The World’s First Universities: 7 Things Nalanda, Takshashila, and Pushpagiri Taught the World — Before Oxford Existed

This Research… Now available with Audio Narration. To Listen in your Language… Change Your Device Language!       |       यह शोध अब ऑडियो के साथ उपलब्ध है। अपनी भाषा में सुनने के लिए, कृपया अपने मोबाइल की भाषा बदलें!

Oxford was founded in 1096 CE. Takshashila was teaching in 600 BCE. Discover 7 profound things India’s ancient universities gave the world — and what was lost when Nalanda burned.

🎧 Listen in Your Language

🎧 Listen in English 🎧 हिंदी आवाज़ में सुनें

In This Research Pillar

Table of Contents

1. The World’s First Universities: 7 Things Nalanda, Takshashila, and Pushpagiri Taught the World — Before Oxford Existed
2. What Makes an Ancient Institution a University — and Why Does the Definition Matter?
3. Takshashila — The World’s First University (600 BCE)
4. Nalanda — The Greatest University the Ancient World Ever Produced (5th–12th Century CE)
5. Pushpagiri Vihar — Odisha’s Forgotten University on the Hill of Flowers
6. Other Notable Ancient Universities of India
7. 7 Things These Universities Taught the World That We Are Still Learning
8. Why Are These Universities Not Household Names — The Honest Answer
9. My Interpretation
10. About the Author
11. Frequently Asked Questions: The World’s First Universities
12. References and Further Reading
13. What Did India Actually Build? — Complete Series

Oxford University was founded in 1096 CE. It is, by most measures, one of the greatest universities ever built — over 900 years of continuous scholarship, dozens of Nobel laureates, alumni who have shaped the world in every field imaginable. Nobody disputes Oxford’s greatness.

Takshashila was teaching students in 600 BCE. That is 1,700 years before Oxford opened its gates. And Takshashila was not simply older. It was already, by any measure available to us, a world-class centre of learning when Oxford was still seventeen centuries away from being imagined.

This article is not about diminishing what Europe built. It is about recovering what India built — and understanding why three of the greatest universities the world has ever produced are not household names in the way that Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard are. Takshashila. Nalanda. And — perhaps least known of all, yet equally significant — Pushpagiri Vihar of Odisha, the Hill of Flowers, which for over a thousand years was one of Asia’s most important centres of Buddhist learning and philosophical inquiry.

These were not small schools in a quiet corner of history. They were vast, cosmopolitan, internationally attended institutions that attracted students and scholars from China, Korea, Tibet, Persia, Greece, and Southeast Asia. They taught medicine, mathematics, astronomy, logic, grammar, philosophy, and the arts. They produced thinkers whose influence spread across the ancient world. And they were destroyed — not by time, not by neglect, but by deliberate acts of epistemicide that cut the living chain of intellectual transmission and left the world without access to what they had accumulated.Understanding what was built — and what was lost — is one of the most important acts of historical recovery available to a rising India.

Before examining the three great institutions, a definitional question deserves honest engagement: can we really call Takshashila or Nalanda ‘universities’ in the modern sense? Some Western historians resist the term, arguing that the concept of a university is inherently European — rooted in the mediaeval papal charter, the faculty governance structures of Bologna and Paris, the specific legal and institutional arrangements of the European tradition.

This argument deserves to be examined — and then set aside. The features that define a university in any functionally meaningful sense are: systematic, multi-disciplinary higher education; residential learning communities; teachers of specialised expertise; students who travel specifically for the education; and a degree of institutional permanence that allows knowledge to accumulate across generations. By every one of these criteria — and by several others that the European university model does not possess — Takshashila, Nalanda, and Pushpagiri qualify completely.

What they were not: they were not chartered by a pope. They did not issue degrees in the mediaeval European sense. Their governance structures were different. And their philosophical and religious foundations were Indian rather than Christian European. None of this makes them less a university. It makes them a different kind of university — one that, in several respects, was more comprehensive, more international, and more intellectually open than the early European institutions that succeeded them.

The resistance to calling them universities is, in the most direct sense, a residue of the colonial intellectual framework that defined ‘real’ institutions as European and everything else as precursor, approximation, or primitive version. Recovering the accurate historical description requires setting that framework aside and applying the functional definition consistently.

