Which of the following is not the famous centre for Buddhist Learning in Ancient India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Nagpur. Three of the four names are among the best-attested monastic universities of early India and the fourth is not on the list at all. Nalanda, in what is now Nalanda district of Bihar, ran from about the fifth century CE to the end of the twelfth and is the mahavihara every source names first; Xuanzang studied there under Shilabhadra in the 630s and Yijing spent roughly a decade there later in the same century. Vikramshila was founded by the Pala emperor Dharmapala, who reigned about 783–820 CE, and its ruins stand at Antichak village near Kahalgaon — the Archaeological Survey of India's own list of centrally protected monuments places the site in BHAGALPUR district, not in the neighbouring Banka, which was carved out of Bhagalpur only in 1991. Tibetan sources rank Vikramshila as the premier university of the Pala era, with more than a hundred teachers and about a thousand students, and it produced Atisha, who carried Buddhist learning to Tibet. Valabhi, in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat near modern Bhavnagar, was the Maitraka capital and the great western counterpart to Nalanda; Xuanzang, who praised the Maitraka king Shiladitya I, records it as a leading seat of the Hinayana tradition, and Valabhi is separately famous in Jain history for the council of 454 CE at which the Svetambara canon was written down. Nagpur has nothing of this kind in its past. Its association with Buddhism is entirely modern and dates to 14 October 1956, when Dr B. R. Ambedkar and several lakh followers took the Buddhist vows at the ground in Nagpur now called Deekshabhoomi. That single, famous, twentieth-century event is what makes the option feel plausible, and it is exactly why the setter chose it — the question tests whether you can tell an ancient monastic university from a modern conversion site.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A genuine centre, and the one a Bihar candidate should know best after Nalanda. Founded by the Pala king Dharmapala between the late eighth and early ninth century as a response to a perceived decline in scholarship at Nalanda, it specialised in tantric or Vajrayana studies and was destroyed around 1193. The ruins at Antichak, Bhagalpur district, are a protected monument.  (b) The most famous Buddhist university in the world and plainly not the answer. It functioned for some seven centuries in Bihar, drew students from China, Korea, Tibet and Southeast Asia, and its excavated mounds were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016. Anyone reading the stem too quickly and picking the biggest name has inverted the question, which asks for the one that is NOT a centre.  (c) The least familiar of the three real answers, and therefore the trap for a candidate who eliminates by recognition rather than by knowledge. Valabhi was the Maitraka capital in Saurashtra, Gujarat, and a celebrated seat of Buddhist learning that Chinese pilgrims bracketed with Nalanda. Unfamiliarity is not evidence: the option a student has never heard of is not automatically the odd one out.

Concept: Ancient India's higher learning was organised around the mahavihara — a large endowed monastery that combined residence, worship and formal teaching, funded by royal grants of villages whose revenue maintained the establishment. The recognised list is short and worth memorising as a list: Taxila (Takshashila) in the north-west, the oldest; Nalanda in Magadha, the largest and longest-running; Valabhi in Saurashtra; and the Pala-period foundations of eastern India — Vikramshila, Odantapuri, Somapura and Jagaddala. Tibetan tradition treats the Pala group as a coordinated network under state supervision, with scholars moving freely between them, which is why a teacher trained at Nalanda could end his career at Vikramshila. The curriculum went well beyond scripture: logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy and philosophy were all taught, and Buddhist and non-Buddhist students both attended. The destruction of this network at the end of the twelfth century, in the campaigns associated with Bakhtiyar Khalji, ended organised Buddhist scholarship in the Gangetic plain.

State PCS 2025 Q38 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q38 — History PYQ with Answer