Looking West to India: Asian education, intra-Asian renaissance, and the Nalanda revival

C Cambridge University Press 2014 Modern Asian Studies: page 1 of 39  doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000310 3 The Nalanda Revival and Intra-Asian Renaissance: The brokering of a modern and Asian university∗ 4 ANDREA M ARION PINKNEY 5 6 Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Canada Email: andrea.pinkney@mcgill.ca 7 Abstract 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 More than 800 years ago – at approximately the same time as the founding of the first European universities – the renowned monastic institution known as the Nālandā Mahāvihāra disappeared from historical records. Since 2006, a transnational Asian initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as ‘Nalanda University’ in Bihar, India, has been embraced at the highest government and philanthropic levels by a consortium of South, Southeast, and East Asian nations. Nalanda, described as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’, and the issues surrounding its revival raise important questions about how a new interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and a newly imagined vision of ‘Asian’ education are seen as converging to promote Asian interests. First, I consider the ambivalent relationship of the revival and its pre-modern namesake against the Nālandā Mahāvihāra’s known history. Then I characterize two kinds of unfolding discourse on the contemporary project: one that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and frames the revival as serving transnational Asian goals; and another that is Indic and imagines Nalanda as advancing Indian nationalist concerns. While for the various stakeholders serious fissures are evident in the symbolic values of Nalanda—as an exemplar of Asia and of India—both types of discourse, taken together, reveal important insights into the development of an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’. 1 2 25 ∗ Sincere thanks to John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore, for his proposal to collaborate on the theme of ‘Religious Studies in Asia’, which initially inspired me to work on this topic. The National University of Singapore Religion Cluster supported a workshop in 2010 where I presented an early version of this article; the NUS-University Scholars’ Programme made it possible to revisit Nalanda in 2010; and the National University of Singapore-Southeast Asian Studies Department provided an opportunity to improve the article during a workshop organized by Goh Benglan, National University of Singapore, and Kanagawa University in 2011. I received valuable perspectives on Asian education and intraAsian connections from my colleagues, Shrikant S. Bahulkar, Peter Friedlander, Leigh Kathryn Jenco, Gyanesh Kudaisya, Rahul Mukherji, Ramu Pandit, and Rajesh Rai; I 1 2 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 26 Introduction 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Can ‘Asian’ values meaningfully shape an Asian model of education? How would such an Asian model of education differ from a Western one? Could the pursuit of these aims herald a new era of intra-Asian cooperation? A significant contemporary development that speaks to these questions is the initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as Nalanda University in Bihar, India, which first came to diplomatic light as a proposal from the India delegation at the 2006 meeting of the East Asia Summit.1 Put simply, the idea was to build a modern university in Bihar near the site of the ancient Nālandā Mahāvihāra, a renowned centre of Buddhist learning that ceased operations some 800 years ago.2 The project’s earliest advocate was George Yeo Yong-Boon, Singapore’s former minister for foreign affairs, who characterized it as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’; it would be hosted by the government of India and backed by countries across Asia as a means of increasing collaboration across national boundaries through the development and realization of a new model of Asian education.3 am extremely grateful to Isaac Souweine for commenting on many drafts. Any errors of fact and/or interpretation are mine alone. 1 The East Asia Summit is the principal multi-lateral organization involved in the Nalanda revival. It is an administrative sub-grouping within ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with membership that goes beyond ASEAN boundaries. The decision to form the East Asia Summit was taken at the 10th Asean meeting in Vientiane on 29 November 2004, following the initiative of Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia. The first East Asia Summit was convened on 14 December 2005 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The members of the East Asia Summit at that time were: Australia, People’s Republic of China, Republic of India, Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand, and the member states of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (16 countries total). Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2005), ‘General Information on East Asia Summit (EAS)’, Tokyo, Japan, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/eas/outline.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. As of 2014, the addition of Russia and the United States of America has increased EAS membership to 18 states. Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, Australia, <http://www.dfat.gov.au/asean/eas/>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. 2 As is frequently noted by various interlocutors, the destruction of Nalanda coincided with the founding of the earliest European universities. In the words of Amartya Sen, ‘[Nalanda] ceased to exist in the twelfth century, almost exactly when the oldest university in Britain, Oxford, was being born.’ Amartya Sen (2009), ‘Remarks at the Inauguration of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre’, Inauguration of ISEAS Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Singapore, ISEAS, p. 5. 3 George Yeo (2011), ‘Nalanda and the Asian Renaissance’, The Huffington Post, Singapore, 12 April. See also: Ministry of External Affairs India (2011) ‘External Affairs Minister Co-Chairs 9th Asean India Post Ministerial Meeting’, 22 July, Bali, NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 3 The first intimation of the Nalanda initiative to appear in the Western press was a New York Times article by Jeffrey E. Garten, a Yale professor of international trade and finance, in late 2006. Entitled ‘Really Old School’, it aimed to call attention to what Garten described as a big event that was unlikely to make Western waves: the intention of Singapore, Japan, India, and possibly others, to ‘discuss the revival of an ancient university in India called Nalanda’ to be announced at an upcoming Asean meeting.4 Garten used this as an opening to raise two key questions about the future of Asia that, he claimed, ‘we do not generally ask’. First, he wondered whether Asian countries would ever expand their mutual interests from that of trade agreements into something grander that would better the region and the world. Second, despite anticipating the rise of Asia in the new millennium, Garten wondered whether Asian countries would continue to be hobbled by a lack of top-flight, internationally esteemed institutes of higher learning. He argued that the revival of Nalanda University offered an opportunity for ‘Asia’ to achieve both aims. First of all, the obvious must be stated: is it not somehow astonishing to imagine that any single institution could somehow represent the achievement of two such sweeping goals? And much less a university in Bihar—the state with the lowest literacy level in all of India?5 Yet this is exactly what has been proposed, for Garten’s basic vision—that Nalanda ‘represents much of what Asia could use today’—is substantively shared by many Asian nation-states. Since its introduction, the project has captured attention at the highest Indonesia, http://www.mea.gov.in/mystart.php?id=510117862&flg=1. Mr George Yeo was personally involved in the earliest inception of the Nalanda revival; he continues his leadership of the project as a member of the Nalanda University Governing Board. Interview with Mr George Yeo, 15 April 2013, Singapore. In 2012, Mr Yeo was awarded India’s second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan, in the category of ‘public affairs’ in recognition of his leadership on the Nalanda project: Government of India (2013), ‘Padma Awards Announced’, <http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=79881>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 4 Jeffrey E. Garten (2006), ‘Really Old School’, New York Times, New York, 9 December. 5 According to the Government of India 2001 census, Bihar has the lowest literacy of all Indian states. The overall state average in 2001 was 47 per cent (59.7 per cent male literacy; 33.1 per cent female literacy). Government of India (2010), ‘Census Data 2001 > India at a Glance > Number of Literates and Literacy Rate’, Ministry of Home Affairs, New Delhi, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, <http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_glance/literates1.aspx>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 4 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY government and philanthropic levels—from India and China to Singapore and Japan. It has found champions in India’s Nobel laureate economist (1998), Amartya Sen; British peer and London School of Economics professor, Baron Meghnad Desai; and Singapore’s former minister for foreign affairs, George Yeo. Despite early scepticism surrounding the project, obstacles regarding faculty, facilities, and funding continue to be surmounted so that the first batch of students are expected to start their studies in 2014 on schedule. In addition to being regularly reviewed at Asean forums, the initiative has received extraordinary support in the Indian domestic political sphere at the levels of both state and centre. In August 2010 the Nalanda Bill was passed by both houses of the Indian parliament and as of February 2014, an amended Nalanda 2013 bill was approved by the Union Cabinet, noting the Indian government’s release of 2127.1 crore INR (approximately US$448$ million) to cover the university’s expenses from 2010–2011 to 2020–2021.6 What is it about Nalanda that makes it so captivating as an exemplar of ‘Asia’ and a means of collaboration for such diverse stakeholders? Analysis of the discourse surrounding the Nalanda University revival provides a singular opportunity to understand contemporary interests in pan-Asianism and ‘Asian education’, as viewed by key political and cultural interlocutors for Nalanda, the transnational bodies charged with negotiating the project, and the participating nation-states. As a scholar of religion and South Asian studies, I explore three key themes in this article. First, I discuss how the contemporary framing of the project pragmatically both adopts and neglects key elements of the Nālandā Mahāvihāra’s known Buddhist heritage. What slippages occur—and what tensions do they reveal—between ancient Nalanda, the contemporary reimagining of historical Nalanda, and the new Nalanda University project? Second, I identify a major stream of discourse surrounding the Nalanda revival that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and transnational in tone and celebrates Nalanda as Asian, while simultaneously acknowledging its Indic provenance. As I discuss, key features of this discourse are centred on an ‘a-cultural’ Buddhism and the invocation of ‘Asian’ values as contributing to a new model of a modern ‘spiritual’ university that would be uniquely Asian. Third, I turn to examine the ‘Indic’ framing of Nalanda in India and the perceived ability of the Nalanda revival to advance four 6 Press Information Bureau, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=104362>. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 5 106 107 108 109 110 111 characteristically Indian concerns: Indian foreign policy goals; Indic educational ideals; alternative Indian models of education; and the unique relationship of Buddhism in India to secularism and low-caste politics. In closing, I reflect on these fissures in the conceptions of Nalanda and its future prospects as a representative of ‘New Asia’ and as an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’.7 112 Historical Nalanda and its contemporary reimagination 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 More than 50 years ago, Margaret Wiley Marshall, a scholar of English literature, visited Bihar and, reflecting on her visit to Nalanda, commented that: ‘ . . . one can easily imagine the intellectual and spiritual vitality that abounded there as recently as eight or nine hundred years ago’ (my emphasis).8 Nalanda’s extremely remote past commands a similar enthusiasm today, yet the relationship of the contemporary project to the Nalanda of antiquity is often marked by degrees of inattention to the original institution’s fundamental nature. The necessity of both reconciling and harnessing this legacy is at the crux of this project and was recently recognized by India’s Ministry of External Affairs in its report on the Nalanda University (Amendment) Bill 7 My findings are based on an analysis of the contemporary debates around the Nalanda revival initiative over the last half decade from South, Southeast, and East Asian perspectives. For insight into the interests of parties from outside India, I have framed my research on the level of intra-governmental interactions, by reviewing the major statements made on Nalanda by the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Asean, and the East Asia Summit. From the Indian side, I draw on my close reading of the full 2010 Indian government debates on the Nalanda University Bill, recorded in the proceedings of both houses of parliament—the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. 8 Margaret Wiley Marshall (1961), ‘Bihar Universities-New and Old’, The Journal of Higher Education, 32, 9, p. 506. Nalanda, now accessible to the public as an archaeological site, is located approximately 90 kilometres southeast of Patna, the state capital of Bihar, India, and is about five kilometres from the site proposed for the new university. Patna has been a regional capital city for millennia: as Pāt.aliputra, it was the capital of Magadha, one of the 16 ancient mahājanapadas, or ‘great polities’, of the Indian subcontinent. As an urban hub for trade and commerce, Pāt.aliputra was a regional anchor that generated ample surplus thus enabling a large monastic community to flourish in its vicinity, and was itself an important Buddhist centre at particular points in its long history. Some of Nalanda’s most important patrons included: the Nandas, Mauryas (especially Aśoka), the Śuṅgas, the Hindu Guptas (especially fifth century Kumāragupta, also known as Śakrāditya, who reigned from 415–455), and Emperor Harśa (seventh century). The Pālas (eighth–twelfth centuries), known as staunch Buddhists and liberal benefactors, were Nalanda’s patrons at its zenith. 6 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY (December 2013): ‘ . . . all efforts should be made to invoke and include the icons, nomenclature and cultural as well as scholarly traditions of the old Nalanda University in the new initiative and have hoped that by reconciling the ancient glory with the contemporary and future academic pursuits, the authorities would be able to develop it as an international centre of excellence’.9 In this section, I review some of Nalanda’s earliest known history in order to frame some of the tensions and elisions that mark the discourse around the contemporary project—where politicians, policy makers, and commentators attempt to build momentum for a modern university project while invoking a decidedly pre-modern institution. The original Nālandā Mahāvihāra or ‘Great Nalanda Monastery’ was a centre of higher learning that was founded in the fifth century and operated for nearly 800 years, from approximately 427 to 1197.10 As discussed by Frederick Asher, Nalanda’s demise coincided with major social and economic upheavals in the twelfth century.11 The 9 Lok Sabha Secretariat, ‘Report on “the Nalanda University (Amendment) Bill, 2013”’, 17 December 2013, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://164.100. 47.134/lsscommittee/External%20Affairs/pr_files/The%20Nalanda%20University% 20(Amendment)%20Bill,%202013.pdf>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. 10 Upendra Thakur (1995), Buddhist Cities in Early India: Buddha-Gayā, Rājagr.ha, Nālandā, Delhi, Sundeep Prakashan, p. 77. Nalanda’s importance to the Buddhist and Jaina communities predates the founding of Nalanda by some 800 years. According to the Buddhist texts, Mahāsudassana Jātaka and the Nikāyasaṅgraha, Aśoka, the Buddhist scion of the Maurya empire, established the first monastic refuges (vihāras) at Nalanda as well as a very large stūpa to commemorate the life and death of Sāriputra (one of the Buddha’s key disciples who was born and died at Nalanda), during his third century reign (304–232 BCE). This claim is repeated over the centuries in multiple sources, including the fourth century account of Faxian and the sixteenth century account of Tārānātha. Aśoka’s Sāriputra stūpa is the largest and most prominent archaeological element at the ruins today. See Hirananda Shastri (1986), Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, New Delhi, Sri Satguru Publications, p. 6. For a brief note on Tārānātha, see Archaeological Survey of India (n.d.), Nālandā Site Guide, New Delhi, p. 3. In the Jaina text Sūtrakr.itān.ga, composed as early as the fourth century BCE, a chapter is dedicated to Nalanda (Book 2, Lecture 7), in which it is described as a prosperous ‘suburb’ (bāhirikā) of Rājagr.ı̄ha containing many ‘hundreds of buildings’, although Jacobi states that this was a generic description routinely given to towns. Rājagr.ı̄ha, lying just 12 kilometres away from Nalanda, is famed as the place where Buddha resided and gave discourses at Gr.iddhakūt.a, or ‘Vulture’s Peak’. In this text, Mahāvı̄ra, the putative founder of Jainism, is said to have spent 14 rainy seasons at Nalanda, an account corroborated in the Kalpasūtra of the Jaina monk, Bhadrabāhu. See Max Müller (ed.) (1895), Sacred Books of the East, Volume XLV: The Jaina Sutras (Part 2): The Uddhyanana Sutra and the Sutrakritanga Sutra, trs. Hermann Jacobi, Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. xxxix–xl. 11 Frederick M. Asher (2010), ‘Replicating Bodhgaya: The Origins of Mahabodhi Temple Replicas in Southeast Asia’, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Lecture Series, Singapore. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 7 proximate cause of the institution’s collapse has been attributed to ‘Turkic Muslim adventurers’12 (Turus.ka) led by Muh.ammad-i-Bakhtyār Khaljı̄, who is reported to have sacked the present-day city of Bihar Sharif, about ten kilometres from Nalanda, in 1198.13 A later Tibetan account claims that a handful of monks occupied Nalanda until 1235, when the activities of a group of Tı̄rthika mendicants led to the final cessation of Nalanda’s operations. Whatever the exact date, from the thirteenth century onwards, Nalanda vanished from historical records for centuries.14 Since the contemporary framing of Nalanda is deeply invested in reviving the original spirit of Nalanda, it is vital to examine what the sources on ancient Nalanda actually disclose about the institution of antiquity. Most of what is known about monastic life at Nalanda is preserved in the travelogues of Chinese monks who undertook pilgrimages to India: the two most famous Chinese visitors to the Nalanda Mahāvihāra produced detailed accounts of life at the monastery.15 First, the itinerant monk-scholar Xuanzang (d, circa 602–664) recorded his impressions of a 17-year return pilgrimage from China to India, from 629–645. His account is one of the most detailed sources of information on ancient Nalanda.16 Next, Yijing (d d, circa 635– 713) travelled to India via Sriwijaya (now in Sumatra, Indonesia) and stayed at Nalanda for approximately a decade, from 675–685. His account of the practices at Nalanda corroborates and deepens 12 K.A. Nilakanta Shastri (1941), ‘Nālandā’, Journal of the Madras University, XIII, No. 2, p. 173. 13 Frederick M. Asher (2008), Bodh Gaya: A Monumental Legacy, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, pp. 14–15. 14 Shastri, ‘Nālandā’, p. 173. Nalanda disappeared from historical record until Alexander Cunningham, the inaugural director of the Archaeological Survey of India, reported in his maiden publication that in 1862 he identified the village of Baragaon in Bihar (Bar.agām.v) as Nalanda. Here, Cunningham found red brick ruins on a site in excess of 14 hectares. See Alexander Cunningham (1871), Four Reports Made During the Years, 1862–63–64–65, Government Central Press, Simla (Shimla), India, p. 28. 