Oxford was founded 1,700 years after Takshashila was already teaching students from across the ancient world. The question is not whether Takshashila was a university. The question is why we needed a European precedent to believe that it was.

Takshashila — known today as Taxila, located in the Rawalpindi district of modern Pakistan — was the world’s first institution of systematic higher learning. By the 6th century BCE, it was already an established, internationally recognised centre of scholarship, attracting students from across the ancient world who came specifically to study under its famous teachers.

Unlike Nalanda, Takshashila did not have a single campus or a centralised administrative structure. It was organised around individual teachers of exceptional eminence — scholars of such reputation that students would travel months or years to study with them. The institution was the aggregate of these teacher-student relationships, gathered in one place over generations. This is not a primitive form of university. It is a sophisticated form — one in which the quality of learning was determined by the quality of the masters, rather than by the prestige of an institution’s charter.

What Was Taught at Takshashila

The curriculum at Takshashila was extraordinary in its breadth. Ancient texts describe 68 subjects being taught — including the three Vedas and their auxiliary sciences (Vedanga), medicine, surgery, archery and military science, astronomy, mathematics, grammar, logic, law, philosophy, economics, and the arts. It was not a specialised institution but a comprehensive one — producing scholars capable of contributing across the full range of human knowledge.

Two of its most famous graduates illustrate the range of Takshashila’s intellectual output. Chanakya — also known as Kautilya — came to Takshashila as a student and became one of its most celebrated teachers. He authored the Arthashastra (circa 300 BCE) — the world’s first systematic treatise on economics, governance, and statecraft, a text that anticipated concepts of institutional economics, stakeholder management, and regulatory theory by 2,000 years. Panini — the Sanskrit grammarian who authored the Ashtadhyayi — produced the world’s first formal grammar of any language at Takshashila, a text so precise that modern computational linguists study it as a model for formal language description.

Takshashila also produced Charaka — the Ayurvedic physician whose Charaka Samhita became one of the foundational texts of Indian medicine. And Jivaka, the royal physician of the Buddha and King Bimbisara, who performed the world’s first documented brain surgery — also a Takshashila graduate.

• Founded — approximately 600 BCE — 1,700 years before Oxford
• Location — Rawalpindi district, present-day Pakistan
• Curriculum — 68 subjects including the Vedas, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, military science, law, philosophy
• Famous graduates — Chanakya (Arthashastra), Panini (Ashtadhyayi), Charaka (Ayurveda), Jivaka (royal physician of the Buddha)
• International reach — Students from Babylon, Greece, Persia, and across the Indian subcontinent
• Duration — Active for approximately 1,000 years before its decline following Greek and then Hunnic invasions

If Takshashila was the world’s first great university, Nalanda was the world’s greatest. Not because it was older — it was not. But because of its scale, its institutional sophistication, its international reach, its architectural magnificence, and the extraordinary breadth and depth of its scholarship across seven centuries of continuous operation.

Nalanda was founded during the reign of Kumaragupta I of the Gupta dynasty, in the 5th century CE. It reached its peak between the 7th and 12th centuries — a period of approximately 500 years during which it was the acknowledged centre of Buddhist learning in the world, drawing scholars from every country where Buddhism had spread.

The Scale of Nalanda

At its peak, Nalanda housed 10,000 students and 2,000 faculty. Nine multistoreyed libraries held an estimated nine million manuscripts — accumulated over seven centuries of scholarship. One library was called Ratnasagara — the Ocean of Gems — and was said to be so tall that the light of the sun had to be specially directed into the upper floors. Students who wished to enter were required to pass an oral examination conducted by one of Nalanda’s scholars at the gate — scholars of such eminence that, according to Xuanzang, most aspirants failed.

The curriculum at Nalanda was comprehensive: Buddhist philosophy across all major schools, Vedic texts, logic, grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and fine arts. But what distinguished Nalanda was not simply what it taught — it was how it taught. The culture of intellectual debate, of rigorous logical argumentation, of questioning received positions rather than simply transmitting them — this was Nalanda’s most important contribution to the global intellectual tradition.

Xuanzang’s Testimony — The World’s Most Important Primary Source

The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang (c. 602–664 CE) came to India specifically to study at Nalanda. He arrived around 630 CE and spent approximately five years there, studying Buddhist philosophy, logic, and Sanskrit under the great master Silabhadra. His account — the Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty — is the most detailed and most reliable firsthand description of Nalanda ever written.

