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Nalanda University flourished for more than seven centuries
- nothrowaways 4y ago9 million books and 10k students - Unrealistic.
- 22SAS 4y ago[flagged]
- sbmthakur 4y agoIs BBC following Hindu nationalist propaganda?
- Bang2Bay 4y agothat is what most want us to believe or argue about. :)
- 22SAS 4y ago[flagged]
- Bang2Bay 4y ago'could be' many things. :) But what centrists should do is research and allow research to happen. Not silence. rewriting history is not shameful.
- SeanLuke 4y agoActually a fair bit of the BBC article appears to have been derived from Wikipedia.
- lazyninja987 4y ago[dead]
- Bang2Bay 4y agoeverything is propaganda. Including painting nationalists as those behind these articles. :) Unfortunately no one wants to research because many tame any research as rightwing propaganda. No research has been done as to how an 80ton stone was moved 100s of km and lifted 20 stories up to build temples for example.
- steponlego 4y agoWhy wouldn’t Hindus have a country? Muslims got two in the partition.
- 22SAS 4y agoWhat does my post have to do with Hindus having/not having a land of their own?
- steponlego 4y agoIt seems extremely obvious if you just think for a second. Are you aware that British India was partitioned along ethno-religious lines? I’m a little shocked that you’re so confused…
- selimthegrim 4y agoI guess Nepal is chopped liver then?
- shaan7 4y ago[flagged]
- steponlego 4y agoAre you aware that there are many dozens of such countries?
- shaan7 4y agoYes, hence the "should". Just because something exists doesn't mean it is always justified or sensible.
- steponlego 4y agoWho are you to judge them though? Seems like a colonizer’s attitude.
- seatac76 4y agoDid you even read the article? It seems well researched, if anything it alludes to the uncertainty inherent in determining with accuracy what happened centuries ago.
- MPlus88 4y ago[dead]
- kshacker 4y agoWhy? Books need not be unique books. There could be variations of the same book. For example, many books / scriptures were still being reconciled as recently as 100 years back and there are so many versions of ramayana available from one corner of Asia to another corner, that I would expect a respectable university to try to look at the variations and do some kind of lineage analysis. And also book may not imply a 1000 page book, it could also mean an 8 page manuscript. Does 9 million sound big, sure? But in the absence of other information, maybe we can debate the quantum of overstatement rather than just assuming that since we can't explain it, everything related to it may be fake. And last point, maybe there were 9 million books. What's a university if it does not have more than one book per student especially if they built that library over 700 years. Maybe each student had an annual journal which is classified as a book.
- stonogo 4y agoYale has 15k students and its library has a collection of 15 million. Cornell has 25k students and 10 million books.
- Symbiote 4y agoMost of Cornell's books cost between $5 and, say, $200. They represent between less than an hour and a day's labour. Copying a book in mediaeval times took months, so 9 million is an incredible amount of work. Other sources put the number of books in the low hundreds of thousands.
- CydeWeys 4y agoHow many of the books that Yale and Cornell have are hand-written on hand-produced paper and manually bound codexes? The printing press is kind of a big deal.
- brigandish 4y agoThe printing press allows magnitudes greater than that but it doesn't limit the number that can be written by hand, especially over hundreds of years, at an institute dedicated to study.
- Symbiote 4y agoCopy out a short novel, by hand, using a quill pen, and then decide what the limit is for handwritten books. By the way, you also need to make the quills, ink and paper by hand, and work with natural light and no eyeglasses.