15 Faxian (d d, circa 337–422), a Chinese Buddhist monk-scholar, mentions ‘Nala’—a site with a Buddhist stūpa assumed to have later become known as Nalanda— but does not give any details of it as a functioning monastery in the earliest of these accounts. This absence of detail may indicate, but not conclusively, that his visit pre-dated the major activities of the Nalanda Mahāvihāra. Later Chinese accounts note that the Chinese Emperor Wu Di of the Liang dynasty organized a delegation to Nalanda in 539 to collect Buddhist texts. After the return of the expedition, Nalanda’s fame in China grew sufficiently to inspire several more Chinese monastics to make the long and hazardous journey to India. 16 Xuan Zang (1884), Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, trs. Samuel Beal, Trübner’s Oriental Series 1, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 8 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY that of Xuanzang.17 Finally, Huili (dd, circa seventh century), a disciple of Xuanzang, composed a biography of his master—‘The Life of Xuanzang’—which gives the most complete portrait of monastic education at Nalanda.18 Monks of all ages formed the main community living at the institution; Xuanzang guessed at a minimum of 10,000 residents. Yijing estimated that approximately 3,000–3,500 preceptor-monks were in residence, occupying eight halls and 300 apartments.19 Students lived and studied together with their teachers; some 100 lecterns were set up for instructional sessions. Of the residents, just 1,000 monks were advanced enough to possess mastery of the ‘30 collections’, or scriptural compendiums, and perhaps just ten men, including the ‘Master of Law’ (dharma), could teach 50 collections. One master, Śı̄labhadra, revered for his unimpeachable conduct, was said to possess knowledge of them all.20 According to both Xuanzang and Yijing, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Nalanda Mahāvihāra was its use of a sort of entrance examination.21 A gatekeeper was said to bar strangers from entering the compound’s single gate unless they could answer questions attesting to an elementary level of education in Buddhist monastic terms. Knowledge of the Buddhist canon (the Tipit.aka) was expected as a basic requirement; the failure rate was popularly reported at seven or eight out of ten candidates.22 Xuanzang noted that the primary objects of study were Mahayana Buddhist texts, as well as works from 18 other rival Buddhist sects. Additionally, ‘miscellaneous’ texts were also studied, including canonical Sanskrit texts such as the Atharvaveda. Xuanzang dwelt on the grave and pious character of the residential inmates at Nalanda, whose duties included attending to their teachers and studying scripture. The senior monks were described as assiduously following the ‘severe’ rules of the institution; their conduct was ‘pure and unblamable’. Discussion on the topics 17 I Tsing (1896), A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (AD 671–695), trs. Junjiro Takakusu, Oxford, Clarendon Press. The pinyin romanization of ‘I Tsing’ corresponds to Yijing. 18 Hui Li (1914), The Life of Hiuen Tsian, trs. Samuel Beal, Trübner’s Oriental Series, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 19 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, pp. 65, 154. 20 Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, p. 112. 21 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. 22 Archaeological Survey of India (n.d.), pp. 7–8. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 9 of study was so enthusiastic that Xuanzang noted: ‘the day is not sufficient for asking and answering profound questions’.23 Yijing contributed more details about Nalanda’s curriculum and the modes of study. One of the foundational non-Buddhist texts to be mastered was Pān.ini’s Sanskrit grammar, the As.t.ādhyāyı̄, knowledge of which ensured facility in study and debate. There were also five major vidyās or ‘disciplines’ (which were of course further subdivided): śabdavidyā (discourse analysis); śilpasthānavidyā (arts); cikitsāvidyā (diagnostic medicine); hetuvidyā (logic, epistemology); adhyātmavidyā (metaphysics).24 Students considered to be accomplished would engage in public debates so that, ‘when they are refuting heretical doctrines all their opponents become tongue-tied and acknowledge themselves undone’.25 The lifestyle observed by and enforced upon Nalanda residents facilitated strict adherence to the Buddhist Vinaya (monastic code of conduct). The monks had individual cells furnished with a hard, raised platform to be used as a bed. Yijing noted that a clepsydra (water clock) was used to ensure the punctual observance of the monastic rule of not eating after noon, which was mandatory for all monks in residence. Expulsion from the institution was the penalty for violation of this fundamental monastic practice.26 Patronage was liberal: on a daily basis, Nalanda was said to receive more than 1,000 pounds of rice and several thousands of pounds of butter and milk.27 Xuanzang stated that Nalanda received generous patronage from the region’s king, in the form of remittance from 100 villages; in Yijing’s account, the number of remitting villages is doubled to 200.28 The institution designated itself as a mahāvihāra or ‘great monastery’. This unambiguously Buddhist and monastic term was found on hundreds of terracotta seals excavated from the Nalanda archaeological site, taken by Cunningham as definitive proof that the site was the legendary Nalanda of old. The entire phrase found on the seal confirms Nalanda as an institution for Buddhist monks 23 Xuan Zang, Si-Yu-Ki, p. 170. Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, p. 112. 25 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 18. 26 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 145. 27 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. 28 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 65. It is a commonplace that such figures should be considered approximate rather than literal; nevertheless, in doubling the number of villages said to support Nalanda, we may infer that the institution enjoyed increased support over the period of commentary. 24 10 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY (bhiks.u): Śrı̄-Nalanda-Mahāvihārı̄y-ārya-bhiks.u-saṅghasya or ‘The Great Monastery of Nalanda of the noble community of monks’. Finally, the major decorative element of the seal is the dharmacakra, or ‘wheel of law’, flanked by two deer, a reference to the deer park at Sārnāth where the Buddha is said to have taught his first disciples. In short, the ancient institution’s seal—in scriptorial and pictorial modes— identifies Nalanda as definitively Buddhist; in 2008 it was adopted by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the modern institution’s official seal.29 Yet in contemporary discourse, old Nalanda has been variously framed as a ‘monastic centre’, a ‘university’, and a ‘monastic university’. For example, Garten has claimed that Nalanda was a ‘global university’ of its time; Sen has stated that it attracted ‘foreign students’.30 Yet both characterizations dubiously imply a similarity with the contemporary globalization of higher education, where students can easily enrol for an international term of study abroad. According to all the major Chinese pilgrims’ records, numerous visitors from far-flung places in the Buddhist world indeed went on extended pilgrimages to the Indian sites associated with the exemplary life of the Buddha—but often for ten years or more owing to the difficulty of voyaging over great distances in the first millennium.31 Another depiction of Nalanda that troublingly elides the gulf between ancient and modern is the suggestion that students studied there ‘for free’.32 It is true that the monks at Nalanda did not pay fees, but the implication that monks benefited from a ‘tuition waiver’ obfuscates the reason why Nalanda was supported. It was underwritten by imperial and lay patronage from primarily Buddhist sources (and also some Hindu ones, such as the Gupta emperors) in order to underwrite a monastic ‘field of merit’ generated by thousands of monks engaged in sedulously observing Buddhist dharma. 29 Ministry of External Affairs India (2008), ‘On the Fourth Meeting of the Nalanda Mentor Group’, 12–13 August, New Delhi, <http://www.mea.gov.in/pressreleases.htm?dtl/1926/On+the+Fourth+Meeting+of+the+Nalanda+Mentor+ Group1213+August+2008+at+New+Delhi>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 30 Garten, ‘Really Old School’. Shreeya Sinha (2011), ‘Q & A: Nobel Prize Winning Economist Amartya Sen on Reviving Nalanda University’, <http://asiasociety. org/blog/asia/qa-nobel-prize-winning-economist-amartya-sen-reviving-nalandauniversity>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 31 Pilgrims’ places of origin include: Bactria (Balkh), now in Afghanistan; Tushara in northwestern South Asia (possibly latter-day Turkey); Tibet; Burma; Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan; China; and Korea. See Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, pp. xvii–xxxi. 32 Shashi Tharoor (2006), ‘Reconstructing Nalanda: The Ideal Nalanda Must be More than an Exercise in Constructive Nostalgia’, Hindu Online Edition, 24 December. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 11 Xuanzang notes the harmonious arrangement between the regional polity and the mahāvihāra, saying, ‘ . . . the students here, being so abundantly supplied, do not require to ask for the four requisites. This is the source of the perfection of their studies to which they have arrived.’33 The prestige of the institution and its material support were thus incontrovertibly linked to the religious practices of its pious residents.34 According to Yijing, ‘ . . . the prosperity of the religion continues ever, owing to nothing but (the fact that) the Vinaya (is being strictly carried out)’.35 Texts studied at Nalanda did go beyond Buddhist scripture in that monks studied the foundational Sanskrit texts of the day, and monks hailing from diverse parts of the Buddhist world did study them together. However, the monks at Nalanda were admitted based on their knowledge of Buddhist scripture and compliance with vinaya rules; they were trained in theological argumentation for the purpose of unseating non-Buddhists and others holding unsound views; and they were supported by patrons because they were observant Buddhist monks. This last point is crucial. According to the Chinese records, Nalanda was a Buddhist institution in a world of competing worldviews. In some sense, its purpose was to provide a locus for a Buddhist outlook while it vied with others for ideological and political dominance. Uncharitably, one could consider the contemporary inattention given to the above as distortions of Nalanda’s legacy. Yet this would miss an important point. Pragmatically, framing Nalanda as an ancient exemplar of the dominant contemporary model of education is a useful heuristic that captures enthusiasm for the project and permits a mosaic of actors to embrace the proposal. While ancient Nalanda was a religious institution that inculcated a set of religious values that would in turn produce a set of religious experiences, attitudes, 33 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. One very conspicuous point of difference between historical European universities and ancient Nalanda is the relationship between European students and their host communities. In comparison with the pious monastery of Nalanda, the earliest European universities were not housed in fixed locations but were dependent upon being granted space for lectures as well as student accommodation by townspeople. Animosities resulting from this arrangement gave rise to the infamous ‘town and gown’ encounters. In 1200, King Philip Augustus of France decreed that the students of the University of Paris were exempt from lay jurisdiction, providing a peculiar protection for the students, who were often at violent odds with the local townspeople. See Charles Homer Haskins (1957), The Rise of Universities, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press (Great Seal Books), p. 15. 35 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 65. 34 12 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 and cultural formations, the Nalanda revival appears destined to be a secular university, in harmony with the rational-materialist cultures that have envisioned it. Nalanda’s historical legacy thus stands in sharp contrast to the contemporary project, based on the ideal of the modern university as an institution that espouses dogmatological agnosticism, and dominates educational ideals across the elite strata of all global cultures. It is important to reflect on this contrast precisely because it is elided in modern discussions. Clearly, the gap between historical and future Nalanda is vast and comparisons between the two must be made carefully in order to avoid stretching historical fact in the service of present-day aspirations. Nalanda’s ancient prestige, glowingly burnished by the passage of many intervening centuries, affords a neutrality to the past and its staunchly Buddhist legacy. Indeed, the ideal of ‘Nalanda’ functions as a palimpsest where participating bodies can write, read, and reread multiple expediencies that further divergent goals. It is the remoteness of Nalanda’s legacy that permits it to be so thoroughly reimagined and, as I go on to argue, in such strikingly dissimilar ways. In the rest of this article, I identify two major types of discourse on Nalanda. First, I show how Nalanda has galvanized a new wave of ‘Pan-Indo-Asianism’; then, I show how Nalanda has been framed as advancing Indian interests. While Nalanda is celebrated in the former type of discourse as the common cultural property of Asia, it is seen as one of the crown jewels of Indian civilization by the latter. Both modes embrace the revival, but favour divergent outcomes— a possibility which is facilitated by the pragmatic reframing of the project’s past as outlined above. As will be clear, great differences emerge in the perceptions of Nalanda’s legacy and the motivations behind steering its symbolic power. 313 Pan-Indo-Asianism, a-cultural Buddhism, and Asian education 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 Discourse on Nalanda reveals a fresh interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’, expressed in three areas. First, the transnational support for Nalanda indicates a new readiness to affirm India as a centre for Asian spirituality and a locus of ‘Asian values’. In the twentieth century, independent India’s pan-Asian ambitions were viewed warily by India’s Asian neighbours. Now, through the lens of Nalanda, we can discern a new acceptance and affirmation of Indian antiquity as an apt candidate to represent and exemplify Asia. Second, Buddhism has long been NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 13 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 viewed as a unifying regional tradition. Here, India is celebrated for its potential to enliven multilateral, intra-Asian Buddhist connections through its identity as the ancient birthplace of Buddhism. Finally, the Nalanda revival reveals a new interest in realizing an ‘Asian’ vision of education that would be distinguished from dominant Western models. With education as a favoured path to Asian cooperation, I conclude this section by exploring some of the most intriguing ideas put forth by Asian and Indian discussants to make sense of the proposed ‘spiritual’ nature of the new Nalanda University and to assess its potential contributions towards developing an Asian educational paradigm. 333 India as Asia, Asia as India 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 Intra-Asian regionalism has many historical antecedents and wellknown interlocutors, such as Rabindranath Tagore in India, Zhang Taiyan of China, and Okakura Kakuzo (also known as Okakura Tenshin) of Japan.36 To take one early twentieth-century example, Okakura famously summarized his views in the expression ‘Asia is One’, arguing that Asian peoples from Arabia to Japan shared a unity of temperament: ‘Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace’.37 As flagged by Garten, the notion of an Asian cultural unity has inspired a diverse body of advocates, but it has produced limited multilateral projects. Yet over the last decade, soft spheres such as education and culture have been identified by Asian extra-governmental organizations as priority areas for mutual cooperation. In India, the discourse surrounding Nalanda has created a space where it represents not just a rising India but an ascendant Asia in classically pan-Asian terms reminiscent of those from the last century. In ‘Our Vision’, the plan for the University confirms Asia’s resurgence on the common basis of ‘peace and harmony’, as exemplary ‘Asian’ values: 353 354 Asian countries are coming together to forge a continent based on the foundations of peace and harmony. The decision of the East Asia Summit in 36 See Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, (eds) (2011), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Plymouth, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Limited. 37 Kakuzo Okakura (1904), The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan, New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., p. 10. 14 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 355 356 2007, at its meeting in Cebu, Philippines, to endorse the plan to re-establish the Nalanda University underscores the commitment to these values.38 357 358 359 360 The vision statement then underscores the fact that Nalanda’s ancient pedigree outranks the great European universities by at least a millennium, and invokes a ‘hallowed universalism’ at some variance with the historical record just reviewed: 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 After teaching thousands of students for centuries, Nalanda ceased its existence just as universities were opening up in Bologna, Paris and Oxford at the beginning of the second millennium CE. The shift of centres of knowledge from East to West was symbolic of the eventual transfer of power which followed within half a millennium. There is now a perfect opportunity to recreate the hallowed universalism of Nalanda as a centre of knowledge. The second millennium CE ended with a tremendous resurgence of Asia after centuries of stagnation, division and decline. Asia is today synonymous with a dynamic entrepreneurial and innovative culture, based on knowledge and enterprise not forgetful of its past yet not afraid to face the future.39 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 This striking vision statement affirms Nalanda as a key element of India’s ancient legacy without mentioning India by name; it praises Nalanda’s reputation as a centre of civilization, while disconnecting it from its religious character, partially through the assertion that it taught ‘students’ rather than monks. Most interestingly, while the Orientalist notion of Asia as ‘stagnant’ and in ‘decline’ is endorsed, it is then summarily displaced by the imagining of a modern, secular Nalanda that is ‘dynamic’, ‘innovative’, and an ideal standard-bearer for ‘new (undifferentiated) Asia’. Several key Indian interlocutors have powerfully articulated a panAsian role for Indian civilization. To take one example, N. K. Singh, member of the Rajya Sabha (Bihar) and of the Nalanda Governing Board, has strongly supported pan-Asian ideals. Singh’s political career spans more than four decades and his portfolio has ranged from trade and finance to energy and transport. Singh has successfully argued in Parliament that the new Nalanda will illuminate Asia’s past, it will succour the present, and it will pave the way for a future of cooperation between Asian nations. Most significantly, he twins Nalanda’s revival—and Bihar’s (and by extension, India’s)—with the broader expectation of the rebirth of Asia in the third millennium: 38 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Our Vision’, abt-vision.