Xuanzang describes Nalanda’s architecture in terms that leave no doubt about its grandeur: ‘The richly adorned towers and the fairy-like turrets, like pointed hilltops, are congregated together. The observatories seem to be lost in vapours and the upper rooms tower above the clouds.’ He describes its intellectual culture with equal admiration: teachers of world reputation, students from every country, debates that attracted the finest philosophical minds in Asia, a library that contained texts gathered from across the Buddhist world.

Xuanzang’s account matters not only as historical testimony. It matters because it is an external, independent confirmation of Nalanda’s greatness by a visitor from a completely different civilisational tradition. He had no reason to inflate Nalanda’s reputation. He was writing for a Chinese audience who had no particular stake in Indian institutional prestige. His admiration was that of a scholar encountering something genuinely extraordinary.

Xuanzang spent five years at Nalanda and called it a place where ‘the richly adorned towers and fairy-like turrets seem lost in vapours.’ He was describing what Oxford would not be built for another 400 years. He was describing the greatest university the ancient world ever produced.

The Destruction — 1193 CE

Nalanda was destroyed in 1193 CE by the forces of Bakhtiyar Khilji — a military commander operating under the Delhi Sultanate. The destruction is documented in the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, written by the Islamic chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj in 1260 CE — a primary source within the invading tradition itself, recording the event with approval.

The library burned for three months. Thousands of monks were killed. The accumulated scholarship of seven centuries — nine million manuscripts representing the intellectual heritage of the Buddhist and classical Indian world — was reduced to ash. When the surviving monks were asked what texts they had been studying, they reportedly said they were reading holy books. The soldiers, it is said, did not understand what they had destroyed — Bakhtiyar Khilji allegedly did not initially know that the great fortress he had conquered was a place of learning rather than a military installation.

Whether or not that account is accurate in its details, the consequence is not in dispute: the greatest centre of learning the ancient world had produced was deliberately destroyed. The knowledge lost was irreplaceable. The chain of transmission — teachers who could explain the texts, students being trained to carry them forward — was broken in a single act. Manuscripts without teachers become incomprehensible. A library without living scholars is an archive without keys.

The historian Will Durant described the Islamic conquest of India as ‘probably the bloodiest story in history’ in terms of the scale of destruction. Whatever one’s view of that assessment, the specific destruction of Nalanda is documented and undisputed. And its intellectual consequences — the knowledge that was lost, the chain of scholarship that was broken — cannot be fully measured.

For the complete historical analysis of India’s knowledge disruptions, see The Knowledge That Was Lost: 3 Historical Disruptions (P9 C17).

Of the three great universities examined in this article, Pushpagiri is the least known — and the most in need of recovery. While Takshashila and Nalanda have entered the standard narrative of Indian educational history, Pushpagiri remains largely absent from popular accounts. This is not because it was less significant. It is because its physical remains were not systematically excavated until the 1990s — and because the full extent of its scholarly significance has only recently been documented in academic literature.

Pushpagiri Vihar — the Hill of Flowers — was an ancient Buddhist mahavihara located atop Langudi Hill in the Jajpur district of Odisha. The name comes from the Sanskrit: Pushpa (flower) and Giri (hill). In Xuanzang’s records, it appears as Pu-se-p’o-k’i-li — which scholars have restored to Pushpagiri — described as a monastery located in the south-west of the country of Odra (ancient Odisha), on a mountain whose stone top exhibited supernatural lights, and where sunshades placed by worshippers between the dome and the amalaka remained there ‘like needles held by a magnet.’

What Pushpagiri Was — The Archaeological Record

A 2025 peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Political Science and Leadership Studies — ‘Rediscovering Pushpagiri: A Forgotten Beacon of Ancient Indian Knowledge and Buddhist Scholarship’ by Sharma, N. — provides the most comprehensive recent analysis of Pushpagiri’s significance. The paper draws on primary sources, archaeological excavations at Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri, and Udayagiri, and epigraphic evidence to establish that Pushpagiri functioned from the 3rd century BCE to the 11th century CE — a span of approximately 1,400 years — as a vital node in the transnational knowledge network connecting the Indian subcontinent to China, Korea, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Southeast Asia.

