Nalanda’s Last Torch

JAMYANG DORJEE

How India’s Buddhist Golden Age Was Handed to Tibet

In the 7th century, when the fame of Nalanda University of was at its peak and  Thonmi Sambhota was shaping the Tibetan script from the Gupta tradition, Europe was passing through what it later called its “Dark Ages,” and the Americas had yet to emerge in global history. Nowhere else existed an institution remotely comparable to Nalanda. India stood as the intellectual capital of the ancient world, and Buddhism served as its primary vehicle for transmitting knowledge across borders.

This remarkable period—roughly 630–647 CE—saw an extraordinary convergence of abbots, philosophers, translators, and rulers. The 7th century was truly a golden age of international learning, dominated by India. Two great rulers, Harsha and Songtsen Gompo not only led their respective civilizations but also sustained and nurtured the Buddhist institutional world at its height.

Harsha became the last emperor to extend pan-Indian imperial patronage to Buddhism. Songtsen Gampo, meanwhile, laid the foundation for a Tibetan tradition that would receive and preserve the intellectual wealth produced in India. No other Buddhist civilization absorbed such a complete and systematic transmission. It is almost as if history orchestrated a deliberate handoff—India’s final flourishing of imperial Buddhism passing its greatest treasures to Tibet just as its own political foundations began to weaken.

Nalanda produced some of India’s finest minds, including Nagarjuna, Aryadeva,  Chandrakirti, Shantideva, Shantarakshita,Kamalashila, Asanga, Vasubhandu,Dignaga, Dharmakirti and many others, alongside  Padmasambhava, revered as the “second Buddha.” Buddhism and India’s intellectual traditions grew together and traveled together, making them nearly inseparable during this extraordinary era.

As Swami Vivekananda later observed, “Hindus need the heart of Buddha, and Buddhists need the brain of the Brahmins.” His vision imagined a future India uniting intellectual rigor with spiritual compassion. The Buddha himself redefined the idea of a “true Brahmin” as one who is morally pure and wise, regardless of birth. Echoing this unity, HH the Dalai Lama has described Hindus and Buddhists as “two leaves of the same Bodhi tree.”

The final embers of Nalanda’s living transmission reached Tibet through the last abode of the Nalanda, Shakyashribhadra, a Kashmiri pandit who fled to Tibet around 1204 CE as the great Indian monasteries faced destruction.

After Harsha’s death in 647 CE, Buddhism lost its last great imperial patron in India. Over time, shifting political and religious dynamics altered its trajectory. By the 8th century, the idea of the Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu appeared in several Puranic traditions—an incorporation that, while culturally significant, blurred distinct philosophical boundaries. By 12th century, the name of the original script of India created by Ashoka the great called ‘ Dhammalipi’ changed to Brahmi script as coined by the European scholars. 

The decline of Buddhism in India was not a single event but a long, complex process involving changing patronage, philosophical debates such as those associated with Adi Shankracharya,and eventually the physical destruction of monasteries during invasions led by Bakhtiyar Khilji. When Nalanda and other great centers in Bihar were destroyed in the late 12th century, India’s living Buddhist transmission was largely severed.

Yet across the Himalayas, Tibet preserved this legacy with remarkable fidelity. Within just a couple of centuries of Sambhota’s script creation, Tibetan scholars had translated a vast body of Indian knowledge—work that had taken centuries to develop—into their own language. Even upheavals such as the cultural revolution in Tibet could not extinguish this preserved knowledge. When the HH the Dalai Lama arrived in India as a refugee in 1959, he and other scholars helped rebuild monastic institutions, reviving the Nalanda tradition in exile and transmitting it anew across the Himalayan region.

The repository of the Nalanda tradition in its near entirety survives today in Tibetan script—essentially a living snapshot of 7th-century Gupta intellectual culture. This script, associated with Thonmi Sambhota is known as Sambhota in Nepal. In 2007, Nepal formally recognized Sambhota teachings in monasteries as part of its school curriculum, and in May 2024, some provinces granted it official language status. In Bhutan, Dzongkha—derived from the same script tradition—serves as the national language.

The contrast is striking: more than three million people in India’s Himalayan regions speak Bhoti languages, yet they continue to struggle for inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, despite steps such as Ladakh’s recognition under its 2025 language regulations. Just as Sanskrit is often described as a mother of many Indian languages, Bhoti remains a crucial custodian of the full range of Buddhist traditions that emerged from Nalanda—Mahayana, Theravada, Vajrayana, and Tantrayana.

Despite waves of destruction—from the burning of Nalanda to the devastations of the Cultural Revolution—the knowledge itself was never extinguished. It survived in texts, in memory, and in unbroken lineages carried across generations. Today, that legacy continues to be preserved, studied, and transmitted by millions across India, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Tibetan diaspora—an enduring testament to one of humanity’s greatest intellectual and spiritual traditions.

(The writer is a retired Civil servant of Government of Sikkim and a master calligrapher. Email: jamyangitsn@gmail.com)