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 39 Nalanda University, ‘Our Vision’. <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/ NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 15 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 . . . the [Nalanda] revival and the Asian renaissance represent not merely the economic wherewithal with which we want to rebuild Asia, improve our life quality but in some way regain the intellectual and knowledge leadership which Asia had forgone 800 years ago . . . it could be a trend setter for the power of soft diplomacy . . . not only of pan-Asia but looking to Asia and the Pacific . . . [to] strike at the broader commonalities of Asia, Asian values . . . let us hope and pray that the new Nalanda University would be this voice of an enlightened Asia.40 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 Singh’s articulation echoes a widely held goal for the Nalanda project: to advance an ‘Asian renaissance’ centred in India. Many Indian intellectuals have supported a pan-Asian vision where India is part of the Asiatic community; however, independent India’s foreign policy has been more typically nationalist in its imaginations of Asia. Singh’s conception as a parliamentarian is thus notable for its strongly pan-Asian tone, especially so given the otherwise Indo-centric outlook of the Indian parliamentary debates, covered in detail in the third section of this article. Amartya Sen continues to be Nalanda’s most influential supporter both in India and abroad. His extensive comments on Nalanda also reflect pan-Indo-Asian priorities such as a ‘long-run goal’ to establish great Asian universities inspired by the model of ancient Nalanda. Pragmatically, Sen identifies education and research as an area in which ‘joint action is possible’ in Asia: 414 415 416 417 418 . . . Asian countries have many differences in political outlook and practice, and these differences are not going to disappear any time soon. But it is also important to live with each other in peace, and cooperate in areas in which joint action is possible. This applies particularly well to cooperation in education and research, involving all the countries of the Asian region.41 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 This statement trenchantly summarizes Sen’s approach to the project and, I believe, flags one of the driving levers of the project’s appeal. Intra-Asian collaboration is an alluring goal but it has produced very limited forums for substantive and sustained engagements. To extrapolate from Sen’s words, the arenas where Asian countries are able to find viable common ground for collaboration are limited. A new Nalanda, hosted by India but conceived of in pan-Indo-Asian terms, is a chance to unite respect for ‘broad-spectrum Buddhism’ with the 40 Rajya Sabha (2010), The Nalanda University Bill 2010 (Full Uncorrected Text), 21 August, New Delhi, pp. 36–38. 41 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Chairman’s Message’, <http://nalandauniv.edu. in/abt-chairman-msg.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 16 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 dream of realizing a non-Western, alternative model of Asian higher education while creating a new fulcrum to reshape Bihar. Outside of India, we need look no further than the official statements made by the East Asia Summit for evidence of Asean’s approval of India as a centre for Asian values, which I will now briefly review. The Nalanda revival was initially tabled early in 2007 at the second meeting of the East Asia Summit, in Cebu, Philippines. The Nalanda initiative appeared as a priority, just after poverty eradication and energy, as follows: 436 437 438 439 440 We agreed to strengthen regional educational cooperation, noting that we could tap the region’s centers of excellence in education for this purpose. Noting proposals to renew our historical ties, we welcomed initiatives such as the revival of the Nalanda University in India, to improve regional understanding and the appreciation of one another’s heritage and history.42 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 Again, in late 2007, the third East Asia Summit renewed its commitment, saying that ‘the revival of Nalanda University would create a centre for cultural exchange and inter-religious study and understanding in the region’.43 This meeting resulted in the creation of the Nalanda Mentor Group as the primary body leading the Nalanda project.44 Then, in 2009, the fourth East Asia Summit emphatically reaffirmed the role of ancient India (via Nalanda) as a regional hub of learning and religiosity, tying it to the three contemporary regional Asian blocs: 42 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2007), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 2nd East Asia Summit’, 15 January, Cebu, Philippines, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asiapaci/eas/state0701.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 43 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2007), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 3rd East Asia Summit’, 21 November, Singapore, <http://www.aseansec.org/21127. htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 44 The Nalanda Mentor Group, established by the government of India and chaired by Amartya Sen had its inaugural meeting in Singapore in July 2007. In November 2011, the Group was converted to the Nalanda University Governing Board, with the following members and affiliations: Amartya Sen (Harvard University); George Yeo (ex-foreign minister of Singapore); N. K. Singh (Rajya Sabha member of parliament); Professor Wang Gungwu (National University of Singapore); Wang Bangwei (Beijing University); Susumu Nakanishi (emeritus, Kyoto City University of Arts); Sugata Bose (Harvard University); Prapod Assavavirulhakarn (Chulalongkorn University) Tansen Sen (City University of New York); Lord Meghnad Desai (London School of Economics); Gopa Sabharwal (vice chancellor, Nalanda University); and Sanjay Singh (secretary, (East) Ministry of External Affairs). The Board’s international membership covers many bases, with representatives connected to India, Singapore, China, Thailand, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Nalanda University (2012), ‘Board’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/board.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 17 450 451 452 [The Summit was] deeply impressed with the sanctity and significance of the great ancient centre of learning in Nalanda that attracted many scholars from South, South-East and East Asia . . . 45 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 In this ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit released a definitive articulation of transnational support. Here, member states are recorded as having ‘appreciated’ and ‘encouraged’ the Nalanda revival as proposed by the India delegation, amounting to an endorsement of India as an appropriate site for a pan-Asian initiative. This marked a significant step in Asean’s relationship with India. Finally, in 2010, the fifth East Asia Summit praised the successful passage of the Nalanda Bill in the Indian parliament and singled out education as a premier mode of intra-regional cooperation, naming Nalanda as ‘an international institution of excellence with continental focus’.46 At the sixth East Asia Summit in 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed that work on Nalanda University was progressing well.47 The seventh Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2012) reaffirmed support for Nalanda and noted that Lao People’s Democratic Republic had contributed financially.48 Most recently, at the eight East Asia Summit, seven members signed a memorandum of understanding on Nalanda with India (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, New Zealand, Singapore); on 23 October 2013, China also signed this agreement.49 These developments signal a new readiness within Asia and India to embrace shared humanistic 45 East Asia Summit (2009), ‘Joint Press Statement of the 4th East Asia Summit on the Revival of Nalanda University’, 15th Asean Summit and Related Summits, Cha-am, Hua Hin, Thailand, <http://www.aseansec.org/23619.htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 46 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2010), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 5th East Asia Summit (EAS)’, 30 October, Ha Noi, Viet Nam, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/ asia-paci/eas/pdfs/state101030.pdf>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 47 Ministry of External Affairs India (2011), ‘Statement by Pm at the 6th East Asia Summit Plenary Session’, November 19, Bali, Indonesia, <http://www. mea.gov.in/in-focus-article.htm?6974/Statement+by+PM+at+the+6th+East+ Asia+Summit+Plenary+Session>, [accessed 10 March 2014]. 48 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia, Canberra, Australia, <http://www.dfat.gov.au/asean/eas/121120_7th_eas_chairman_ statement.html>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. 49 Nalanda University, Press Release, 11 October 2013, <http://www. nalandauniv.edu.in/8eas.pdf>, [accessed 8 March 2014]; Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://mea.gov.in/bilateraldocuments.htm?dtl/22367>m [accessed 8 March 2014]. 18 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 474 475 goals, and to endorse India, through the imagining of Nalanda, as representative of a progressive and modern ‘new Asian’ renaissance. 476 (Buddhist) Asia ‘is one’ 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 The Buddhist nature of Nalanda is celebrated as the common cultural heritage of all three interested regional blocs: South, Southeast, and East Asia. While this supports India’s ambition to claim a position of cultural leadership under the rubric of historical Buddhism, it in turn leverages an essentialist reading of the Indian Buddhism of antiquity as a useful fulcrum to unite contemporary Asian cultures which practise divergent forms of contemporary Buddhism. As I demonstrate below, multi-party political discourse describes Asia’s Buddhist connections in generic and ‘a-cultural’ terms, removed from religious belief or regional practices. For example, in the ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit formally endorsed the Nalanda revival as follows: 489 490 491 492 [the EAS] . . . welcomed India’s initiative to revive the Nalanda University located in the State of Bihar in India . . . [and recognized that] Nalanda University was a great ancient centre of intellectual activity in Buddhist philosophy, mathematics, medicine and other disciplines.50 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 In this crucial statement, Nalanda is strongly and explicitly related to ‘Buddhist philosophy’. This is a classically Orientalist characterization of Buddhism as an analytical system or a ‘philosophy of life’ rather than a lived religious tradition. As a rhetorical move, it distances the contemporary project from the celebrated history of its namesake—a site where monks lived, slept, and ate in accordance with Buddhist Vinaya rules or faced expulsion. Furthermore, the nod to Nalanda’s Buddhist legacy is included in a list of other secular ‘disciplines’—mathematics and medicine—which undoubtedly echo a modern perception of the proper business of a university. The ‘vision’ for Nalanda University echoes this ‘a-religious’ representation, exchanging Buddhist monks for secular students as follows: 505 506 Nalanda is a word known across the world and for centuries. It stands for a university which attracted students and scholars from across Asia and even 50 East Asia Summit, ‘Joint Press Statement’. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 19 507 508 farther away. It was a centre of excellence for Buddhist studies, philosophy but medicine and mathematics as well.51 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 This severing of Buddhism from devotional piety and its coupling with a secular modernity is reminiscent of the influential characterization of the religion by Anāgārika Dharmapāla of Sri Lanka (1864–1933). Dharmapāla famously depicted Buddhism as a religion which not only fulfils but also exceeds the criteria for modernism, pitching Buddhism as ‘a scientific religion’. In his address to the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893, Dharmapāla emphasized the ‘rationality’ of Buddhism as being on par with that of Charles Darwin and insisted that ‘nothing whatever be accepted on faith’.52 While the Nalanda Mahāvihāra was certainly a centre of ‘intellectual activity’, the ancient institution’s religious element has been completely excised in accordance with the requirements of a modern, secular university of the present. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the centrality of the role played by a denatured Buddhism, unencumbered by living practices, in creating pan-Asian common ground for the revival. India is the ideal site to do this, as it links the vastly different practices found throughout the Buddhist world to a past that is so remote so as to present no contemporary challenges, only the ‘authenticity’ of antiquity. For example, Tommy Koh, Singapore’s ambassador-at-large, located original Buddhism in India and tied the far-flung Buddhist countries to it as follows: 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 Located in Bihar, India, Nalanda University had preceded the founding of Oxford and Cambridge. It was a great centre of learning, not just in Buddhism, but also in mathematics and science. Buddhism originated from India and has spread to China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka and many of the countries of Southeast Asia. The revival of Nalanda University will connect our past to our present and our future. It is a symbol of Asia’s cultural renaissance.53 538 539 540 Were the project hosted by a nation with a distinctly Buddhist character, such as Sri Lanka or Thailand, high stakes would be involved in attempting to transcend the distinct and culturally embedded 51 Nalanda University, ‘Chairman’s Message’. All citations of Dharmapāla are from ‘The World’s Debt to the Buddha’, read at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, and cited in David L. McMahan (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, New York, Oxford University Press, p. 20. 53 Tommy Koh (2010), ‘Toward the Realisation of an East Asian Community’, New Asia Republic, 29 March. 52 20 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 national formations of the host country and in merging them with other Asian partners’ particular Buddhist practices. Compared to the uninterrupted vitality of Buddhist traditions in Southeast and East Asia, for centuries Buddhism has had a marginal cultural influence in India. In locating the project at ancient Nalanda, India is read as a welcoming site for an a-historically ancient and a-cultural Buddhism that can expansively accommodate a mosaic of contemporary forms of Buddhism. In summary, characterizations of Nalanda as broadly representative of contemporary Asian interests exhibit a tendency to admire but at the same time underrepresent the very religious features which gave Nalanda its exemplary Buddhist character. 552 Spirituality and Asian education 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 In March 2006, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, former president of India (2002–2007), outlined a distinct vision for the Nalanda revival to the Bihar state assembly. He suggested that the revival should impart not just academic excellence, but ‘enlightened citizenship’, a concept he identified as having three features, ‘(1) value-based education; (2) religion transforming into spirituality; (3) economic development for societal equality’.54 Kalam’s high profile as the then-president of India and his associations with education and social reform lent credence to the proposal and, critically, helped to ensure the Bihar government’s support for the project. As proposed, Nalanda’s educational targets would be both conventional—‘excellence’—and unusual—‘spirituality’, a quality consistently showcased as one of the project’s hallmarks.55 Aspects of Kalam’s original proposal have been broadly ingeminated in many of the East Asia Summit statements on Nalanda. These statements are echoed on the Nalanda University website, which proposes that Nalanda, as a ‘spiritual university’, would represent an alternative ‘Asian’ vision for education:56 54 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Dr. A. P. J Kalam’s Message’, <http://nalandauniv. edu.in/abt-kalam-msg.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 55 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Schools’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/school.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 56 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2010), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers Informal Consultations’, 21 July, Ha Noi, Viet Nam, <http://www.aseansec.org/24914.htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 21 571 572 573 [o]ur goal is to match the excellence of Nalanda of the first millennium for the third millennium’; its mission is to recapture the moral and character-driven model of education of old while refashioning it for the present.57 574 575 576 577 Ideally, this alternative model would provoke a non-Western reassessment of broad pedagogical goals at the foundational level. For the definitive statement in this regard, the Summit’s ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’ must be revisited: 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 . . . [the EAS] supported the establishment of the Nalanda University as a non-state, non-profit, secular, and self governing international institution with a continental focus that will bring together the brightest and the most dedicated students from all countries of Asia—irrespective of gender, caste, creed, disability, ethnicity or social-economic background—to enable them to acquire liberal and human education and to give them the means needed for pursuit of intellectual, philosophical, historical and spiritual studies and thus achieve qualities of tolerance and accommodation.58 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600 601 602 603 This critical portion of the statement declared that the new Nalanda University will have a distinctly ‘Asian’ character which includes ‘spiritual studies’, in order to produce ‘tolerance and accommodation’. In 2010, the Indian minister of external affairs chaired an ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations-India post-ministerial meeting’, at which the East Asia Summit foreign ministers reavowed their interest in the Nalanda University initiative, now described as a ‘symbol of Asia’s cultural renaissance’.59 Most recently, India’s 2013 Memorandum of Understanding (currently signed with eight East Asia Summit member states) clarified the intra-regional obectives of Nalanda University as follows: ‘to build an Asian community of learning . . . to create an Asian community by strengthening our regional awareness . . . to impart education towards capacity-building of Asian nations in the domain of philosophy, language, history . . . ’.60 The refurbished ideal of Nalanda has been incredibly successful in captivating Indian, Asian, and Western enthusiasts. As framed here, contemporary Nalanda should be not just as humanistic, rational, and scientific as the West, but it should exceed those standards by also 57 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Home’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 58 East Asia Summit, ‘Joint Press Statement’. 59 Koh, ‘Toward the Realisation of an East Asian Community’. 60 Memorandum of Understanding on the Establishment of Nalanda University, Prime Minister of India, Press Releases, New Delhi, India, <http://pmindia. gov.in/press-details.php?nodeid=1733>, [accessed 10 March 2014]. 22 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 604 605 being—morally and culturally resonant. In the third and final section, I explore how Nalanda is reread to serve particularly Indic concerns. 606 Indian visions of Nalanda 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 On 21 August 2010, India’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha, passed the Nalanda University Bill, affirming the nation’s commitment to develop a modern university near the site of ancient Nalanda in Bihar. The lower house, or Lok Sabha, passed the Bill five days later. Analysis of the parliamentary debates and other Indian sources offers unique insight into the symbolic power of Nalanda to further a range of particularly Indian agendas that diverge significantly from the panIndo-Asian ones considered in the previous section. Below, I consider four aspects of the discourse around Nalanda that highlight how the initiative serves particularly Indic concerns in India. In some cases we see how pan-Asian themes are reconceived through a nationalist lens; in other cases, we find peculiarly Indian issues. In all cases, the inherent tensions between pan-Asian, transnational, and Indian nationalist interests are clear. 621 Indian (soft) diplomacy 622 623 624 625 626 627 628 629 630 631 632 633 634 Over the last two decades, Indian foreign affairs has included a strong emphasis on Southeast and East Asia through its ‘Look East’ policy, adopted in 1991. This policy signalled a major commitment by India to reorient attention towards its Asian neighbours with the aim of greater economic and cultural integration. As Christophe Jaffrelot has discussed, ‘Look East’ can also be seen as the contemporary iteration of India’s long-term, nationalist interest in ‘Asianism’, in which ‘the existence of common traditions is . . . invoked to establish economic links more easily or to enter into regional organizations’.61 After independence, Jawaharlal Nehru tried to rally Asian nations under India’s banner but was largely unsuccessful, as many new Asian nation-states were uneasy about India’s regional ambitions and its proprietary cultural attitude, based on the assumed continuities within 61 Christophe Jaffrelot (2003), ‘India’s Look East Policy: An Asianist Strategy in Perspective’, India Review, 2, 2, p. 61. