The Lost Knowledge of Nalanda, World’s Oldest University
A library was burned down at the end of the 12th century, 1193 to be exact, it kept on burning not for days or weeks, but for three months.
It housed nine million books and manuscripts. The library belonged to the first residential University in the world. The University was called Nalanda.
Imagine what was written in those nine million books and manuscripts. What a great storehouse of knowledge it must have been which is irretrievably lost to us. What a huge loss it was for the whole world, for the whole of humanity. If we had that store of knowledge with us today, would the human race have gone a couple of steps ahead in our continuous collective journey of civilization?
We cannot know the answer to this question, and we will never know. Whatever we know of Nalanda today we know only from a very few scattered sources. We can only guess its vastness, its grandeur, its greatness, but we can never ascertain it accurately.
Nalanda was for Asia, what was the Academy of Athens for the Ancient Greeks and Romans, a fountainhead of intellectual and cultural exchange.
Just as the Academy lay outside the city walls of Athens, Nalanda was situated outside the capital city Rajgriha, or modern Rajgir, now an unassuming city in the state of Bihar in India.