- brigandish 4y agoWhy is the chosen length a short novel? Books range from a few pages to hundreds of pages. If we make some unlikely assumptions - that there were 10,000 students attending Nalanda every year from its foundation to its destruction, and that each student wrote for only 1 hour a day, 5 days a week for 40 weeks of the year, that gives us 2,000,000 hours of writing. Over 763 years that is 1,526,000,000 hours. There were 2000 teachers at Nalanda, that's 400,000 more hours per year, 305,200,000 hours over the course of Nalanda's existence. The population of India in 1000 AD is estimated at anywhere from 75 million to 200 million. Not all the students would have to write all the books as there was another university nearby that was also destroyed by Muslim invaders called Takshashila[2] which would've also housed and produced books, some of which no doubt made their way to Nalanda, and show that books weren't only produced in one part of ancient India, and that there was a large enough population to support a book "industry" with things like quills and ink (they actually used a knife with palm leaves that could last hundreds of years[3]), let alone writers. Add to that, what are some of the students going to be doing once they graduate? Writing books. As that last link says: > Hindu temples often served as centers where ancient manuscripts were routinely used for learning and where the texts were copied when they wore out. In South India, temples and associated mutts served custodial functions, and a large number of manuscripts on Hindu philosophy, poetry, grammar and other subjects were written, multiplied and preserved inside the temples. Archaeological and epigraphical evidence indicates existence of libraries called Sarasvati-bhandara, dated possibly to early 12th-century and employing librarians, attached to Hindu temples. Palm leaf manuscripts were also preserved inside Jain temples and in Buddhist monasteries. That is all to ignore that movable type printing was invented in China[4] before Nalanda was sacked, and that scholars from all over Asia went back and forth from Nalanda sharing texts. You might have heard of the Journey to the West, which was inspired by an actual journey that was written down in a book called Great Tang Records on the Western Regions[5]. In it, Nalanda is mentioned because Xuanzang, the author, visited there. That book took 2 people to produce, and is described as: > The book contains more than 120,000 Chinese characters and is divided into twelve volumes That's in 646 AD. I think you underestimate the abilities of the people of that time to produce books. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33640/what-was-the-population-of-indian-subcontinent-in-1000-ad https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/33640/what-was-t... [2] https://www.britannica.com/place/Taxila https://www.britannica.com/place/Taxila [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-leaf_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm-leaf_manuscript [4] https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tang_Records_on_the_Western_Regions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tang_Records_on_the_West...
- flextheruler 4y agoOftentimes the ancient world did not distinguish between manuscripts of a couple pages and books. If that number is not made up then that must be what’s happening here.
- blackoil 4y agoExaggeration is an integral part of such stories. It definitely didn't take 3 months to burn. But even if it was 9 million pages, still impressive and important.
- rg111 4y agoI think they are considering even 5 written pages as a "book"?
- badblade 4y ago[flagged]
- selimthegrim 4y agoWho destroyed Taxila? Muslims or Huns? What are they teaching in India these days?
- mettamage 4y agoWait, so is this the oldest university then? Because a quick Google says "The Jagiellonian University is a public research university in Kraków, Poland. Founded in 1364 by King Casimir III the Great, it is the oldest university in Poland and the 13th oldest university in continuous operation in the world. It is regarded as Poland's most prestigious academic institution." Ugh... ChatGPT says "The University of Bologna, located in Bologna, Italy, is considered the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088. It was initially established as a law school, but over time, it grew to include faculties of medicine, philosophy, and theology. The university played a significant role in the development of European higher education, and its model of organization and academic freedom has been emulated by other universities around the world." This seems to be a contentious topic.
- mtalantikite 4y agoThose sound like universities that are still in operation. Nalanda was destroyed about 800 years ago.
- jltsiren 4y agoIt depends on how you define a university. Medieval European universities are often considered the first true universities, because they are direct ancestors of modern universities, and their traditions have survived and evolved into what we see today. There were earlier institutes of higher education all around the world (including Europe), but those traditions have not survived.
- SeanLuke 4y ago[dead]
- calt 4y agoWhat is the meaning of University, and why don't these old "universities" meet the criteria?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- SeanLuke 4y agoThe University of Bologna, where the word University came from, was: 1. A higher-education degree-awarding school 2. Offering publically recognized, official secular diplomas: originally they were grammar, rhetoric, logic, and different kinds of law, in addition to theology.