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 23 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 ‘Farther India’.62 In the era of ‘Look East’, Jaffrelot cautioned that India’s overtly nationalist interpretations of ‘Greater India’ in Asean territory have limited the economic and intra-regional benefits of the policy.63 Recently, some influential Indian voices have integrated the Nalanda revival into the purview of the ‘Look East’ policy. Veteran diplomat, N. Ravi, suggests that the policy be remade with Nalanda as a focus, in his ‘Look East Policy—millennia apart’.64 Likewise, S. D. Muni, a scholar of international relations, takes a similarly instrumental approach to Nalanda regarding India’s intra-Asian interests in his op-ed piece: ‘Nalanda: A Soft Power Project’. 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 India has, till recently, been rather casual about and indifferent to its strength in the use of soft power in its foreign policy and diplomacy. The goodwill and admiration clustered around India’s cultural footprints in Asia . . . have not been harnessed systematically. Many of the innovative proposals and initiatives have died under the burden of bureaucratic ineptitude and lethargy. It is only now that India is waking up to the use of this asset . . . It will spurt activities and processes towards building an Asian community and cannot be used as an instrument of competitive diplomacy in the region.65 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 Muni, a realist observer who has been closely allied with India’s state policy, accepts the idea that a ‘secular-Buddhist’ university in Bihar can act as an effective vehicle for India’s ‘ . . . unleashing its soft power on Asia and the world’ and act as a counterweight to ‘competitive diplomacy’ among Asian nations. He argues that the pan-Asian dream of mutual cooperation is imminently possible and that the Nalanda project could facilitate powerful new intra-Asian connections between nation-states based on common culture rather than trade and policy. But inversely mirroring the pan-Asian ideals 62 The now-classic work of George Coedès advanced a reading of Southeast Asia as culturally underwritten by Indic civilization, based on his early identification of the historical links between South and Southeast Asia. Since Nehru’s era, the interpretation of a pervasive Indic influence has been challenged as being far less dominant than is argued by Coedès, especially from Southeast Asian perspectives. See George Coedès (1968), The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, University of Malaya Press, pp. 33–35; 252–56. 63 Jaffrelot, ‘India’s Look East Policy’, p. 61. Also see Susan Bayly (2004), ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 3. 64 N. Ravi (2010), ‘Look East Policy—Millennia Apart’, The Hindu, 7 October 2010. 65 S. D. Muni (2010), ‘Nalanda: A Soft Power Project’, Hindu Online, 30 August 2010. 24 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 introduced previously, Muni reconsiders India’s historic legacy as a pragmatic lever to increase India’s influence in the region. Finally, as discussed in the previous section, the Nalanda revival has been envisioned as promoting a pan-Indo-Asian vision of Asian unity, with India as an exemplar of Asian civilization. During the August 2010 Indian parliamentary debates, many Indian members of parliament echoed similar themes. Yet the forthright style of many Indian parliamentarians produced statements that veer from the guarded language of international diplomacy to reveal an ardently reimagined vision for Nalanda, Asia, and, ‘of course, a resurgent India’: 674 675 676 677 678 679 Karan Singh: [L]et this not be just another university. Let it be a genuinely trans-national university . . . let us re-establish the links between India and South and South-East Asia that were shattered by centuries of colonial rule . . . Asia is rising again after many centuries of servitude and I sincerely hope that this new Nalanda will become a symbol of a resurgent Asia and, of course, a resurgent India’.66 680 681 A second representative example puts this sentiment in even more overtly anti-Western and pro-Indian terms: 682 683 684 685 686 687 Girija Vyas: Nowadays, the basis of our thinking and thoughts is European. Under India’s lead, Asia is breaking away from that and taking on a new shape, in which we are on course to achieve signs of economic progress along with ASEAN, by means of (mādhyam) Nalanda university we will realize our ancient prestige (gaurav), in which there is something new and something old as well.67 688 689 690 691 692 693 694 695 696 697 698 In these and numerous other instances the ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ rhetoric around Nalanda is reconceived in strongly nationalistic terms that reflect characteristically Indian concerns. In reflecting on the terms of the revival, it is striking to note how Nalanda has captured support for such different reasons. In Amartya Sen’s treatment, the Nalanda project pragmatically serves the greater aims of pan-Asianism; in other hands, it is idealistically retooled to fit the interests of the Indian state. This reflects the incredibly broad appeal of the project, while simultaneously unmasking its inherent tensions. In other words, it is clear that Nalanda captivates the imaginations of many—what is not clear is the extent to which these visions are shared. 66 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, pp. 18–19. Translation from Hindi by the author; Lok Sabha (2010), The Nalanda University Bill 2010 (Full Uncorrected Text), 26 August, Government of India, New Delhi, pp. 630– 35. 67 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 25 699 Indic educational ideals 700 701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709 710 711 712 713 714 715 716 717 While the East Asia Summit statements invoke, but do not detail, how Asian ‘spirituality’ will shape Nalanda, Indian parliamentarians offer very closely articulated descriptions of what these educational ideals ought to be. Not surprisingly, we find that these visions differ from the ideals of tolerance, accommodation, and ‘Asian spirituality’ discussed in the previous section. Instead, these ideals are characteristically and paradigmatically Indic. Below, I discuss three of the most frequently used Indic terms in the Nalanda Bill debates and show how they reflect a distinctly Indian conception of knowledge and education which is tied to liberative soteriology, namely vidyā (knowledge, wisdom), dharma (values), and ātma (consciousness, self).68 Vidyā was noted by Yijing in his seventh-century listing of Sanskritderived disciplines at ancient Nalanda. In the 2010 Nalanda Bill debates, vidyā is compared with Western values and educational ideals, and is celebrated as possessing greater moral weight. It is the most frequently recurring Indic term in the debates on the Nalanda Bill in both houses. One eloquent speaker defined vidyā as follows, using a well-known Sanskrit idiom, left untranslated in the proceedings: 718 719 720 721 Balavant alias Bal Apte: Information is relevant if it is knowledge, and, knowledge is relevant if it is blessed with wisdom, and, all these put together is one word in this country, which is called ‘vidyā’. Vidyā is knowledge with wisdom, and, we say, sā vidyā yā vimuktaye [that which liberates is knowledge].69 722 723 724 725 726 727 728 Here, the outcome of acquiring vidyā is ‘liberation’, which has an experiential and moral character and is deeply tied to both Hindu and Buddhist soteriology. In the context of contemporary Indian higher education, such aphorisms are relatively common (if highbrow) locutions. Many Indian schools (at all levels) have a Sanskrit motto, which frequently contains the word vidyā. For example, the Sanskrit motto of Banaras Hindu University—‘immortality through knowledge 68 All three of these terms must be understood as carrying a much greater semantic weight than that suggested here as each inhabits a vast range of contexts in Indic literatures, ranging by time and subject matter. 69 Translation from Sanskrit by the author; Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 12. This phrase is used as the school motto of numerous institutions in India, including the Banasthali Vidyapith in Rajasthan and the Birla Institute of Technology in Jharkhand. 26 729 730 731 732 733 734 735 736 737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 745 746 747 748 749 750 751 752 753 754 755 756 757 758 759 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY (vidyā)’—similarly suggests that vidyā has a soteriological dimension.70 While the pan-Asian discourse on Nalanda and spirituality affirms a general investment in the inculcation of moral values, Indian discourse on Nalanda explicitly links the acquisition of knowledge to spiritual liberation. Another related word that appears frequently in the parliamentary debates—dharma—is notoriously difficult to translate from Indic languages. Attested in the Oxford English Dictionary since Sir William Jones’s usage of it in 1796, dharma is translated in English as ‘ethics, custom, religion’ and so on. In the upper house, member of parliament, M. Rama Jois, engaged in an extended discussion of vidyā in relation to dharma, suggesting that part of Nalanda University’s mandate ought to include an obligation to impart a sense of dharma to its students. Speaking in English, Jois argued that dharma acts as a pre-emptive moral curb against those transgressions associated with a lack of character: ‘ . . . unless vidya is accompanied by character and humanness, it is dangerous’.71 Similar language was used by member of parliament, Pramod Kureel, who emphasized the moral character of ancient Nalanda and urged that this standard inform the new iteration of the institution: ‘Nalanda was not just for imparting education to students from the world over. Its role was more in terms of creating a value system.’72 By contrast, the implicit suggestion is that ‘Western’ knowledge—perceived to be untempered by moral character—is substandard and even harmful. Deeply interconnected in the parliamentary discourse on wisdom, ethics, and moral character is the suggestion that the meaningful education exemplified at ancient Nalanda facilitated students’ knowledge of a higher consciousness. Member of parliament, Bhola Singh, speaking in Hindi, united these themes when he made a connection between Nalanda’s curriculum and the potential to achieve knowledge of ātma (self): 70 Translation from Sanskrit by the author; ‘vidyayā amr.tam aśnute’—Banaras Hindu University (2011), ‘Seal’, <http://www.bhu.ac.in/seal.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 71 Based on Jois’ diction elsewhere in his address, ‘character’ corresponds to the concept of śila, listed among the Buddhist ‘perfections’ and trenchantly associated in modern (Southeast) Asian history with the five moral principles outlined at the Bandung Conference of Unaligned Nations in 1955. Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 59. 72 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 20. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 27 760 761 762 763 764 Bhola Singh: Today, what we study, it’s the opposite of (what was studied) at that time—what we are, what is humanity, where have we come from— that’s what was studied then . . . [w]ithout knowing the self (ātma), one can’t get to know the supreme consciousness (paramātmā). In this connection, the Nalanda university (viśvavidyālaya) had taken a historic step.73 765 766 767 768 769 770 771 772 Just as in previous passages, Singh makes a clear statement in favour of Nalanda as an institution that should inculcate essentially Indian religio-philosophical attitudes and experiences. Likewise, N. Ravi echoed the language of the fourth East Asia Summit by including ‘spiritual studies’ in the purview of the University, but extended this significantly by claiming an Indian prerogative of ‘spirituality’, which could ‘catalyse’ the Nalanda revival movement for the next millennium: 773 774 775 776 [The] connection to Nalanda . . . could be the first step in our journey of the next thousand years. India is ideally placed to spur a movement catalysed by spirituality, to reach an ancient destination in the new millennium—a place that set ancient India apart as a pioneer in higher education.74 777 778 779 780 781 782 783 784 785 786 787 788 789 These views recall earlier statements by nationalist pioneers of Indo-Asianism, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who admired the virtues of the other great Asian civilizations—China in particular—while proprietarily extolling India’s cultural legacy to the ‘Asiatic peoples’, writ large.75 Also, as a variety of spiritual parochialism, in which India is regarded as the origin of authentic spirituality, the contemporary debate again seems to take cues from the religious modernist movement of the last century. One of that movement’s most famous representatives, Swami Vivekānanda of India (1863–1902), idiosyncratically re-presented aspects of ‘traditional’ Hindu religiosity. In Vivekānanda’s formulation of modern Hinduism, the very qualities most valued by modernity were not only present in ‘Hinduism’ since its origin but were, in fact, Hinduism’s gifts to the world.76 73 Translation from Hindi by the author; Lok Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, pp. 658–59. 74 Ravi, ‘Look East Policy’. 75 See Jawaharlal Nehru (1961), The Discovery of India, Bombay, Asia Publishing House, pp. 138, 151, 192–200. 76 For example, Vivekānanda, in his 1893 address to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, described his religion as ‘the mother of all religions’, saying, ‘I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.’ Swami Vivekananda (1893), ‘Address to the World Parliament of Religions’, World Parliament of Religions, Chicago. 28 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 790 791 792 793 794 795 796 797 798 799 800 801 802 803 804 805 806 807 808 At one level, the contemporary visions share common cause with the transnational exhortations that Nalanda should be a ‘spiritual’ university. But at another level, the profoundly Indic character of these statements suggests the potential for deep pedagogical and philosophical tensions as the project proceeds. The original Nalanda perhaps succeeded in part because it espoused a comparatively unified worldview. The Nalanda revival so far has leveraged a broad-brush version of that view, driven partially by the contemporary ambition to develop a model of Asian education. But what will happen as views are refined regarding the spiritual or moral truths the project is meant to impart, and in locking down the ‘Asian’ nature of the curriculum? It is unclear to what extent these differences will truly challenge the dominant-Western mode of higher education. However, as the Nalanda revival evolves in its Indian setting and the first cohort of Nalanda faculty and students chart a path together from 2014 onwards, it is worth emphasizing the extent to which, the robust national discourse on Nalanda is marked by widely shared Indic educational ideals whose significance in India should not be underestimated. 809 Models of Indian education 810 811 812 813 814 815 816 817 818 819 820 821 822 823 824 825 826 827 In India, the term viśvavidyālaya is the usual Hindi translation of ‘university’; jāmi’a is the less-frequently found Urdu equivalent. Both terms are used to describe centrally administered, degree-granting institutions, such as the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. In a common practice, the University of Delhi uses the term ‘university’ in its official English name and retains viśvavidyālaya in its official Hindi name (Dillı̄ Viśvavidyālaya). Both versions appear on its bilingual Hindi-English seal. Alongside these two terms—and occasionally in opposition to them—there are numerous other Indic terms for educational institutions which are important for understanding contemporary educational milieus in India. Most of these titles reveal a religious and/or community affiliation with Hindu modes of learning. Some of the most common include: vidyālaya, ‘abode of knowledge’; and mahāvidyālaya, ‘great abode of knowledge’, used widely by the Indian government for secular government secondary schools; sansthān, or ‘institute’ and anusandhāna sansthān, ‘research institute’; kalāman.d.ala, ‘arts college’; and gurukul, a traditional Hindu residential school. Mahāvihāra, ‘great monastery’, and madrasa, ‘school’, are respectively NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 828 829 830 831 832 833 834 835 836 837 838 839 840 841 842 843 844 29 associated with Buddhist and Muslim education. Nearly all of these Indic designations can be found in the contemporary titles of the 130 institutions deemed by the government of India to be universities’.77 Referring to the new Nalanda as a ‘university’ may appear to be one point that all parties can agree on as this designation has become the gold standard for institutions of higher learning around the world. Indeed, centres of learning outside of Europe—whatever their scholastic inheritance—have consistently adopted Western standards in converting their institutional designations to that of ‘university’.78 The institution of higher learning at Nanjing, China, founded around 258 BCE, changed its designation to university in 1888; Al-Karaouine, founded in Fes, Morocco, in 859 became a university in 1947; and Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, founded around 970–972, converted to university status in 1961. For better or for worse, the Western university model now dominates global standards of education and has done so since at least the nineteenth century. However, in the Nalanda debates, several members of parliament raised the matter 77 Government of India (2011), ‘List of Deemed Universities’, Department of Higher Education, <: http://www.ugc.ac.in/deemeduniversity.aspx>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. With conversion to university status, institutes often adopt an English word such as ‘academy, institute, centre, or university’. Of all the deemed universities listed, none retain the designation ‘madrasa’ in their present official English name, although it may remain in the Indian language version. However, the term ‘madrasa’ in India has the oldest link to modern (colonial) education: the first British-established institute of higher learning in India was a madrasa. Established by Warren Hastings in 1780, the institute was known officially as the Aliya Madrasah and also the ‘Calcutta Madrasah’; it is now designated as ‘Aliya University’ in English (and Āliyā Viśvavidyālaya in Bengali) since converting to university status in 2007. Additionally, primary schools in India are often known as pāt.hśālā or ‘house of lessons’. 78 The term ‘university’ (universitas) was first used at the University of Bologna, Italy, believed to have been founded in 1088. See Università di Bologna (2011), ‘A.D. 1088: La Rivista Dell’università Di Bologna’, <http://www.unibo.it/ Portale/Ateneo/AD1088.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. The next two European institutions of comparable antiquity are the Universities of Oxford (circa 1096) and Paris (circa 1170). Together, these three institutions hold pride of place as the first and oldest modern universities in Europe. Oxford’s year of founding is not recorded but the university notes that teaching in some capacity occurred from 1096; its student intake grew significantly from 1167, when Henry II prohibited Englishmen from studying abroad. The University of Paris was also established some time in the mid-eleventh century, first as a cathedral school and then as a university, some time around 1200. For full details, see l’Université de Paris (2011), ‘Avant L’université De Paris: L’enseignement Supérieur En Europe Dans L’antiquité Et Au Moyen Âge’, <http://www.univ-paris1.fr/universite/presentation/historique/avant-luniversite-deparis/>, [accessed 21 January 2014], University of Oxford (2011), ‘A Brief History of the University’, <http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/introducing_ oxford/a_brief_history_of_the_university/index.html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 30 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 845 846 847 848 of Nalanda’s designation in explicitly anti-Western terms, calling for the revival to use a different term—vidyāpı̄t.h—claiming that it would better match Indian and Asian values. For example, member of parliament, Bharatkumar Raut, contends that: 849 850 851 852 . . . the Nalanda spirit should be looking into the 21st century needs not only of India or South Asia, but also, of [the] wider global confluence of ideas and confluence of minds . . . [t]his university should be called ‘Nalanda Vidyapeeth’ . . . University is a western concept’.79 853 854 855 856 857 858 859 860 861 862 863 864 865 866 867 868 869 870 871 From all of the numerous Indic designations for institutions of learning, vidyāpı̄t.ha—literally, pı̄t.ha, ‘seat’, ‘chair’ or ‘place’ of vidyā, ‘knowledge, learning, philosophy, skills’—especially recalls the campaign for non-Western, non-colonial education that arose as part of India’s Independence movement. Vidyāpı̄t.h (or vidyāpı̄t.ha) was associated with M. K. Gandhi’s call to boycott British-led institutions of higher learning at a meeting of the Indian National Congress in Nagpur in 1920.80 There are currently numerous vidyāpı̄t.has, known as ‘deemed universities’, such as the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth (T.il.ak Mahārās.t.ra Vidyāpı̄t.ha) founded in 1921 in Pune, Maharashtra, and the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith (Mahātmā Gāndhı̄ Kāśı̄ Vidyāpı̄t.ha) founded in 1920 in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. The latter was the first exclusively Indianrun institute of higher learning in British India.81 There is thus an important history of indigenously conceived forms of higher education in India that is linked to Indian sovereignty and is expressly anti-colonial. It is this history that members such as Balavant (alias Bal Apte) reference when they suggest that the term ‘university’ be abandoned altogether, arguing that English terminology is deficient 79 Rajya Sabha (2010), Synopsis of Debate: Nalanda University Bill, 21 August, New Delhi. p. 362. 