The physical complex of Pushpagiri was spread across three major hill sites in Jajpur district — Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri, and Udayagiri — plus the primary site at Langudi Hill, identified through archaeological excavations conducted between 1996 and 2006. These excavations, covering 143 acres, unearthed inscriptions describing the monastery as Pushpa Sabhar Giriya — the Hill of the Flower Assembly — confirming the identification that had been debated by scholars for decades.

The Mahastupa at Pushpagiri is associated with Emperor Ashoka — one of the ten great stupas attributed to the Mauryan emperor who made Buddhism the civilisational foundation of his vast empire. A 3rd century inscription of the Andhra Ikshvaku king Vira-purusha-datta, found at Nagarjunakonda in Andhra Pradesh, mentions sponsoring construction at Pushpagiri — placing the institution’s activity by at least the 3rd century CE and connecting it to royal patronage networks that spanned the subcontinent.

Pushpagiri’s Intellectual Character

Pushpagiri was particularly distinguished for its role in the development and transmission of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist philosophy — traditions that would spread from Odisha across Tibet, China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The philosophical debates conducted at Pushpagiri on Buddhist doctrines, metaphysics, and logic contributed to the broader intellectual tradition of the Buddhist world in ways that are still being traced by scholars.

The 9th century Buddhist monk Prajna — who spent 18 years travelling across India including at Nalanda — settled at a monastery in Odra (Odisha), identified by some scholars as Pushpagiri, before proceeding to China. His journey exemplifies the role Pushpagiri played as a node of transmission: a place where scholars absorbed the accumulated wisdom of the Indian tradition before carrying it outward across Asia.

The curriculum at Pushpagiri included Buddhist philosophy, logic, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and the arts — a range comparable to Nalanda’s. Its architectural legacy — the stupas, monasteries, and temples at Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri, and Udayagiri, decorated with intricate carvings depicting Buddhist motifs and Jataka tales — reflects the artistic and intellectual culture of a mature, sophisticated institution that was simultaneously a place of learning and a living expression of Buddhist civilisational values.

Why Pushpagiri Matters for Odisha — and for India

Pushpagiri is Odisha’s claim to the same global intellectual heritage that Bihar claims through Nalanda and Punjab through Takshashila. The Kalinga region — the ancient name for Odisha — was one of the most consequential territories in Indian civilisational history. It was the site of the Kalinga War (261 BCE) that transformed Emperor Ashoka from a conqueror into a champion of non-violence, Dharma, and the welfare of all beings. It produced some of the most sophisticated Buddhist sculpture and architecture in the ancient world. And it housed, at Pushpagiri, an institution of learning that connected the wisdom of India to the civilisations of Asia for over a millennium.

That Pushpagiri is not as well known as Nalanda is a consequence of the same forces that have obscured India’s broader civilisational contributions: the destruction of physical infrastructure, the breaking of living transmission chains, and the colonial intellectual framework that privileged European institutions and treated Indian ones as lesser approximations. Recovering Pushpagiri — giving it the recognition it deserves in the narrative of world educational history — is part of the same project of civilisational recovery that this entire series undertakes.

Pushpagiri was the Hill of Flowers — a thousand years of Buddhist learning on the hills of Odisha, connecting India to China, Tibet, Korea, and Southeast Asia. For too long it has been overshadowed by Nalanda. It is time to restore it to its rightful place in the story of how India educated the world.

• Valabhi University in Gujarat of 6th century CE
• Vikramshila University in Bihar founded by king Dharmapala 8th century CE
• Odantapuri University in Bihar 8th century CE
• Sharda Peeth in present day Kashmir, a temple University
• Jagaddala University in Varendrabhumi (present day Bangladesh) 11th century CE
• Kanthallar shala in Kerala , a Vedic University in 11 th century CE

1. That Knowledge Is for All — The Radical Openness of Ancient Indian Universities

At a time when European education was the exclusive preserve of the church and the nobility, Takshashila admitted students based on knowledge and readiness — not birth, wealth, or religious affiliation. Students came from Babylon, Persia, Greece, and China. The criterion for entry was intellectual merit. This was not merely progressive. It was structurally radical — a model of knowledge as a common human inheritance rather than a class privilege. Nalanda’s examination system — where entry required passing a rigorous oral test at the gate — maintained quality without restricting access by social category.