- naravara 4y agoWestern academia has a bias towards defining religious institutions out of consideration as true academia. You see this in philosophy departments too where philosophers love to argue that Eastern philosophy is "more religion than philosophy" even though that statement is basically begging a whole host of questions about what religion and philosophy even is. Religion, as an element of society that is discrete from our understandings of just how stuff in the world works, is a conception that was pretty unique to Christian civilization (and specifically Protestantism at that) which became generalized due to Western European cultural and economic dominance. Most other times and places just didn't view them as being all that distinct. Their religious traditions didn't insist on strict separations between worldly pursuits and spiritual ones and often didn't really separate the formal institutions from each other. Most people would just adopt bits and pieces of all the various intellectual traditions from the priests and monks, but they'd adapt them into their personal or family practices. Normal people today would not try and identify themselves as "deontologists" or "utilitarians" today. They pick these ideas up from the nerds and applied them to their lives, but it wasn't really important for them to identify as one or another the way we insist folks split hairs as to whether they're Christian or Buddhist or Taoist or whatever now. These were intense (and sometimes violent) arguments among the intelligentsia, but not so much outside of that.
- readthenotes1 4y agoI went to the university in Salamanca Spain, founded 1218. There were a lot of old buildings, but nowhere was there a Salamanca U t-shirt as a souvenir (and FYI, the Rome University sweatshirts aren't official--the biz school sells some polos, but that's it).
- tom-thistime 4y agoExactly. The BBC must show us a Nalanda U hoodie, with a copyrighted logo, or else abandon these wild claims! Did this so-called 'university' even have a lacrosse team?? Irony notice: this comment contains irony.
- fcatalan 4y agoUh I don´t know what this has to do with the rest of the discussion but... The University sells some official swag through their "Mercatus" store, including clothing, and in fact in recent years had a lot of it related to the 800th aniversary. But it also tolerates every souvenir shop in the town selling shirts and hoodies showing the university seal, which I guess makes them kind of "semi-official". Many students wear them. Anyone curious can enter "Rua Mayor, Salamanca" in Street View and look at the front of every other shop in that street...
- readthenotes1 4y agoIt was before that. Maybe they got my strongly worded comment card and took it to heart.
- ugh123 4y agoBare with me here: Why is it that articles need to start with lines like > "The winter morning was cloaked in thick fog..." and postpone the actual information pertaining to the title? Instead, we have to sift through irrelevant story-like content to get to the meat of the information and facts. Will one promise of tools like ChatGPT and their successors be to summarize-away this fluff?
- msla 4y ago> Bare with me here: Most people would pay money to ensure I don't. > Instead, we have to sift through irrelevant story-like content to get to the meat of the information and facts. Because journalists are frustrated novelists, and editors think the "human interest" angle sells.
- quackduck 4y ago> editors think the "human interest" angle sells. does it not?
- ugh123 4y agoWhen "human interest" means "keep scrolling to find the content while you look over our ads" then that angle gets less and less meaningful.
- malshe 4y agoI found it ironic that OP started complaining about the author’s writing style by urging us to bare it all!
- raymondgh 4y agoI had the same reaction. I read the first line of the article and instantly knew I didn’t have the patience to find the content implied by the title. There have been discussions here about this problem for recipe sites especially. What I wonder is whether the majority of their readers (non HN people) also feel annoyed by this.
- 4y ago
- xony 4y ago[dead]
- fwlr 4y agoI remember being taught in school about the important Muslim contributions to science, philosophy, and mathematics. It has been interesting to learn over time that much of this was inherited from Indian scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians (and it has been disquieting to learn what “inherited” is a euphemism for).
- jhbadger 4y agoTrue, but in turn when we do hear about the Indian contributions, we tend to think they were all Hindus, rather than recognizing the great contributions of the Buddhists at Nalanda. While Buddhism has little presence in India today, that's where it started.
- pankajdoharey 4y agoBuddhists were the only folks who were building universities at the time Hindus didnt even have a school leave alone universities. The so called "Gurukul" has never been found at any archaeological site.
- sudhirc 4y agoOfcourse millions of Sanskrit manuscript were produced in fictional Gurukuls by fictional characters who never existed. > The so called "Gurukul" has never been found at any archaeological site. Chariot were considered fiction until they were not[0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakhigarhi&ved=2ahUKEwjwktvMmMn9AhUCUGwGHccLB0EQFnoECA0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2O98GNSgFiY0SSa31iUe2U https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakhigarhi&ved=2ahUKEwjwktvM...