80 Tilak Maharasthra Vidyapeeth (2010), ‘About Us’, <http://www.tmv.edu.in/ aboutus.asp>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 81 Its curriculum was based on Gandhian principles, its medium of instruction was primarily Hindi, and its aim was complete autonomy from the colonial government of the time. Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith (2011), ‘History of Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith’, <http://www.mgkvp.ac.in/>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. A third institution founded on similar principles was the Kashi Vidyapith, created as an answer to the establishment of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in 1916 (also in Varanasi, by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya). This institution was founded as a ‘modern’ residential university and was associated with the British, the Congress Party (Annie Besant), and the early use of English-medium instruction. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 872 873 874 875 876 877 878 879 880 881 882 883 884 885 886 887 888 889 890 891 892 893 894 895 896 897 898 899 900 901 31 and should be augmented with the Indian notion of vidyāpı̄t.ha: ‘adopt that word, bring it into English and enrich that language’.82 Apart from its historical resonances, the contemporary significance of the term vidyāpı̄t.ha appears somewhat unclear. In the past, vidyāpı̄t.has were associated with social uplift, while the colonial universities furthered social differentiation through English education. The first ‘modern’ Indian universities were the three Presidency universities, founded in 1857 in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, which were intended to impart English language and European values. In Masks of Conquest (1989), Gauri Viswanathan argues that the establishment of the centralized university system in India advanced many imperial objectives, from producing candidates for the civil service to ‘creating a class that might emulate Europeans . . . and increase demand for the consumption of British goods [and] the advancement of European knowledge and European culture’.83 Yet in the post-independence era, Nalanda University Vice-Chancellor Gopa Sabharwal notes that, in terms of gender relations, these universities achieved ‘more for the emancipation of women than any other institution . . . [and allowed] men and women unrelated by kinship, to interact freely’.84 One potential point of distinction may be the positive emphasis that the vidyāpı̄t.ha historically placed on inculcating morality. Viswanathan notes that the colonial government had a ‘ . . . hostility to a moral emphasis in education’, which was set in the 1854 dispatch of Lord Halifax that informed the curriculum of the Presidency universities.85 Yet contemporary Indian universities (in principle) embrace this mode as well. Banaras Hindu University, an institution intended to combine Western and Indian modes of learning and curriculums, identifies the following as one of its core objectives: ‘ . . . the building up of character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education’.86 82 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 13. Gauri Viswanathan (1989), Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 146. 84 Gopa Sabharwal (2011), The Nalanda University: Past, Present and Prospects, Nalanda Sriwijaya Centre, Singapore, pp. 7. 85 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, p. 146. 86 ‘Objectives of the university: (1) To promote the study of the Hindu Shastras and of Sanskrit literature generally as a means of preserving and popularizing for the benefit of the Hindus in particular and of the world at large in general, the best thought and culture of the Hindus and all that was good and great in the ancient civilization of India; (2) to promote learning and research generally in Arts and Sciences in all branches; (3) to advance and diffuse such scientific, technical and professional 83 32 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 902 903 904 905 906 907 908 909 910 While it may be difficult to differentiate between the ethical nature of the modern Indian university and the contemporary vidyāpı̄t.ha, the particular history of the vidyāpı̄t.ha in India already represents a fully realized alternative model of education which resonates with India’s Independence movement and confrontation with its colonial past. While pan-Indo-Asianists may extol Nalanda for its ability to forge Asian connections, other parties in India may see the new Nalanda as an opportunity to showcase Indic educational ideals and modern India’s particular history on a pan-Asian stage. 911 Indian Buddhism, secularism, and egalitarianism 912 913 914 915 916 917 918 919 920 921 922 923 924 925 926 927 The idea of Buddhism, so important to the Asian imagining of the Nalanda revival, also has strikingly different modes of reception among certain sectors in India. When compared to the relative cultural influence of Buddhism in many Asean nations, Buddhism exerts a marginal cultural influence within Hindu-majority India; there are just eight million Buddhists in India, representing just 0.8 per cent of the general population. However, contemporary Indian Buddhism has a highly charged affinity with the political enfranchisement of low-caste electorates, on account of its association with Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution and a champion of low-caste equality in India. Born into a Dalit family, Ambedkar famously rejected Hinduism as inherently inequitable and converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands of supporters in Nagpur, Maharashtra.87 This public political act mobilized a new movement of ‘Ambedkar Buddhists’ in India which is associated with the rejection of caste and caste-based inequality. knowledge, combined with the necessary practical training as is best calculated to help in promoting indigenous industries and in developing the material resources of the country; and (4) to promote the building up of character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education.’ Banaras Hindu University (2011), ‘Objectives of the University’, <http://www.bhu.ac.in/aboutbhu/obj.html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 87 Ambedkar developed a neo-Buddhist creed that included distinctive vows for converts, such as disavowing faith in Hindu deities, caste and class injustice. See Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1956), ‘Twenty-Two Vows’, <http://www.ambedkar.org/ impdocs/22Vows.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. The Nagpur site of the conversion is now revered as dı̄ks.abhūmi, (‘teaching ground’), and it has become a Dalit Buddhist pilgrimage centre. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 928 929 930 931 932 933 934 935 936 937 938 939 940 941 942 943 944 945 946 947 948 949 950 951 952 953 954 955 33 Numerically, a very small community of Indians professes to be Ambedkar Buddhists. Yet Ambedkar’s relationship to social justice means that ‘Buddhism’ in India has a special link to the historically disenfranchised communities known as ‘Scheduled Castes’ (16.2 per cent), ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (8.2 per cent), and ‘Other Backward Castes’.88 In the words of member of parliament, Pramod Kureel, ‘the Scheduled Castes, “Scheduled Tribes”, and “Other Backward Castes” of this country . . . may not be practicing Buddhism . . . but as a value system [it] has a special place in their hearts’.89 Collectively, these three groups potentially represent a strong numerical majority of the general population, so that Ambedkar Buddhist identity politics resonates with an influential section of the Indian electorate. Ambedkar’s repudiation of Hinduism also leads to an unusual connection between Buddhism and secularism that is highly specific to India. This is partially because of Ambedkar Buddhism’s promise of a new egalitarian religious identity through denunciation of the Hindu caste system.90 According to member of parliament, Baishnab Parida, ‘[Buddhism] has established a new order and a casteless society which the great Buddha has given not only to the Indian people but to the entire world.’91 In almost any other context, it is difficult to imagine a similarly robust relationship between a particular religion and secularism as a political ideology. Yet given India’s Hindumajority context and the role of caste-politics in Indian democracy, ‘Buddhism’—here read as the Buddhism of Ambedkar—is understood as being in concert with low-caste political goals and secular ideals. For this reason, Indian members of parliament representing low-caste voters may regard the Nalanda project as an avenue to advance the interests of their constituents. 88 Census data was not collected by the government of India for ‘Other Backward Classes’ in 2001 as the definition of this category is both dynamic and controversial. Estimates range hugely, from between 30 and 50 per cent of the Indian population, depending on factors such as the inclusion of non-Hindus in the total percentage. For more details on this issue, see the Annual Report of the National Commission for Backward Classes: < http://ncbc.nic.in/Pdf/annual.pdf>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 89 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 26. 90 Given the backdrop of an (approximately) 80 per cent Hindu majority in a secular republic, many members of parliament affirm a ‘secular’ definition of Nalanda in the Bill alongside its Buddhist one, including Shrimati Preneet Kaur, the minister of state in the Ministry of External Affairs, responsible for proposing the Bill. Many other members speaking on the Nalanda Bill use these terms alongside one another, indicating a harmony of meaning between the ‘Buddhist’ and ‘secular’ that would be unusual outside of the context of India. 91 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 360. 34 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 956 957 958 959 960 961 962 963 964 965 966 967 968 969 970 971 972 973 974 975 976 977 978 979 980 981 982 983 984 Finally, Ambedkar Buddhism is strongly associated with the midtwentieth century ‘revival’ of Buddhism in India and the rise of lowcaste politics in western and northern India. As described by Ram Vilas Paswan, ‘[w]hen we talk of Nalanda, Buddhism comes to our minds which has given India significant identity in the world. Baba Saheb Ambedkar revived it in 1956.’92 Prior to the large-scale conversion of Dalits inspired by Ambedkar, Buddhists in India were largely restricted to small Himalayan border populations, such as those in Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh (which later included refugees from Tibet), and so on. In contrast, Buddhism has been a continuously relevant and dominant social force for many East Asia Summit nations—reform and renewal movements notwithstanding. In some East Asia Summit countries—whether Theravada or Mahayana— Buddhism may be the official state religion, as in Cambodia93 or the de facto state religion, as in Myanmar and Thailand. In summary, Buddhism in India has a complex history that lends itself to two very different readings. In the pan-Indo-Asian recension, India, as Buddhism’s place of origin—is relatively unencumbered by contemporary entanglements of religiosity and national practices— and can thus offer a welcoming home to all contemporary and national forms of Buddhism without privileging or threatening the status of any of them. In the Indo-centric view, however, Indian Buddhism is richly resonant with numerous themes that are difficult to translate outside of India: the rise of low-caste politics, anti-caste movements, secularism (as opposed to religious communalism), the political empowering of Dalits, Adivasis, and others disadvantaged by the caste system, and so on. These divergent interpretations reveal the complexity of Nalanda as both an Asian and Indian symbol and its capacity to be framed in the service of very different agendas. 985 Prospects and reflections 986 987 The tabling of the Nalanda initiative is proof of the strong mutual desire among Asian nations to develop intra-Asian cultural 92 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 366. Constitution of Cambodia (1993) Article 43, ‘Buddhism shall be the religion of the State Kingdom of Cambodia’, The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, <http://cambodia.ohchr.org/klc_pages/KLC_files/section_001/section_01_01_ENG. pdf >, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 988 989 990 991 992 993 994 995 996 997 998 999 1000 1001 1002 1003 1004 1005 1006 1007 1008 1009 1010 35 relationships. Collective goodwill towards the project is deep, as acknowledged in an Economist editorial: ‘ . . . the project’s appeal is clear: Nalanda offers both a glimpse of a glorious past and a chance of a bit of neighbourly collaboration’.94 Even China and India recently spoke in terms of this new common language of admiration, referring to each other as ‘neighbours’ and part of the ‘Asian family’ at a bilateral meeting between the former Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, and the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in December 2010.95 Initially, there were many doubts about the project’s viability, particularly regarding funding. While all East Asia Summit members supported the project, only seven major commitments had been confirmed by late 2012, from China, Singapore, Thailand, and India. The largest contribution came from India: the Indian government committed ten million USD$ towards the initial endowment (approved for release in January 2014), while the state of Bihar donated 446 acres of land.96 In 2010, China ‘welcomed’ India’s efforts to revive Nalanda and agreed to make a major donation. This pledge was fulfilled in November 2011 when the former Chinese ambassador to India, Zhang Yen (2008–2012), formally presented one million USD$ toward the construction of a ‘Chinese-style library’ at the new university. In his address, he noted that, ‘Nalanda University is a symbol of the centurylong cultural and (friendly) people-to-people exchanges among Asian countries in general, and between China and India in particular.’97 94 The Economist (2010), ‘Ivory Pagodas: An Ancient Pan-Asian University Might yet Open Again’, 2 September. 95 ‘India and China, being each other’s neighbour, have a shared interest in the stability, prosperity and security of the wider region. They agreed to intensify their dialogue on various aspects pertaining to this region and work together on realizing their common goals. The two sides believed that as members of the Asian family, stronger neighbourly relations and mutually beneficial cooperation between India and China help foster a peaceful and stable regional environment that promotes equality, mutual trust and mutual respect.’ Ministry of External Affairs India (2010), ‘Joint Communiqué of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China’, 16 December, <http://mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/5158/ Joint+Communiqu+of+the+Republic+of+India+and+the+Peoples+Republic+ of+China>, [acessed 22 March 2014]. 96 Ministry of External Affairs India (2010), ‘Written Reply to Lok Sabha Question: Nalanda University Bill’, Press Information Bureau-Government of India, <http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=64617>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 97 However, a new area of Sino-Indian tension emerged in August 2011 that threatened to overshadow the donation. Chinese media reports indicated that a Hong Kong-based group, believed to be linked closely with the Chinese government, had signed an agreement with UNIDO, the UN’s industrial-development organization, for a proposed a three-billion dollar project to develop Lumbini, Nepal, a site revered as 36 1011 1012 1013 1014 1015 1016 1017 1018 1019 1020 1021 1022 1023 1024 1025 1026 1027 1028 1029 1030 1031 1032 1033 1034 1035 1036 1037 1038 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY Private Singapore Buddhist organizations have reportedly pledged anywhere between four and ten million USD$ towards the construction of a library, but no funds have been officially reported as of early 2014. In 2010, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that Australia would contribute a Chair of Ecology and Environment Studies to India’s Nalanda University, characterized as ‘a regional centre of learning’.98 Finally, news reports in 2011 suggested that a private donor had committed one million USD$, and in March 2012, the government of Thailand donated 100,000$USD, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shared news of developments on Nalanda with Lee Myung-Bak, president of South Korea.99 The university’s proposed location in Bihar is inspired but it has also posed deeply challenging logistical problems for the project. Bihar has long endured a reputation as India’s most troubled state in terms of law and order problems, human development indicators, infrastructure, caste-based violence, corruption, and so on. Numerous infrastructural milestones are planned, including the construction of an airport. Nevertheless, putting early scepticism in its place, Nalanda University is now reported to be on track to welcome its first batch of faculty and students in September 2014.100 Chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar has been heralded for his efforts to rehabilitate the state and was re-elected in a landslide for a second term of five years in November 2010. While Amartya Sen confirmed that Kumar’s government has been ‘impeccably cooperative’, the project’s success naturally depends on more than state (and federal) government support.101 As just one example of local opposition, Chief Minister Kumar and then-president of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, visited Nalanda in February 2008 where they were pelted with stones by angry local farmers aggrieved with the the Buddha’s birthplace. It is presently unclear whether this initiative will be pursued. See The Economist (2011), ‘A Bizarre Project in Nepal—at Buddha’s Birthplace: A Chinese Development Proposal Causes Disbelief’, 20 August. 98 Prime Minister of Australia Press Office (2010), ‘Prime Minister Attends East Asia Summit in Hanoi’, 31 October, <http://pmtranscripts.dpmc. gov.au/browse.php?did=17447>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 99 See <http://pmindia.gov.in/press-details.php?nodeid=1401>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 100 See <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Nalanda-Universitysacademic-session-to-start-in-September-Amaratya-Sen/articleshow/28608507.cms>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 101 Sinha ‘Q & A’. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 1039 1040 1041 1042 1043 1044 1045 1046 1047 1048 1049 1050 1051 1052 1053 1054 1055 1056 1057 1058 1059 1060 1061 1062 1063 1064 1065 37 compensation offered for the land commandeered by the state of Bihar for the project.102 At the federal level, there continue to be concerns about the role of the government in university affairs. The internationally scrutinized staging of the Commonwealth games in Delhi in October 2010 shows that effective implementation of large-scale multi-year projects—even those of great international prestige for the state— continues to be an issue for the federal government of India.103 Amartya Sen has been a tireless advocate of all things Nalanda, but his remarks in some interviews since 2011 reveal dissatisfaction with ‘administrative delays’ and ‘bureaucratic control’ in India.104 For example, Gopa Sabharwal was selected by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the university’s vice-chancellor in September 2010, yet the appointment was not officially confirmed until March 2012. Some Indian mass media commentators, especially Tehelka and the Bihar Times, have been extremely critical of almost every aspect of the revival—from the inclusion of business and technology in the proposed curriculum and the up-and-down status of the university’s website to the vice-chancellor’s qualifications and salary and even the location of the university’s temporary rented offices in New Delhi against the charge that they ought to be in Bihar.105 Furthermore, the wisdom of launching this institution may generally be called into question, given that higher education in India is in need of reform. The Times Higher Education world university rankings are dominated by American institutions, but numerous Asian universities have made the cut—from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Yet not a single Indian university is listed 102 Anand Mohan Sahay (2008), ‘Brickbats Not Bouquets for Kalam in Nalanda’, Rediff India, Patna, 8 February. Before becoming chief minister, Kumar was elected to the Lok Sabha from Nalanda constituency in 2004. 