The Famous Account of Nalanda's Destruction Never Names Nalanda — And More Than 30 Years Later a Tibetan Monk Was Still Studying There

In the 630s a Chinese monk named Xuanzang walked into Nalanda with two hundred monks around him. He stayed five years. His biographer wrote that ten thousand monks lived there. Xuanzang's own book says "several thousands". A second pilgrim, forty years later, counted "more than 3,000". The ending is just as tangled. The chronicle always quoted for Nalanda's destruction describes two hundred horsemen taking a walled "Bihar" and never uses the word Nalanda. And in 1235 a Tibetan pilgrim found an abbot of more than ninety still teaching about seventy monks there, among buildings "damaged by the Turushkas", Turkic soldiers who came back while he stayed. This Investigation opens every one of these documents.