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Nalanda on Amartya mind by GC Shekhar

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said recreating Nalanda University would not be easy and that it needed a scientific attitude and disciplined thought and the inspiration for this could come from old Nalanda itself.

At the Indian Science Congress in Chennai today, Sen said: “The meeting here gives me an opportunity to recollect the pursuit of science in old Nalanda which will inspire and guide our long-run efforts in new Nalanda.”

Sen chairs the interim governing body that is tasked with reviving the Nalanda University in Bihar after a hiatus of more than 800 years.

“I say long-run because, mainly for cost reasons, we cannot start the science faculties immediately as physical and biological sciences cost much more money than the humanities and social sciences,” he pointed out.

To begin with, the new Nalanda would teach and conduct research in history, languages, linguistics, social sciences, international relations, management and development, and IT, he said in his speech, which he said would be devoted to Nalanda and not social economics, his forte.

Sen gave a few interesting insights while trying to fix the antiquity of Nalanda which, he recalled, was destroyed by “the ruthless Afghan conqueror Bhaktiyar Khilji”.

Nalanda, established in the early fifth century, was already 700 years old when Oxford and Cambridge were being founded and 600 years older than the oldest continually operating university in Bologna in Italy. “Had it not been destroyed and had it managed to survive our time, Nalanda would be, by a long margin, the oldest university in the world,” Sen told a packed audience at the SRM University, one of the largest private universities of the country, which is hosting the congress.

At its peak, the residential university had 10,000 students from several countries, particularly China, Tibet, Korea, Japan and even as far in the west as Turkey, studying various subjects. “Chinese students in particular, such as Xuanzang and Yi Xing in the seventh century, wrote extensively on what they saw and what they particularly admired about the education standards in Nalanda. Incidentally, Nalanda is the only non-Chinese institution in which any Chinese scholar was educated in the history of ancient China,” Sen observed.

Although Nalanda, along with nearby Vikramshila and Odantapuri, focused on studies of Buddhist philosophy and practice, it nevertheless pursued general, intellectual and scientific studies even by those who had no religious beliefs, Sen said.

Sen referred to Yi Xing, a Buddhist monk from China, who was interested in medicine and had also acquired great expertise on Indian writings on mathematics and astronomy. As a general mathematician who happened to be also a Tantrist, Yi Xing dealt with a variety of analytical and computational problems, like calculating the total number of possible situations in chess, which had no particular connection with Buddhism or Tantrism, pointed out Sen.

The Nobel laureate threw light on two other interesting aspects of Nalanda — its students and teachers loved to argue and very often held argumentative encounters, which is part of the scientific tradition.

“There were plenty of organised argumentative matches going on in Nalanda and this too fits into the scientific connections of Nalanda,” he argued.

Foreign students often went back to their countries rather than stay back and teach at Nalanda. When Xuanzang was pressed to stay on as a faculty member after he had completed his studies he invoked the Buddha and said he wanted “to spread enlightenment to all lands”. “Who would wish to enjoy it alone and to forget those who are not yet enlightened?” the Chinese scholar had asked his teachers.

“Science has to fight parochialism and Nalanda was firmly committed to that,” Sen concluded.