103 BBC (2010), ‘Q & A: India’s Commonwealth Games Crisis’, 22 September. 104 Aarti Dhar (2011), ‘Bureaucratic Hurdles Delaying Nalanda Varsity: Amartya Sen’, The Hindu, 8 October; Sinha ‘Q & A’. 105 The Indian Ministry of External Affairs has been confirmed this curriculum for Nalanda’s seven founding schools: Historical Studies; Ecology and Environment Studies; Buddhist Studies, Philosophy and Comparative Religion; Languages and Literature; International Relations and Peace Studies; Information Sciences and Technology; Business Management in relation to Public Policy and Development Studies. See <http://www.nalandauniv.edu.in/schools.html>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. Also see Iftikhar Gilani (2011), ‘A Scam in the Name of Reviving Nalanda Heritage’, Tehelka, New Delhi. The Bihar Times regularly publishes ad hominen remarks about Amartya Sen, for example, Bihar Times (2012), ‘Kalam’s Letter Bared Truth About Nalanda University’, Patna, 17 June. 38 1066 1067 1068 1069 1070 1071 1072 1073 1074 1075 1076 1077 1078 1079 1080 1081 1082 1083 1084 1085 1086 1087 1088 1089 1090 1091 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY within the top 300 institutions, and only one falls within the top 400— the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. Ranked within the 301 and 350th range, IIT Bombay is part of the autonomously functioning IIT network, granted by an act of parliament in 1961.106 And, almost simultaneously, the federal government launched a second international university with special operational status: the new South Asian University, which welcomed its first cohort of students in 2010. The rationale for this, as stated by one of its architects, was to ‘facilitate autonomy from bureaucratic stranglehold’.107 As the project continues to move forward, it will have many challenges to overcome, perhaps none greater than reconciling the past Nalanda with the future Nalanda. And yet there are grounds for optimism. To understand why, it is instructive to consider the state of intra-Asian relationships among the Buddhist communities in nearby Bodhgaya, Bihar. There, for the better part of a century, representatives from various Buddhist nations have shown limited engagement with one another.108 While these groups participate in some collaborative projects, they generally operate in tandem in Bodhgaya rather than in concert. However, a now-annual event (inaugurated in 2006) has newly united representatives from numerous Theravadin Buddhist countries in collaboratively chanting the Pali Tipit.aka in the precincts of the Mahabodhi temple, the site where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment in Bihar.109 Each country sponsors separate national stalls, where monks in the unique dress of their state distinctively intone the scriptures. Collectively, the event gives a moving impression of both the diversity 106 Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2011–2012), <http:// www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011–2012/top-400. html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 107 South Asian University (2012), ‘About the University’, <http://www. southasianuniversity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= 3&Itemid=128>, accessed 20 January 2014]. 108 Facilities are sponsored by nearly every Buddhist country: the first Burmese rest house was established in Bodh Gaya in 1877; the current Burmese Vihāra was established in 1936; the Thai Monastery was constructed in 1966; the Japanese rest house was formally opened in 1970, although Japan has liberally supported the Mahabodhi society since the nineteenth century; Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko visited Bodhgaya in 1960. For full details on this history, see David Geary (2009), ‘Destination Enlightenment: Buddhism and the Global Bazaar in Bodh Gaya, Bihar’, PhD thesis, University of British Columbia. 109 Tipitaka Chanting Council (2011), ‘Mission’, <http://www. tipitakachantingcouncil.org/index.php/2013-11-11-03-12-15/mission>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 1092 1093 1094 1095 1096 1097 1098 1099 1100 1101 1102 1103 1104 1105 1106 1107 1108 1109 1110 1111 1112 1113 1114 1115 39 and unity of practices encompassed by the Theravadin Buddhist schools. The final effect, however, is somewhat cacophonous, as each group simultaneously chants over one another at different levels of amplification. As illustrated by this anecdote, certain elements of Buddhism, such as reverence for the sites associated with the historical Buddha, may be embraced universally by Buddhists worldwide. But in the case of the Tipit.aka chanting, we can see how difficult it can be to harmonize the highly refined and culturally embedded practices drawn from the mosaic of practices found among Asian Buddhists. In contrast, the comparison between Bodhgaya and Nalanda is provocative: could a secular, modern university, which takes historical Buddhism as a symbolic icon, transcend national interests and norms? Can a denatured decoction of intra-Asian Buddhism and Asian education mediate the differences between pan-Indo-Asian and Indian visions of Nalanda? Will the intersection of these two streams foster the realization of a pan-Indo-Asian model of modern higher education? At the very least, India’s strategy of ‘looking east’ is being ardently reciprocated by those in Singapore, Japan—and even China—who are ‘looking west’ to India in the name of Buddhism, education, and a resurgent Asia for the third millennium. Analysis of the Nalanda revivial project can thus offer important insights into contemporary efforts to develop an Asian model of education, through the rereading and rewriting of the ancient Nalanda Mahāvihāra from multiple intraAsian perspectives. 

C Cambridge University Press 2014 Modern Asian Studies: page 1 of 39 ⃝ doi:10.1017/S0026749X13000310 Looking West to India: Asian education, intra-Asian renaissance, and the Nalanda revival∗ ANDREA M ARION PINKNEY Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Canada Email: andrea.pinkney@mcgill.ca Abstract More than 800 years ago—at approximately the same time as the founding of the first European universities—the renowned monastic institution known as the Nālandā Mahāvihāra disappeared from historical records. Since 2006, a transnational Asian initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as ‘Nalanda University’ in Bihar, India, has been embraced at the highest government and philanthropic levels by a consortium of South, Southeast, and East Asian nations. Nalanda, described as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’, and the issues surrounding its revival raise important questions about how a new interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and a newly imagined vision of ‘Asian’ education are seen as converging to promote Asian interests. First, I consider the ambivalent relationship of the revival and its pre-modern namesake against the Nālandā Mahāvihāra’s known history. Then I characterize two kinds of discourse on the contemporary project: one that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and frames the revival as serving transnational Asian goals; and another that is Indic and imagines Nalanda as advancing Indian national concerns. While, for the various stakeholders, serious fissures are evident in the symbolic values of Nalanda—as an exemplar of Asia and of India—both types of discourse, taken together, reveal important insights into the development of an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’. ∗ The National University of Singapore Religion Cluster supported a workshop in 2010 where I presented an early version of this article; the NUS-University Scholars’ Programme made it possible to revisit Nalanda in 2010; and the National University of Singapore-Southeast Asian Studies Department provided an opportunity to improve the article during a workshop organized by Goh Benglan, National University of Singapore, and Kanagawa University in 2011. I received valuable perspectives on Asian education and intra-Asian connections from my colleagues, Shrikant S. Bahulkar, Peter Friedlander, Leigh Kathryn Jenco, Gyanesh Kudaisya, Rahul Mukherji, Ramu Pandit, and Rajesh Rai. Sincere thanks to Isaac Souweine for commenting on many drafts and to John Whalen-Bridge, National University of Singapore, for his proposal to collaborate on the theme of ‘Religious Studies in 1 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 2 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY Introduction Can ‘Asian’ values meaningfully shape an Asian model of education? How would such an Asian model of education differ from a Western one? Could the pursuit of these aims herald a new era of intra-Asian cooperation? A significant contemporary development that speaks to these questions is the initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as Nalanda University in Bihar, India, which first came to diplomatic light as a proposal from the India delegation at the 2006 meeting of the East Asia Summit.1 Put simply, the idea was to build a modern university in Bihar near the site of the ancient Nālandā Mahāvihāra, a renowned centre of Buddhist learning that ceased operations some 800 years ago.2 The project’s earliest advocate was George Yeo Yong-Boon, Singapore’s former minister for foreign affairs, who characterized it as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’; it would be hosted by the government of India and backed by countries across Asia as a means of increasing collaboration across national boundaries through the development and realization of a new model of Asian education.3 Asia’, which initially inspired me to work on this topic. Any errors of fact and/or interpretation are mine alone. 1 The East Asia Summit is the principal multi-lateral organization involved in the Nalanda revival. It is an administrative sub-grouping within ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, with membership that goes beyond ASEAN boundaries. The decision to form the East Asia Summit was taken at the 10th ASEAN meeting in Vientiane on 29 November 2004, following the initiative of Mahathir bin Mohamad, former prime minister of Malaysia. The first East Asia Summit was convened on 14 December 2005 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The members of the East Asia Summit at that time were: Australia, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, and the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (16 countries in total). Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2005), ‘General Information on East Asia Summit (EAS)’, Tokyo, Japan, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/eas/outline.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. As of 2014, the addition of Russia and the United States of America has increased East Asia Summit membership to 18 states. Australian Government, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, Australia, <http://www.dfat.gov.au/asean/eas/>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. 2 As is frequently noted by various interlocutors, the destruction of Nalanda coincided with the founding of the earliest European universities. In the words of Amartya Sen, ‘[Nalanda] ceased to exist in the twelfth century, almost exactly when the oldest university in Britain, Oxford, was being born.’ Amartya Sen (2009), ‘Remarks at the Inauguration of the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre’, Inauguration of ISEAS Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Singapore, ISEAS, p. 5. 3 George Yeo (2011), ‘Nalanda and the Asian Renaissance’, The Huffington Post, Singapore, 12 April. See also: Ministry of External Affairs India (2011), ‘External Affairs Minister Co-Chairs 9th ASEAN India Post Ministerial Meeting’, 22 July, http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 3 The first intimation of the Nalanda initiative to appear in the Western press was a New York Times article by Jeffrey E. Garten, a Yale professor of international trade and finance, in late 2006. Entitled ‘Really Old School’, it aimed to call attention to what Garten described as a big event that was unlikely to make Western waves: the intention of Singapore, Japan, India, and possibly others, to ‘discuss the revival of an ancient university in India called Nalanda’ to be announced at an upcoming ASEAN meeting.4 Garten used this as an opening to raise two key questions about the future of Asia that, he claimed, ‘we do not generally ask’. First, he wondered whether Asian countries would ever expand their mutual interests from that of trade agreements into something grander that would better the region and the world. Second, despite anticipating the rise of Asia in the new millennium, Garten wondered whether Asian countries would continue to be hobbled by a lack of top-flight, internationally esteemed institutes of higher learning. He argued that the revival of Nalanda University offered an opportunity for ‘Asia’ to achieve both aims. First of all, the obvious must be stated: is it not somehow astonishing to imagine that any single institution could somehow represent the achievement of two such sweeping goals? And much less a university in Bihar—the state with the lowest literacy level in all of India?5 Yet this is exactly what has been proposed, for Garten’s basic vision—that Nalanda ‘represents much of what Asia could use today’—is substantively shared by many Asian nation-states. Since its introduction, the project has captured attention at the highest Bali, Indonesia, <http://www.mea.gov.in/>, [accessed 19 April 2014]. Mr George Yeo was personally involved in the earliest inception of the Nalanda revival; he continues his leadership of the project as a member of the Nalanda University Governing Board. Interview with Mr George Yeo, 15 April 2013, Singapore. In 2012, Mr Yeo was awarded India’s second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan, in the category of ‘public affairs’ in recognition of his leadership on the Nalanda project: Government of India (2013), ‘Padma Awards Announced’, <http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=79881>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 4 Jeffrey E. Garten (2006), ‘Really Old School’, New York Times, New York, 9 December. 5 According to the Government of India 2001 census, Bihar has the lowest literacy of all Indian states. The overall state average in 2001 was 47 per cent (59.7 per cent male literacy; 33.1 per cent female literacy). Government of India (2010), ‘Census Data 2001 > India at a Glance > Number of Literates and Literacy Rate’, Ministry of Home Affairs, New Delhi, Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, <http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_glance/literates1.aspx>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 4 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY government and philanthropic levels—from India and China to Singapore and Japan. It has found champions in India’s Nobel laureate economist (1998), Amartya Sen; British peer and London School of Economics professor, Baron Meghnad Desai; and Singapore’s former minister for foreign affairs, George Yeo. Despite early scepticism surrounding the project, obstacles regarding faculty, facilities, and funding continue to be surmounted so that the first batch of students are expected to start their studies in 2014 on schedule. In addition to being regularly reviewed at ASEAN forums, the initiative has received extraordinary support in the Indian domestic political sphere at the levels of both state and centre. In August 2010 the Nalanda Bill was passed by both houses of the Indian parliament and as of February 2014, an amended Nalanda 2013 bill was approved by the Union Cabinet, noting the Indian government’s release of 2127.1 crore INR (approximately 448US$ million) to cover the university’s expenses from 2010–2011 to 2020–2021.6 What is it about Nalanda that makes it so captivating as an exemplar of ‘Asia’ and a means of collaboration for such diverse stakeholders? Analysis of the discourse surrounding the Nalanda University revival provides a singular opportunity to understand contemporary interests in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and ‘Asian education’, as viewed by key political and cultural interlocutors for Nalanda, the transnational bodies charged with negotiating the project, and the participating nation-states. As a scholar of religion and South Asian studies, I explore three key themes in this article. First, I discuss how the contemporary framing of the project pragmatically both adopts and neglects key elements of the Nālandā Mahāvihāra’s known Buddhist heritage. What slippages occur—and what tensions do they reveal— between ancient Nalanda, the contemporary reimagining of historical Nalanda, and the new Nalanda University project? Second, I identify a major stream of discourse surrounding the Nalanda revival that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and transnational in tone and celebrates Nalanda as Asian, while simultaneously acknowledging its Indic provenance. As I discuss, key features of this discourse are centred on an ‘a-cultural’ Buddhism and the invocation of ‘Asian’ values as contributing to a new model of a modern ‘spiritual’ university that would be uniquely Asian. Third, I turn to examine the ‘Indic’ framing of Nalanda in 6 Press Information Bureau, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=104362>, [accessed 19 April 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 5 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION India and the perceived ability of the Nalanda revival to advance four characteristically Indian concerns: Indian foreign policy goals; Indic educational ideals; alternative Indian models of education; and the unique relationship of Buddhism in India to secularism and low-caste politics. In closing, I reflect on these fissures in the conceptions of Nalanda and its future prospects as a representative of ‘New Asia’ and as an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’.7 Historical Nalanda and its contemporary reimagination More than 50 years ago, Margaret Wiley Marshall, a scholar of English literature, visited Bihar and, reflecting on her visit to Nalanda, commented that: ‘ . . . one can easily imagine the intellectual and spiritual vitality that abounded there as recently as eight or nine hundred years ago’ (my emphasis).8 Nalanda’s extremely remote past commands a similar enthusiasm today, yet the relationship of the contemporary project to the Nalanda of antiquity is often marked by degrees of inattention to the original institution’s fundamental nature. The necessity of both reconciling and harnessing this legacy is at the 7 My findings are based on an analysis of the contemporary debates around the Nalanda revival initiative over the last half decade from South, Southeast, and East Asian perspectives. For insight into the interests of parties from outside India, I have framed my research on the level of intra-governmental interactions, by reviewing the major statements made on Nalanda by the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, ASEAN, and the East Asia Summit. From the Indian side, I draw on my close reading of the full 2010 Indian government debates on the Nalanda University Bill, recorded in the proceedings of both houses of parliament—the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. 8 Margaret Wiley Marshall (1961), ‘Bihar Universities—New and Old’, The Journal of Higher Education, 32, 9, p. 506. Nalanda, now accessible to the public as an archaeological site, is located approximately 90 kilometres southeast of Patna, the state capital of Bihar, India, and is about five kilometres from the site proposed for the new university. Patna has been a regional capital city for millennia: as Pāt.aliputra, it was the capital of Magadha, one of the 16 ancient mahājanapadas, or ‘great polities’, of the Indian subcontinent. As an urban hub for trade and commerce, Pāt.aliputra was a regional anchor that generated ample surplus, thus enabling a large monastic community to flourish in its vicinity, and was itself an important Buddhist centre at particular points in its long history. Some of Nalanda’s most important patrons included: the Nandas, Mauryas (especially Aśoka), the Śuṅgas, the Hindu Guptas (especially fifth century Kumāragupta, also known as Śakrāditya, who reigned from 415–455), and Emperor Harśa (seventh century). The Pālas (eighth–twelfth centuries), known as staunch Buddhists and liberal benefactors, were Nalanda’s patrons at its zenith. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 6 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY crux of this project and was recently recognized by India’s Ministry of External Affairs in its report on the Nalanda University (Amendment) Bill (December 2013): ‘ . . . all efforts should be made to invoke and include the icons, nomenclature and cultural as well as scholarly traditions of the old Nalanda University in the new initiative and . . . that by reconciling the ancient glory with the contemporary and future academic pursuits, the authorities would be able to develop it as an international centre of excellence’.9 In this section, I review some of Nalanda’s earliest known history in order to frame some of the tensions and elisions that mark the discourse around the contemporary project—where politicians, policy makers, and commentators attempt to build momentum for a modern university project while invoking a decidedly pre-modern institution. The original Nālandā Mahāvihāra or ‘Great Nalanda Monastery’ was a centre of higher learning that was founded in the fifth century and operated for nearly 800 years, from approximately 427 to 1197.10 As discussed by Frederick Asher, Nalanda’s demise coincided with 9 Lok Sabha Secretariat, ‘Report on “the Nalanda University (Amendment) Bill, 2013”’, 17 December 2013, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://164.100. 47.134/lsscommittee/External%20Affairs/pr_files/The%20Nalanda%20University% 20(Amendment)%20Bill,%202013.pdf>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. 10 Upendra Thakur (1995), Buddhist Cities in Early India: Buddha-Gayā, Rājagr.ha, Nālandā, Delhi, Sundeep Prakashan, p. 77. Nalanda’s importance to the Buddhist and Jaina communities predates the founding of Nalanda by some 800 years. According to the Buddhist texts, Mahāsudassana Jātaka and the Nikāyasaṅgraha, Aśoka, the Buddhist scion of the Maurya empire, established the first monastic refuges (vihāras) at Nalanda as well as a very large stūpa to commemorate the life and death of Sāriputra (one of the Buddha’s key disciples who was born and died at Nalanda), during his third century reign (304–232 BCE). This claim is repeated over the centuries in multiple sources, including the fourth century account of Faxian and the sixteenth century account of Tārānātha. Aśoka’s Sāriputra stūpa is the largest and most prominent archaeological element at the ruins today. See Hirananda Shastri (1986), Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, New Delhi, Sri Satguru Publications, p. 6. For a brief note on Tārānātha, see Archaeological Survey of India (n.d.), Nālandā Site Guide, New Delhi, p. 3. In the Jaina text Sūtrakr.itān.ga, composed as early as the fourth century BCE, a chapter is dedicated to Nalanda (Book 2, Lecture 7), in which it is described as a prosperous ‘suburb’ (bāhirikā) of Rājagr.ı̄ha containing many ‘hundreds of buildings’, although Jacobi stated that this was a generic description routinely given to towns. Rājagr.ı̄ha, lying just 12 kilometres away from Nalanda, is famed as the place where Buddha resided and gave discourses at Gr.iddhakūt.a, or ‘Vulture’s Peak’. In this text, Mahāvı̄ra, the putative founder of Jainism, is said to have spent 14 rainy seasons at Nalanda, an account corroborated in the Kalpasūtra of the Jaina monk, Bhadrabāhu. See Max Müller (ed.) (1895), Sacred Books of the East, Volume XLV: The Jaina Sutras (Part 2): The Uddhyanana Sutra and the Sutrakritanga Sutra, trs. Hermann Jacobi, Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. xxxix–xl (Unmarked set by AMPIMAC). http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 7 major social and economic upheavals in the twelfth century.11 The proximate cause of the institution’s collapse has been attributed to ‘Turkic Muslim adventurers’12 (Turus.ka) led by Muh.ammad-i-Bakhtyār Khaljı̄, who is reported to have sacked the present-day city of Bihar Sharif, about ten kilometres from Nalanda, in 1198.13 A later Tibetan account claims that a handful of monks occupied Nalanda until 1235, when the activities of a group of Tı̄rthika mendicants led to the final cessation of Nalanda’s operations. Whatever the exact date, from the thirteenth century onwards, Nalanda vanished from historical records for centuries.14 Since the contemporary framing of Nalanda is deeply invested in reviving the original spirit of Nalanda, it is vital to examine what the sources on ancient Nalanda actually disclose about the institution of antiquity. Most of what is known about monastic life at Nalanda is preserved in the travelogues of Chinese monks who undertook pilgrimages to India: the two most famous Chinese visitors to the Nalanda Mahāvihāra produced detailed accounts of life at the monastery.15 First, the itinerant monk-scholar Xuanzang (d!, circa 602–664) recorded his impressions of a 17-year return pilgrimage from China to India, from 629–645. His account is one of the most detailed sources of information on ancient Nalanda.16 Next, Yijing (dd, circa 11 Frederick M. Asher (2010), ‘Replicating Bodhgaya: The Origins of Mahabodhi Temple Replicas in Southeast Asia’, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Lecture Series, Singapore. 12 K.A. Nilakanta Shastri (1941), ‘Nālandā’, Journal of the Madras University, XIII, No. 2, p. 173. 13 Frederick M. Asher (2008), Bodh Gaya: A Monumental Legacy, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, pp. 14–15. 14 Shastri, ‘Nālandā’, p. 173. Nalanda disappeared from historical record until Alexander Cunningham, the inaugural director of the Archaeological Survey of India, reported in his maiden publication that in 1862 he identified the village of Baragaon in Bihar (Bar.agām . v) as Nalanda. Here, Cunningham found red brick ruins on a site in excess of 14 hectares. See Alexander Cunningham (1871), Four Reports Made During the Years, 1862–63–64–65, Government Central Press, Simla (Shimla), India, p. 28. 15 Faxian (d d, circa 337–422), a Chinese Buddhist monk-scholar, mentions ‘Nala’—a site with a Buddhist stūpa assumed to have later become known as Nalanda— but does not give any details of it as a functioning monastery in the earliest of these accounts. This absence of detail may indicate, although not conclusively, that his visit pre-dated the major activities of the Nalanda Mahāvihāra. Later Chinese accounts note that the Chinese Emperor Wu Di of the Liang dynasty organized a delegation to Nalanda in 539 to collect Buddhist texts. After the return of the expedition, Nalanda’s fame in China grew sufficiently to inspire several more Chinese monastics to make the long and hazardous journey to India. 16 Xuan Zang (1884), Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, trs. Samuel Beal, Trübner’s Oriental Series 1, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 8 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY 635–713) travelled to India via Sriwijaya (now in Sumatra, Indonesia) and stayed at Nalanda for approximately a decade, from 675–685. His account of the practices at Nalanda corroborates and deepens that of Xuanzang.17 Finally, Huili (dd, circa seventh century), a disciple of Xuanzang, composed a biography of his master—‘The Life of Xuanzang’—which gives the most complete portrait of monastic education at Nalanda.18 Monks of all ages formed the main community living at the institution; Xuanzang conjectured that there were a minimum of 10,000 residents. Yijing estimated that approximately 3,000–3,500 preceptor-monks were in residence, occupying eight halls and 300 apartments.19 Students lived and studied together with their teachers; some 100 lecterns were set up for instructional sessions. Of the residents, just 1,000 monks were advanced enough to possess mastery of the ‘30 collections’, or scriptural compendiums, and perhaps just ten men, including the ‘Master of Law’ (dharma), could teach 50 collections. One master, Śı̄labhadra, revered for his unimpeachable conduct, was said to possess knowledge of them all.20 According to both Xuanzang and Yijing, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Nalanda Mahāvihāra was its use of a sort of entrance examination.21 A gatekeeper was said to bar strangers from entering the compound’s single gate unless they could answer questions attesting to an elementary level of education in Buddhist monastic terms. Knowledge of the Buddhist canon (the Tipit.aka) was expected as a basic requirement; the failure rate was popularly reported at seven or eight out of ten candidates.22 Xuanzang noted that the primary objects of study were Mahayana Buddhist texts, as well as works from 18 other rival Buddhist sects. Additionally, ‘miscellaneous’ texts were also studied, including canonical Sanskrit texts such as the Atharvaveda. Xuanzang dwelt on the grave and pious character of the residential inmates at Nalanda, whose duties included attending to their teachers and studying scripture. The senior monks were 17 I Tsing (1896), A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (AD 671–695), trs. Junjiro Takakusu, Oxford, Clarendon Press. The pinyin romanization of ‘I Tsing’ corresponds to Yijing. 18 Hui Li (1914), The Life of Hiuen Tsian, trs. Samuel Beal, Trübner’s Oriental Series, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 19 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, pp. 65, 154. 20 Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, p. 112. 21 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. 22 Archaeological Survey of India (n.d.), pp. 7–8. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 9 described as assiduously following the ‘severe’ rules of the institution; their conduct was ‘pure and unblamable’. Discussion on the topics of study was so enthusiastic that Xuanzang noted: ‘the day is not sufficient for asking and answering profound questions’.23 Yijing contributed more details about Nalanda’s curriculum and the modes of study. One of the foundational non-Buddhist texts to be mastered was Pān.ini’s Sanskrit grammar, the As..tādhyāyı̄, knowledge of which ensured facility in study and debate. There were also five major vidyās or ‘disciplines’ (which were of course further subdivided): śabdavidyā (discourse analysis); śilpasthānavidyā (arts); cikitsāvidyā (diagnostic medicine); hetuvidyā (logic, epistemology); adhyātmavidyā (metaphysics).24 Students considered to be accomplished would engage in public debates so that, ‘when they are refuting heretical doctrines all their opponents become tongue-tied and acknowledge themselves undone’.25 The lifestyle observed by and enforced upon Nalanda residents facilitated strict adherence to the Buddhist Vinaya (monastic code of conduct). The monks had individual cells furnished with a hard, raised platform to be used as a bed. Yijing noted that a clepsydra (water clock) was used to ensure the punctual observance of the monastic rule of not eating after noon, which was mandatory for all monks in residence. Expulsion from the institution was the penalty for violation of this fundamental monastic practice.26 Patronage was liberal: on a daily basis, Nalanda was said to receive more than 1,000 pounds of rice and several thousands of pounds of butter and milk.27 Xuanzang stated that Nalanda received generous patronage from the region’s king, in the form of remittance from 100 villages; in Yijing’s account, the number of remitting villages is doubled to 200.28 The institution designated itself as a mahāvihāra or ‘great monastery’. This unambiguously Buddhist and monastic term was found on hundreds of terracotta seals excavated from the Nalanda archaeological site, taken by Cunningham as definitive proof that 23 Xuan Zang, Si-Yu-Ki, p. 170. Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, p. 112. 25 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 18. 26 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 145. 27 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. 28 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 65. It is a commonplace that such figures should be considered approximate rather than literal; nevertheless, in the doubling of the number of villages said to support Nalanda, we may infer that the institution enjoyed increased support over the period of commentary. 24 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 10 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY the site was the legendary Nalanda of old. The entire phrase found on the seal confirms Nalanda as an institution for Buddhist monks: (bhiks.u): Śrı̄-Nalanda-Mahāvihārı̄y-ārya-bhiks.u-saṅghasya or ‘The Great Monastery of Nalanda of the noble community of monks’. Finally, the major decorative element of the seal is the dharmacakra, or ‘wheel of law’, flanked by two deer, a reference to the deer park at Sārnāth where the Buddha is said to have taught his first disciples. In short, the ancient institution’s seal—in scriptorial and pictorial modes— identifies Nalanda as definitively Buddhist; in 2008 it was adopted by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the modern institution’s official seal.29 Yet in contemporary discourse, old Nalanda has been variously framed as a ‘monastic centre’, a ‘university’, and a ‘monastic university’. For example, Garten has claimed that Nalanda was a ‘global university’ of its time; Sen has stated that it attracted ‘foreign students’.30 Yet both characterizations dubiously imply a similarity with the contemporary globalization of higher education, where students can easily enrol for an international term of study abroad. According to all the major Chinese pilgrims’ records, numerous visitors from far-flung places in the Buddhist world indeed went on extended pilgrimages to the Indian sites associated with the exemplary life of the Buddha—but often for ten years or more owing to the difficulty of voyaging over great distances in the first millennium.31 Another depiction of Nalanda that troublingly elides the gulf between ancient and modern is the suggestion that students studied there ‘for free’.32 It is true that the monks at Nalanda did not pay fees, but the implication that monks benefited from a ‘tuition waiver’ obfuscates the reason why Nalanda was supported. It was underwritten by imperial and lay patronage from primarily Buddhist sources (and also some Hindu ones, such as the Gupta emperors) 29 Ministry of External Affairs India (2008), ‘On the Fourth Meeting of the Nalanda Mentor Group’, 12–13 August, New Delhi, <http://www.mea.gov.in/pressreleases.htm?dtl/1926/On+the+Fourth+Meeting+of+the+Nalanda+Mentor+ Group1213+August+2008+at+New+Delhi>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 30 Garten, ‘Really Old School’. Shreeya Sinha (2011), ‘Q & A: Nobel Prize Winning Economist Amartya Sen on Reviving Nalanda University’, <http://asiasociety. org/blog/asia/qa-nobel-prize-winning-economist-amartya-sen-reviving-nalandauniversity>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 31 Pilgrims’ places of origin include: Bactria (Balkh), now in Afghanistan; Tushara in northwestern South Asia (possibly latter-day Turkey); Tibet; Burma; Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan; China; and Korea. See Hui Li, The Life of Hiuen Tsian, pp. xvii–xxxi. 32 Shashi Tharoor (2006), ‘Reconstructing Nalanda: The Ideal Nalanda Must be More than an Exercise in Constructive Nostalgia’, Hindu Online Edition, 24 December. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 11 in order to underwrite a monastic ‘field of merit’ generated by thousands of monks engaged in sedulously observing Buddhist dharma. Xuanzang noted the harmonious arrangement between the regional polity and the mahāvihāra, saying, ‘ . . . the students here, being so abundantly supplied, do not require to ask for the four requisites. This is the source of the perfection of their studies to which they have arrived.’33 The prestige of the institution and its material support were thus incontrovertibly linked to the religious practices of its pious residents.34 According to Yijing, ‘ . . . the prosperity of the religion continues ever, owing to nothing but (the fact that) the Vinaya (is being strictly carried out)’.35 Texts studied at Nalanda did go beyond Buddhist scripture in that monks studied the foundational Sanskrit texts of the day, and monks hailing from diverse parts of the Buddhist world did study them together. However, the monks at Nalanda were admitted based on their knowledge of Buddhist scripture and compliance with Vinaya rules; they were trained in theological argumentation for the purpose of unseating non-Buddhists and others holding unsound views; and they were supported by patrons because they were observant Buddhist monks. This last point is crucial. According to the Chinese records, Nalanda was a Buddhist institution in a world of competing worldviews. In some sense, its purpose was to provide a locus for a Buddhist outlook while it vied with others for ideological and political dominance. Uncharitably, one could consider the contemporary inattention given to the above as a distortion of Nalanda’s legacy. Yet this would miss an important point. Pragmatically, framing Nalanda as an ancient exemplar of the dominant contemporary model of education is a useful heuristic which captures enthusiasm for the project and permits a mosaic of actors to embrace the proposal. While ancient 33 Shastri, Nālandā and its Epigraphic Material, p. 16. One very conspicuous point of difference between historical European universities and ancient Nalanda is the relationship between European students and their host communities. In comparison with the pious monastery of Nalanda, the earliest European universities were not housed in fixed locations but were dependent upon being granted space for lectures as well as student accommodation by townspeople. Animosities resulting from this arrangement gave rise to the infamous ‘town and gown’ encounters. In 1200, King Philip Augustus of France decreed that the students of the University of Paris were exempt from lay jurisdiction, providing a peculiar protection for the students, who were often at violent odds with the local townspeople. See Charles Homer Haskins (1957), The Rise of Universities, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press (Great Seal Books), p. 15. 35 I Tsing, A Record of the Buddhist Religion, p. 65. 34 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 12 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY Nalanda was a religious institution which inculcated a set of religious values that would in turn produce a set of religious experiences, attitudes, and cultural formations, the Nalanda revival appears destined to be a secular university, in harmony with the rationalmaterialist cultures that have envisioned it. Nalanda’s historical legacy thus stands in sharp contrast to the contemporary project, based on the ideal of the modern university as an institution that espouses dogmatological agnosticism, and dominates educational ideals across the elite strata of all global cultures. It is important to reflect on this contrast precisely because it is elided in modern discussions. Clearly, the gap between historical and future Nalanda is vast and comparisons between the two must be made carefully in order to avoid stretching historical fact in the service of present-day aspirations. Nalanda’s ancient prestige, glowingly burnished by the passage of many intervening centuries, affords a neutrality to the past and its staunchly Buddhist legacy. Indeed, the ideal of ‘Nalanda’ functions as a palimpsest where participating bodies can write, read, and reread multiple expediencies that further divergent goals. It is the remoteness of Nalanda’s legacy that permits it to be so thoroughly reimagined and, as I go on to argue, in such strikingly dissimilar ways. In the rest of this article, I identify two major types of discourse on Nalanda. First, I show how Nalanda has galvanized a new wave of ‘Pan-Indo-Asianism’; then, I show how Nalanda has been framed as advancing Indian interests. While Nalanda is celebrated in the former type of discourse as the common cultural property of Asia, it is seen as one of the crown jewels of Indian civilization by the latter. Both modes embrace the revival, but favour divergent outcomes— a possibility which is facilitated by the pragmatic reframing of the project’s past as outlined above. As will be clear, great differences emerge in the perceptions of Nalanda’s legacy and the motivations behind steering its symbolic power. Pan-Indo-Asianism, a-cultural Buddhism, and Asian education Discourse on Nalanda reveals a fresh interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’, expressed in three areas. First, the transnational support for Nalanda indicates a new readiness to affirm India as a centre for Asian spirituality and a locus of ‘Asian values’. In the twentieth century, independent India’s pan-Asian ambitions were viewed warily by India’s Asian neighbours. Now, through the lens of Nalanda, we can discern a http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 13 new acceptance and affirmation of Indian antiquity as an apt candidate to represent and exemplify Asia. Second, Buddhism has long been viewed as a unifying regional tradition. Here, India is celebrated for its potential to enliven multilateral, intra-Asian Buddhist connections through its identity as the ancient birthplace of Buddhism. Finally, the Nalanda revival reveals a new interest in realizing an ‘Asian’ vision of education that would be distinguished from dominant Western models. With education as a favoured path to Asian cooperation, I conclude this section by exploring some of the most intriguing ideas put forth by Asian and Indian discussants to make sense of the proposed ‘spiritual’ nature of the new Nalanda University and to assess its potential contributions towards developing an Asian educational paradigm. India as Asia, Asia as India Intra-Asian regionalism has many historical antecedents and wellknown interlocutors, such as Rabindranath Tagore in India, Zhang Taiyan of China, and Okakura Kakuzo (also known as Okakura Tenshin) of Japan.36 To take one early twentieth-century example, Okakura famously summarized his views in the expression ‘Asia is One’, arguing that Asian peoples from Arabia to Japan shared a unity of temperament: ‘Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace’.37 As flagged by Garten, the notion of an Asian cultural unity has inspired a diverse body of advocates, but it has produced limited multilateral projects. Yet over the last decade, soft spheres such as education and culture have been identified by Asian extragovernmental organizations as priority areas for mutual cooperation. In India, the discourse surrounding Nalanda has created a space where it represents not just a rising India but an ascendant Asia in classically pan-Asian terms reminiscent of those from the last century. In ‘Our Vision’, the plan for the University confirms Asia’s resurgence on the common basis of ‘peace and harmony’, as exemplary ‘Asian’ values: 36 See Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman (eds) (2011), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Plymouth, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Limited. 