- Anglican34 4y ago[dead]
- pankajdoharey 4y agoShow one Sanskrit manuscript older than 1446. Not a single Stone inscription, Copper plate, Terracotta inscription of classical sanskrit has ever been found nor any Hindu site. Show a single evidence? The evidence of sanskrit found are of Buddhist Sanskrit at Buddhist schools like Nalanda here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#/media/File:Nalanda_clay_seal_of_Kumaragupta_III.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#/media/File:Nalanda_cl... Not a single archeological evidence of Hindu (Brahman) dharm exist, if you have any evidence older that 1446 you have to furnish the proof. Brahmins were writing Allahupanishad at the time of mughals praising Allah to be the supreme god and greater than Vishnu. During the British Rule They wrote Bhavishya Puran and praising queen victoria to be the great ruler and even mentioned Macaulay. All those sanskrit books of Hindus religion were written much later infact they couldnt be written before teh invention of Devanagari script. And devanagari script itself was invented between 11th and 13th century. Also your link doesnt work.
- lazyninja987 4y ago[dead]
- zerop 4y agoHad it been still there, we would have learnt so much about ancient knowledge.. also amazed to know how big it was at those times. When Afghan invader burnt it, it took 3 months >> The campus was so vast that the fire set on by the attackersis said to have burned for three months.
- prezk 4y agoIt is just two years younger than the University of Constantinople, established in AD 425 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Constantinople
- ranit 4y agoIt is amazing it taught 10,000 students at once, but having 10 million books … at times when only handwritten books existed?!? Currently Indian National Library has 2.2 million books and British library has > 13 million. Something is misquoted I guess.
- mannerheim 4y agoOr they're taking an ancient figure at face value, which nine times out of ten end up being grossly exaggerated.
- lovelearning 4y agoI wouldn't take its numbers seriously. It's a travel article by someone who thinks Ashoka lived in the 3rd century CE instead of BCE. May not have gone through any editorial review or fact check.
- rg111 4y agoI think what the author is calling book maybe a manuscript? I think they are counting even five written pages as a unique book? So maybe essays are also being counted as books.
- peterfirefly 4y agoIt is still an unrealistically high number. I think it is just as exaggerated as the "knowledge" of "medicine" and "mathematics" that was taught at what was just a crazy indoctrination center for a particular brand of old-fashioned superstition.
- rg111 4y agoNot really. Medicine in those times was quite standardized and effective. There was not scientific method involved. And the philosophy and mathematics was quite advanced.
- tom-thistime 4y agoI'm not a historian. But "book" sometimes meant something much shorter in the past, at least in the West. Euclid's Elements is organized as "13 books" ... but it's one "book" today even with massive commentary included. Possibly that might account for one order of magnitude or so.
- botanical 4y agoIt's crazy to see the jingoistic Indian comments here, and anti-Muslim sentiment. Why attempt to rewrite history just to show the Hindu people were capable? Let's appreciate both their achievements
- Anglican34 4y ago[dead]
- NoahRahman1 4y ago[dead]
- rocknor 4y agoCan you clarify how is history being rewritten here? All I see is a discussion of historical events to the best extent possible using available data. Everything can be googled for references. Are you discrediting the BBC? And where is the anti-Muslim sentiment? I reckon your victim complex is the real problem here. I suggest reading more rather than falling for cheap simplistic narratives that are widely available for consumption.
- NoahRahman 4y ago[dead]
- _448 4y agoIt is sad how much of the knowledge was destroyed due to ideology and religious fanaticism. I have a book here next to me with the title "Vedic Mathematics". The book is based of ancient Indian text. Reading the preface of the book it is clear that what is written in the book is just a small portion of a very large volume of work that was lost. It is sad that so much advance knowledge was lost.
- bg117 4y agoIt's weird when people talk about Islamic contribution when the fact is that Islamic invaders burnt Nalanda university. It was the beginning of dark ages for India. Not the only institution to be destroyed. It was accompanied by ethnic cleansing by invaders that sent the whole education system into an abyss.
- known 4y ago[dead]