Who among the following was not an Acharya in The Nalanda Vishvavidyalaya?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Kautilya. When BPSC disposed of objections and published its final revised key on 31 October 2025, it gave exactly this reasoning: Nagarjuna, Sheelbhadra and Shantirakshit are all named among the acharyas of the Nalanda Mahavihara, and Kautilya was not an acharya there. The chronology settles it before any list of names is needed. Nalanda Mahavihara was a Gupta foundation — built in 427 CE under Kumaragupta I, on a 12-hectare site in what is now Nalanda district of Bihar. Kautilya — also called Chanakya and Vishnugupta — belongs to the fourth century BCE, to the court of Chandragupta Maurya at Pataliputra, and by tradition to Takshashila in the north-west. Even the most conservative modern dating of the Arthashastra, which pushes its compilation forward into the early centuries CE, still leaves the text and its author centuries earlier than the first brick of Nalanda. More than that, Kautilya's world is a different intellectual world altogether: he is the theorist of danda, saptanga, the mandala theory of interstate relations and revenue administration — a treatise on statecraft written for a king, not a Buddhist monastic curriculum of Yogachara metaphysics, Madhyamaka dialectics, pramana logic and vinaya. Nalanda was a mahavihara, a Buddhist monastic university, and its acharyas were Buddhist masters. Its teaching roll as recorded in the scholarship includes Dharmapala, Nagarjuna, Dharmakirti, Asanga, Vasubandhu, Chandrakirti, Shilabhadra, Vajrabodhi and Dharmasvamin, and its most famous student was the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who was given the Indian name Mokshadeva. Kautilya appears on no such list, in no traveller's account of the site, and in no inscription from it. He is the only name among the four options whose life, place and subject matter all sit outside Nalanda — which is precisely why the paper chose him.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not the answer — the Commission expressly names Nagarjuna as one of Nalanda's acharyas, and he is on the standard list of faculty associated with the mahavihara. Honesty requires one caveat a candidate should know: Nagarjuna, the Madhyamaka philosopher, is dated to roughly the 2nd century CE and so predates Nalanda's 427 CE foundation, which makes his link with the site traditional rather than documented. That does not change the marked answer.  (c) Not the answer — Shilabhadra is the best-attested Nalanda acharya of all. He was the venerable head of the institution when Xuanzang arrived, and Xuanzang, who visited in 637 and 642 CE and spent roughly two years there, studied Yogachara under him and described him as the incomparable teacher for whose sake the overland journey had been worth making.  (d) Not the answer — Shantarakshita was an 8th-century scholar of Nalanda and is the reason Nalanda's learning reached the Himalayas. Invited by the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen (Khri-sron-deu-tsan), he established the monastery at Samye and served as its first abbot; his disciple Kamalashila, also of Nalanda, followed him to Tibet.

Concept: Nalanda Mahavihara was a Buddhist monastic university in Magadha, built in 427 CE under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I and sustained for some seven centuries by royal endowment rather than fees. Inscriptions from the site record grants of villages: Harsha alone gave 100 villages and directed 200 households in each of them to supply the monks with rice, butter and milk. That endowment is said to have supported over 1,500 teachers and 10,000 student monks — figures worth quoting with the scholars' own caution attached, since the Chinese pilgrim Yijing, visiting a few decades after Xuanzang, gives a much lower figure of somewhat over 3,000, and the excavated area is not large enough for the higher number. The excavated ruins cover about 12 hectares, roughly 490 metres by 240, with Temple 3 the most imposing structure and the monasteries laid out facing west with their drains running east. What was taught there was Buddhist: Yogachara idealism, Madhyamaka dialectics, pramana logic, vinaya discipline, and alongside them grammar, medicine and astronomy. The site was likely attacked and ransacked around 1200 CE, traditionally attributed to Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, and was abandoned by about 1400. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 as the 'Archaeological Site of Nalanda Mahavihara at Nalanda, Bihar' — property 1502, criteria iv and vi, a 23-hectare core with a 57.88-hectare buffer.

State PCS 2025 Q97 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q97 — History PYQ with Answer