2. That Debate Is the Engine of Knowledge — The Intellectual Culture

The culture of intellectual debate at these institutions was not incidental. It was the primary pedagogical method. Nalanda hosted formal debates — Vadithi — in which scholars from different philosophical traditions argued their positions before audiences that included the most eminent minds in Asia. The culture of rigorous logical argumentation, of defending one’s position against the strongest available objections, of revising one’s understanding when a better argument was presented — this was the engine of intellectual progress at these institutions. It is the same culture that drives academic peer review and scientific debate today. India practised it institutionally 1,500 years before the modern academy formalised it.

3. That Medicine Is Both Science and Art — Holistic Education

Takshashila taught medicine, surgery, and the full range of what would become Ayurveda alongside philosophy, mathematics, and the arts. Jivaka — the royal physician who performed documented brain surgery in the 5th century BCE — trained at Takshashila. This integration of healing arts with philosophical and scientific education reflects an understanding of human wellbeing that modern health education is only now recovering: that physical health, mental health, and spiritual development are not separate domains but aspects of a single inquiry into what it means for a human being to flourish.

4. That Internationalisation Is Strength — The Global University

At their peak, Nalanda and Pushpagiri were more internationally diverse than any university in the world today. Students and faculty from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Persia, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and across the Indian subcontinent studied together, argued together, and carried what they learned back to their own civilisations. The spread of Buddhist philosophy across Asia — the entire cultural and intellectual transformation of East and Southeast Asia — happened through these institutions. They were not merely centres of learning. They were engines of civilisational transmission.

5. That Preservation Requires Institutional Infrastructure

The destruction of Nalanda’s library demonstrated, with devastating clarity, something that seems obvious in retrospect: knowledge accumulated over centuries requires institutional infrastructure to survive. Without the libraries, the teachers who could interpret the texts, the students being trained to carry them forward — knowledge does not survive. The manuscripts do not speak for themselves. What was lost in 1193 CE was not just texts. It was the living interpretive tradition that made the texts meaningful. This lesson — that intellectual heritage requires sustained institutional support to survive — is one that the destruction of India’s great universities teaches with particular force.

6. That Architecture Is Pedagogy — The Built Environment of Learning

The architectural grandeur of Nalanda, Pushpagiri, and Takshashila was not merely aesthetic. The stupas, monasteries, libraries, and lecture halls were designed to create an environment in which learning was the natural activity. The scale communicated the importance of knowledge. The beauty communicated its worth. The spatial organisation — separate quarters for different schools, common spaces for debate, libraries accessible to all — reflected a philosophy of education in which the physical environment itself was a teacher. The concept of a purpose-built environment for learning — a campus — is as old as Takshashila.

7. That Knowledge Has a Responsibility — Education as Service

The Buddhist philosophical foundation of Nalanda and Pushpagiri gave their educational mission an explicit ethical dimension: knowledge is not accumulated for personal advantage but developed and transmitted in service of the liberation of all beings. The Bodhisattva ideal — the commitment to remain in the world and work for the awakening of all — was the ethical framework within which education at these institutions took place. This is the most profound and most enduring legacy of India’s ancient universities: the understanding that knowledge carries an obligation. That learning is not complete until it is shared. That the purpose of education is not the production of credentials but the cultivation of wisdom in service of the world.

Three Ancient Universities — Comparative Overview

#	Takshashila	Nalanda	Pushpagiri Vihar
Location	Rawalpindi, Pakistan	Bihar, India	Jajpur district, Odisha, India
Period	600 BCE – ~5th century CE	5th century CE – 1193 CE	3rd century BCE – 11th century CE
Duration	~1,000 years	~700 years	~1,400 years
Peak students	Thousands — no single estimate	10,000 students, 2,000 faculty	Significant — comparable to Nalanda
Key subjects	68 subjects — medicine, military science, Vedas, astronomy, law, philosophy	Buddhist philosophy, Vedas, logic, grammar, medicine, mathematics, astronomy	Buddhist philosophy, logic, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, arts
Famous alumni	Chanakya, Panini, Charaka, Jivaka	Xuanzang (student), Silabhadra (master), Dharmapala	Prajna (9th century monk who went to China)
International reach	Babylon, Persia, Greece, Indian subcontinent	China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Persia, Turkey, Southeast Asia	China, Korea, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Southeast Asia
Key primary source	Jataka tales, Pali Canon references	Xuanzang’s Records of the Western Regions	Xuanzang (Pu-se-p’o-k’i-li); Ikshvaku inscription (3rd c. CE); Langudi Hill excavations (1996–2006)
Destruction	Hunnic invasions (5th–6th c. CE)	Bakhtiyar Khilji, 1193 CE — library burned 3 months	Decline through Buddhist decline and invasions, 11th–12th c. CE
Modern status	Taxila Museum, UNESCO World Heritage Site	Nalanda University reopened 2014, 18 nations	Langudi Hill site accessible for tourism; ongoing ASI excavations

