid the plethora of little stupas, of only a few feet high and a few feet in diameter, that are lined up in front of the big Temple of Shariputra. These little stupas still have some beautiful sculptural detail left, including niches displaying carved Buddhas.
Mukesh said something about having to hurry up because a staff member was coming after us and didn’t want us to walk around amid the stupas, so I quickly moved to the cluster of the prettiest and most intact stupas and took my pictures rather hastily, which unfortunately could have an adverse effect on the quality of the photos. Members of the sangha turned back and traversed across the low foundation again, and I very carefully got down into it by sitting on the ledge and scooting off.
The sangha meandered all over the unburied parts of Nalanda, which originally was ten times bigger than what we saw. We afterward walked up the front path and past the archeological dig, to a shrine for which a huge Buddha statue was recently found, fifteen days ago, but it is no longer in the shrine. A portion of the lotus throne still sits there along with some stonework around the big gap where the Buddha statue would have sat. At the front of the shrine, some brickwork still has designs carved into it, such as a vase for instance. The shrine, Shantum explained, used to have front columns with Shiva and Parvati on one column and Vishnu on the other. The entrance has a locked gate, so tourists can’t actually walk in, but we had an impressive view.
Back on the path in front of the gates, a conversation with Yvette, Liz, and Elly turned to how exciting it was to see so many Tibetans, who were coming and going on the path to and from the ruins, and what wonderful clothing they wore. I pointed out that some of them were Bhutanese rather than Tibetan. I could tell because women from Bhutan wear wrap-around skirts in vivid, bold patterns, in plaids, stripes, or floral designs, with a blouse. Since then, I have learned that at least some of them could have been from Nepal. Tibetan women, on the other hand, wear chupas, which are jumpers with a wrap-around skirt, basically the same thing that Tibetan monks and nuns wear under their voluminous shawls. Most of the chupas I saw were solid brown, beige, or grey, or occasionally dark pinstripe wool or dark red. I described the construction of Tibetan chupas, which wasn’t hard for me to do since I’ve made a couple of them. I show up at work wearing weird clothing on a regular basis. With some sign language, I said, “There’s a sleeveless bodice that fastens on the side, and the skirt is really wide on each side, wraps around in back, and then the ties on the skirt are tied in front.”
When we arrived at a little restaurant across the street, Jagdish spoke with the staff and told us that lunch wouldn’t be ready for another ten minutes, so we went further down the path into the Archeological Museum of Nalanda. The museum was a smallish white building that appears to date back to the early twentieth century, and indeed the British founded it, in 1917, the same year as the Patna Museum.
The museum contained beautiful stone sculptures found around Nalanda; they were stone Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and such. In the front room, we stood over a glass case displaying a scale model of the Nalanda ruins, which cover a vast area of land and seem huge, even though what we see now is only a small portion of what stood back in the university’s heyday. I would have liked to see at least a picture showing what the architecture originally looked like, but there’s no such thing in the museum. I admired a beautifully carved pig relief, three stone tablets with words carved on them in neat rows, and little Buddhist plaques and molds, a few inches in dimension, like I’ve seen at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. We also gathered around a beautiful black stone Buddha statue, approximately life-size, with the “touch earth” mudra.
A large bodhisattva statue was broken off above the navel but the remains were beautifully carved. Another, across the room, dated to the thirteenth century and also demonstrated impressive handiwork, but the subject matter was disturbing, because it was the Buddha stomping on the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati. Some fundamentalist portrayed the Buddha stomping out the allegedly wrong religion. I was less shocked than I could have been, since I’ve seen this sort of artwork in either another museum or in a book on Buddhist art. However, it disturbed Ann, since such bigotry didn’t fit her ideals of Buddhism, but by dinner she said, “I guess all religions have practiced some intolerance at some point.” By then she was less shaken and reminded us that at least there haven’t been any wars fought for Buddhism. But meanwhile, as we stood in front of the statue at the museum, Shantum explained that one of the reasons Buddhism died out was because it had become so arrogant. Certainly, I think that portraying the Buddha stomping on Shiva and Parvati is excessively presumptuous and intolerant. The Buddha, who was a Hindu, would not have approved. Bad karma, no biscuit.
In another gallery, the one with the plaques and tablets, I noticed a delightful carving of a big-eyed, pudgy face with mouth wide open and hands in its mouth. The name of the relief was “Greed.” I drew a rough sketch of it in my notebook; it might come in handy for my own sculpting with polymer clay. And who knows, it might remind me not to buy gratuitous quantities of books and music CDs.
In that gallery, a Tibetan monk’s robes brushed against me as he slowly moved by, and I shifted my hand higher up on my bag, to the shoulder strap, because I thought it would be bad karma to goose a monk even by accident. Yet a few minutes later, the gallery was so crowded that I rubbed butts with another stocky Tibetan monk as we passed each other. Hey, coming to think of it, that could become part of a ritual, like the way dogs smell each other’s butts in greeting. Or maybe not.
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