The question deserves a direct answer. These were not minor institutions. By every measure of scale, international reach, intellectual output, and civilisational impact, they were among the greatest educational institutions the world has ever produced. Why are they not universally known in the way that Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Bologna are?

The honest answer has three parts.

First, physical destruction. When Nalanda’s library burned for three months in 1193 CE, not just manuscripts but the living community of scholars who could interpret and transmit them was destroyed. Knowledge without transmission is archaeology, not living tradition. The physical destruction of the institution broke the chain of memory that would have kept its name alive in the way that European institutions — which survived, grew, and accumulated prestige across centuries — have kept theirs.

Second, colonial delegitimisation. The British colonial educational project — implemented through Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education — deliberately positioned European educational institutions as the standard of excellence and Indian ones as primitive predecessors. Educated Indians were taught to aspire to Oxford, not to mourn Nalanda. The psychological and institutional effect of two centuries of this framing is not easily undone.

Third, the structural bias of Western historiography. When European historians wrote the history of universities, they wrote it from within a framework in which the European university was the original and defining model. Takshashila and Nalanda were either ignored, treated as precursors, or — in the most intellectually dishonest versions — simply not mentioned. The history of universities, as told in most Western accounts, begins with Bologna. This is not an accident. It is a structural consequence of who writes the histories and from what framework they write them.

A rising India — with world-class scholarship, a growing global academic diaspora, and the confidence of a nation that is the world’s fourth-largest economy — is in a position to correct this record. Not through grievance but through the patient, evidence-based presentation of what the historical record actually shows. This article is one small part of that project.

I want to say something personal about why Pushpagiri matters to me in a way that Nalanda and Takshashila, for all their magnificence, do not quite reach.

I am from Odisha. The land of Kalinga. The land that Ashoka conquered and then transformed — where the sight of 100,000 deaths in battle broke the greatest military emperor of the ancient world and turned him toward Dharma, compassion, and the welfare of all beings (as written history says). The land where Jagannath has been worshipped for millennia — the Lord of the Universe, whose chariot festival is the largest religious gathering in the world after Mahakumbh.

Pushpagiri is Odisha’s Nalanda. And it is less known than Nalanda in the same way that Odisha is less celebrated than Bihar in the standard accounts of Indian civilisation — not because the contribution was lesser, but because the accidents of excavation, documentation, and historical transmission have given it less visibility.

The Hill of Flowers. The monastery on the hill of Jajpur where, for 1,400 years, monks studied Buddhist philosophy and logic and mathematics and medicine and carried what they learned to China and Korea and Tibet and Southeast Asia. Where Xuanzang came and saw lights on the stone top of the mountain. Where Emperor Ashoka built one of his ten great stupas. Where a tradition of learning and spiritual inquiry flourished for a millennium and a half — and then was silenced, not by the exhaustion of wisdom, but by violence.

In KUTUMB: When Guests Became Masters, I explored how India’s civilisational identity was shaped by its capacity to receive, absorb, and transform. The great universities — Takshashila, Nalanda, Pushpagiri — were the most concrete institutional expression of this capacity. They received students from across the world. They absorbed knowledge from every tradition they encountered. They transformed it through the rigour of debate and the depth of philosophical inquiry. And they sent it back out into the world enriched.

That is what a great university does. Not just teach what is already known. Transform the students who come to it — and through them, transform the world they return to.

Takshashila, Nalanda, and Pushpagiri did this for a combined span of approximately 2,500 years. The world is still living in the intellectual shadow of what they produced. And it is time — finally, urgently — to say that clearly.

1. Sharma, N. (2025). Rediscovering Pushpagiri: A Forgotten Beacon of Ancient Indian Knowledge and Buddhist Scholarship. American Journal of Political Science and Leadership Studies, 2(10), 42–51. https://semantjournals.org/index.php/AJPSLS/article/view/2917

2. Wikipedia (2025). Pushpagiri Vihara — Mahavihara of Langudi Hill, Jajpur District, Odisha. Xuanzang’s account, Ikshvaku inscription, ASI excavations 1996–2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puspagiri_University

3. Orissa Education.net (2025). Pushpagiri: The Forgotten Marvel of Odisha’s Ancient Educational System. https://orissaeducation.net/pushpagiri-the-forgotten-marvel-of-odishas-ancient-educational-system/

4. Prepp.in (2024). Pushpagiri, Odisha — Famous Universities of Ancient India. https://prepp.in/news/e-492-pushpagiri-odisha-famous-universities-of-ancient-india-art-and-culture-notes

5. Xuanzang (c. 644 CE). Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty. Translated: Samuel Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983 (reprint).

6. Minhaj-i-Siraj (1260 CE). Tabaqat-i-Nasiri. Translated: H.G. Raverty, Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881. (Primary source for destruction of Nalanda.)

7. Teachers Institute (September 2025). Ancient Indian Universities: Nalanda, Takshashila, and Vikramashila. https://teachers.institute/higher-education/ancient-indian-universities-nalanda-takshashila-vikramashila/

8. Singh, Upinder (2008). A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. Delhi: Pearson Education.

9. Patnaik, S.K. (2020). Rediscovering Pushpagiri: Revisiting Ancient Buddhist Monastic Complexes of Odisha. Journal of South Asian Studies, 34(2), 114–129.

10. Archaeological Survey of India. Excavations at Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri, and Udayagiri: Odisha Circle. Bhubaneswar: ASI Regional Office, Various Years.

11. Satpathy, K.C. (2012). The Forgotten University of Pushpagiri. Orissa Historical Research Journal, 45(3), 22–36.

12. IJFANS (International Journal of Food and Nutritional Sciences). Historical Impact of Nalanda and Takshashila Universities on Global Education. https://www.ijfans.org/issue-content/historical-impact-nalanda-takshashila-9162

13. Durant, W. (1935). Our Oriental Heritage (The Story of Civilisation, Vol. 1). Simon & Schuster, New York.

14. Macaulay, T.B. (1835). Minute on Indian Education. Government of India.

15. Narayan Rout, KUTUMB: When Guests Became Masters. Amazon India.

16. Narayan Rout, Yogic Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence. BFC Publications, 2025.

17. Narayan Rout, FLUXIVERSE: The Dance of Science and Spirit. Amazon India.

P9: What Did India Actually Build? The Civilisation the World Forgot to Study | Key Articles

• C1 — Zero to Infinity: How India’s Mathematics Built the Modern World
• C2 ← You Are Here | The World’s First Universities: Nalanda, Takshashila, and Pushpagiri
• C17 — The Knowledge That Was Lost: 3 Historical Disruptions
• C15 — Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: How India’s Values Shaped 3 Millennia
• India Civilisation Achievements History: 5 Pillars (P9 Pillar) — The complete overview — everything India built, and why the world forgot to study it.
• The Knowledge That Was Lost: 3 Historical Disruptions (P9 C17) — What happened to Nalanda, what Macaulay did, and how Western scholarship attributed India’s discoveries elsewhere.
• Artha and Dharma: 5 Things Ancient Indian Economics Knew (P11 C5) — Chanakya — Takshashila’s most famous graduate — and the economics text that preceded Adam Smith by 2,000 years.
• Ayurveda: A Beginner’s Guide to India’s 5,000-Year-Old Science of Life (P8 C5) — Charaka and Jivaka — Takshashila’s medical graduates — and the living medical tradition they founded.
• Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science: 5 Places Where They Agree (P-Darshan C2) — The philosophical tradition that Nalanda’s scholars developed — and that the founders of quantum mechanics found indispensable.
• Yogic Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence: 5 Dimensions (P7 Pillar) — The inner science tradition that India’s universities carried across Asia — and that is now the world’s most globally adopted wellness practice.

---

Knowledge grows when shared –If this resonated with you, pass it on.

• Facebook
• WhatsApp
• X
• LinkedIn
• Telegram
• ShareCopied to clipboard
• Pinterest
• Threads
• Reddit
• Mail
• Print