37 Kakuzo Okakura (1904), The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan, New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., p. 10. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 14 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY Asian countries are coming together to forge a continent based on the foundations of peace and harmony. The decision of the East Asia Summit in 2007, at its meeting in Cebu, Philippines, to endorse the plan to re-establish the Nalanda University underscores the commitment to these values.38 The vision statement then underscores the fact that Nalanda’s ancient pedigree outranks the great European universities by at least a millennium. It also invokes a ‘hallowed universalism’ at some variance with the historical record just reviewed: After teaching thousands of students for centuries, Nalanda ceased its existence just as universities were opening up in Bologna, Paris and Oxford at the beginning of the second millennium CE. The shift of centres of knowledge from East to West was symbolic of the eventual transfer of power which followed within half a millennium. There is now a perfect opportunity to recreate the hallowed universalism of Nalanda as a centre of knowledge. The second millennium CE ended with a tremendous resurgence of Asia after centuries of stagnation, division and decline. Asia is today synonymous with a dynamic entrepreneurial and innovative culture, based on knowledge and enterprise not forgetful of its past yet not afraid to face the future.39 This striking vision statement affirms Nalanda as a key element of India’s ancient legacy without mentioning India by name; it praises Nalanda’s reputation as a centre of civilization, while disconnecting it from its religious character, partially through the assertion that it taught ‘students’ rather than monks. Most interestingly, while the Orientalist notion of Asia as ‘stagnant’ and in ‘decline’ is endorsed, it is then summarily displaced by the imagining of a modern, secular Nalanda that is ‘dynamic’, ‘innovative’, and an ideal standard-bearer for ‘new (undifferentiated) Asia’. Several key Indian interlocutors have powerfully articulated a panAsian role for Indian civilization. To take one example, N. K. Singh, member of the Rajya Sabha (Bihar) and of the Nalanda Governing Board, has strongly supported pan-Indo-Asian ideals. Singh’s political career spans more than four decades and his portfolio has ranged from trade and finance to energy and transport. Singh has successfully argued in parliament that the new Nalanda will illuminate Asia’s past, it will succour the present, and it will pave the way for a future of cooperation between Asian nations. Most significantly, he twins 38 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Our Vision’, abt-vision.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 39 Nalanda University, ‘Our Vision’. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/ IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 15 Nalanda’s revival—and Bihar’s (and by extension, India’s)—with the broader expectation of the rebirth of Asia in the third millennium: . . . the [Nalanda] revival and the Asian renaissance represent not merely the economic wherewithal with which we want to rebuild Asia, improve our life quality but in some way regain the intellectual and knowledge leadership which Asia had forgone 800 years ago . . . it could be a trend setter for the power of soft diplomacy . . . not only of pan-Asia but looking to Asia and the Pacific . . . [to] strike at the broader commonalities of Asia, Asian values . . . let us hope and pray that the new Nalanda University would be this voice of an enlightened Asia.40 Singh’s articulation echoes a widely held goal for the Nalanda project: to advance an ‘Asian renaissance’ centred in India. Many Indian intellectuals have supported a pan-Asian vision where India is part of the Asiatic community; however, independent India’s foreign policy has been more typically nationalist in its imaginings of Asia. Singh’s conception as a parliamentarian is thus notable for its strongly pan-Indo-Asian tone, especially so given the otherwise Indo-centric outlook of the Indian parliamentary debates, covered in detail in the third section of this article. Amartya Sen continues to be Nalanda’s most influential supporter both in India and abroad. His extensive comments on Nalanda also reflect pan-Indo-Asian priorities such as a ‘long-run goal’ to establish great Asian universities inspired by the model of ancient Nalanda. Pragmatically, Sen identifies education and research as an area in which ‘joint action is possible’ in Asia: . . . Asian countries have many differences in political outlook and practice, and these differences are not going to disappear any time soon. But it is also important to live with each other in peace, and cooperate in areas in which joint action is possible. This applies particularly well to cooperation in education and research, involving all the countries of the Asian region.41 This statement trenchantly summarizes Sen’s approach to the project and, I believe, flags one of the driving levers of the project’s appeal. Intra-Asian collaboration is an alluring goal but it has produced very limited forums for substantive and sustained engagements. To extrapolate from Sen’s words, the arenas where Asian countries are 40 Rajya Sabha (2010), The Nalanda University Bill 2010 (Full Uncorrected Text), 21 August, New Delhi, pp. 36–38. 41 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Chairman’s Message’, <http://nalandauniv.edu. in/abt-chairman-msg.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 16 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY able to find viable common ground for collaboration are limited. A new Nalanda, hosted by India but conceived of in pan-Indo-Asian terms, is a chance to unite respect for ‘broad-spectrum Buddhism’ with the dream of realizing a non-Western, alternative model of Asian higher education while creating a new fulcrum to reshape Bihar. Outside of India, we need look no further than the official statements made by the East Asia Summit for evidence of ASEAN’s approval of India as a centre for Asian values, which I will now briefly review. The Nalanda revival was initially tabled early in 2007 at the second meeting of the East Asia Summit, in Cebu, Philippines. The Nalanda initiative appeared as a priority, just after poverty eradication and energy, as follows: We agreed to strengthen regional educational cooperation, noting that we could tap the region’s centers of excellence in education for this purpose. Noting proposals to renew our historical ties, we welcomed initiatives such as the revival of the Nalanda University in India, to improve regional understanding and the appreciation of one another’s heritage and history.42 Again, in late 2007, the third East Asia Summit renewed its commitment, saying that ‘the revival of Nalanda University would create a centre for cultural exchange and inter-religious study and understanding in the region’.43 This meeting resulted in the creation of the Nalanda Mentor Group as the primary body leading the Nalanda project.44 Then, in 2009, the fourth East Asia Summit emphatically reaffirmed the role of ancient India (via Nalanda) as a regional hub 42 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2007), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 2nd East Asia Summit’, 15 January, Cebu, Philippines, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asiapaci/eas/state0701.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 43 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2007), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 3rd East Asia Summit’, 21 November, Singapore, <http://www.aseansec.org/21127. htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 44 The Nalanda Mentor Group, established by the government of India and chaired by Amartya Sen had its inaugural meeting in Singapore in July 2007. In November 2011, the Group was converted to the Nalanda University Governing Board, with the following members and affiliations: Amartya Sen (Harvard University); George Yeo (ex-foreign minister of Singapore); N. K. Singh (Rajya Sabha member of parliament); Professor Wang Gungwu (National University of Singapore); Wang Bangwei (Beijing University); Susumu Nakanishi (emeritus, Kyoto City University of Arts); Sugata Bose (Harvard University); Prapod Assavavirulhakarn (Chulalongkorn University); Tansen Sen (City University of New York); Lord Meghnad Desai (London School of Economics); Gopa Sabharwal (vice chancellor, Nalanda University); and Sanjay Singh (secretary, (East) Ministry of External Affairs). The Board’s international membership covers many bases, with representatives connected to India, Singapore, China, Thailand, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Nalanda http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 17 of learning and religiosity, tying it to the three contemporary regional Asian blocs: [The Summit was] deeply impressed with the sanctity and significance of the great ancient centre of learning in Nalanda that attracted many scholars from South, South-East and East Asia . . . 45 In this ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit released a definitive articulation of transnational support. Here, member states are recorded as having ‘appreciated’ and ‘encouraged’ the Nalanda revival as proposed by the India delegation, amounting to an endorsement of India as an appropriate site for a pan-Asian initiative. This marked a significant step in ASEAN’s relationship with India. In 2010, the fifth East Asia Summit praised the successful passage of the Nalanda Bill in the Indian parliament and singled out education as a premier mode of intra-regional cooperation, naming Nalanda as ‘an international institution of excellence with continental focus’.46 At the sixth East Asia Summit in 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed that work on Nalanda University was progressing well.47 The seventh Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2012) reaffirmed support for Nalanda and noted that Lao People’s Democratic Republic had contributed financially.48 Most recently, at the eight East Asia Summit, seven members signed a memorandum of understanding on Nalanda with India (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar, New Zealand, Singapore); on 23 October 2013, China also signed this University (2012), ‘Board’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/board.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 45 East Asia Summit (2009), ‘Joint Press Statement of the 4th East Asia Summit on the Revival of Nalanda University’, 15th ASEAN Summit and Related Summits, Cha-am, Hua Hin, Thailand, <http://www.aseansec.org/23619.htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 46 Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan (2010), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the 5th East Asia Summit (EAS)’, 30 October, Ha Noi, Viet Nam, <http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/ asia-paci/eas/pdfs/state101030.pdf>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 47 Ministry of External Affairs India (2011), ‘Statement by PM at the 6th East Asia Summit Plenary Session’, 19 November, Bali, Indonesia, <http://www. mea.gov.in/in-focus-article.htm?6974/Statement+by+PM+at+the+6th+East+ Asia+Summit+Plenary+Session>, [accessed 10 March 2014]. 48 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia, Canberra, Australia, <http://www.dfat.gov.au/asean/eas/121120_7th_eas_chairman_ statement.html>, [accessed 8 March 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 18 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY agreement.49 These developments signal a new readiness within Asia and India to embrace shared humanistic goals, and to endorse India, through the imagining of Nalanda, as representative of a progressive and modern ‘new Asian’ renaissance. (Buddhist) Asia ‘is one’ The Buddhist nature of Nalanda is celebrated as the common cultural heritage of all three interested regional blocs: South, Southeast, and East Asia. While this supports India’s ambition to claim a position of cultural leadership under the rubric of historical Buddhism, it in turn leverages an essentialist reading of the Indian Buddhism of antiquity as a useful fulcrum to unite contemporary Asian cultures which practise divergent forms of contemporary Buddhism. As I demonstrate below, multi-party political discourse describes Asia’s Buddhist connections in generic and ‘a-cultural’ terms, removed from religious belief or regional practices. For example, in the ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit formally endorsed the Nalanda revival as follows: [the EAS] . . . welcomed India’s initiative to revive the Nalanda University located in the State of Bihar in India . . . [and recognized that] Nalanda University was a great ancient centre of intellectual activity in Buddhist philosophy, mathematics, medicine and other disciplines.50 In this crucial statement, Nalanda is strongly and explicitly related to ‘Buddhist philosophy’. This is a classically Orientalist characterization of Buddhism as an analytical system or a ‘philosophy of life’ rather than a lived religious tradition. As a rhetorical move, it distances the contemporary project from the celebrated history of its namesake—a site where monks lived, slept, and ate in accordance with Buddhist Vinaya rules or faced expulsion. Furthermore, the nod to Nalanda’s Buddhist legacy is included in a list of other secular ‘disciplines’—mathematics and medicine—which undoubtedly echo a modern perception of the proper business of a university. The 49 Nalanda University, Press Release, 11 October 2013, <http://www. nalandauniv.edu.in/8eas.pdf>, [accessed 8 March 2014]; Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi, India, <http://mea.gov.in/bilateraldocuments.htm?dtl/22367>m [accessed 8 March 2014]. 50 East Asia Summit, ‘Joint Press Statement’. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 19 ‘vision’ for Nalanda University echoes this ‘a-religious’ representation, exchanging Buddhist monks for secular students as follows: Nalanda is a word known across the world and for centuries. It stands for a university which attracted students and scholars from across Asia and even farther away. It was a centre of excellence for Buddhist studies, philosophy but medicine and mathematics as well.51 This severing of Buddhism from devotional piety and its coupling with a secular modernity is reminiscent of the influential characterization of the religion by Anāgārika Dharmapāla of Sri Lanka (1864–1933). Dharmapāla famously depicted Buddhism as a religion that not only fulfils but also exceeds the criteria for modernism, pitching Buddhism as ‘a scientific religion’. In his address to the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893, Dharmapāla emphasized the ‘rationality’ of Buddhism as being on par with that of Charles Darwin and insisted that ‘nothing whatever be accepted on faith’.52 While the Nalanda Mahāvihāra was certainly a centre of ‘intellectual activity’, the ancient institution’s religious element has been completely excised in accordance with the requirements of a modern, secular university of the present. Finally, it is worth reflecting on the centrality of the role played by a denatured Buddhism, unencumbered by living practices, in creating pan-Asian common ground for the revival. India is the ideal site to do this, as it links the vastly different practices found throughout the Buddhist world to a past that is so remote so as to present no contemporary challenges, only the ‘authenticity’ of antiquity. For example, Tommy Koh, Singapore’s ambassador-at-large, located original Buddhism in India and tied the far-flung Buddhist countries to it as follows: Located in Bihar, India, Nalanda University had preceded the founding of Oxford and Cambridge. It was a great centre of learning, not just in Buddhism, but also in mathematics and science. Buddhism originated from India and has spread to China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka and many of the countries of Southeast Asia. The revival of Nalanda University will connect 51 Nalanda University, ‘Chairman’s Message’. All citations of Dharmapāla are from ‘The World’s Debt to the Buddha’, read at the Chicago Parliament of Religions, and cited in David L. McMahan (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, New York, Oxford University Press, p. 20. 52 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 20 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY our past to our present and our future. It is a symbol of Asia’s cultural renaissance.53 Were the project hosted by a nation with a distinctly Buddhist character, such as Sri Lanka or Thailand, high stakes would be involved in attempting to transcend the distinct and culturally embedded national formations of the host country and in merging them with other Asian partners’ particular Buddhist practices. Compared to the uninterrupted vitality of Buddhist traditions in Southeast and East Asia, for centuries Buddhism has had a marginal cultural influence in India. In locating the project at ancient Nalanda, India is read as a welcoming site for an a-historically ancient and a-cultural Buddhism that can expansively accommodate a mosaic of contemporary forms of Buddhism. In summary, characterizations of Nalanda as broadly representative of contemporary Asian interests exhibit a tendency to admire but, at the same time, underrepresent the very religious features which gave Nalanda its exemplary Buddhist character. Spirituality and Asian education In March 2006, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, former president of India (2002–2007), outlined a distinct vision for the Nalanda revival to the Bihar state assembly. He suggested that the revival should impart not just academic excellence, but ‘enlightened citizenship’, a concept he identified as having three features, ‘(1) value-based education; (2) religion transforming into spirituality; (3) economic development for societal equality’.54 Kalam’s high profile as the then-president of India and his associations with education and social reform lent credence to the proposal and, critically, helped to ensure the Bihar government’s support for the project. As proposed, Nalanda’s educational targets would be both conventional—‘excellence’—and unusual—‘spirituality’, a quality consistently showcased as one of the project’s hallmarks.55 53 Tommy Koh (2010), ‘Toward the Realisation of an East Asian Community’, New Asia Republic, 29 March. 54 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Dr. A. P. J Kalam’s Message’, <http://nalandauniv. edu.in/abt-kalam-msg.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 55 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Schools’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/school.html>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 21 Aspects of Kalam’s original proposal have been broadly ingeminated in many of the East Asia Summit statements on Nalanda. These statements are echoed on the Nalanda University website, which proposes that Nalanda, as a ‘spiritual university’, would represent an alternative ‘Asian’ vision for education:56 [o]ur goal is to match the excellence of Nalanda of the first millennium for the third millennium; its mission is to recapture the moral and character-driven model of education of old while refashioning it for the present.57 Ideally, this alternative model would provoke a non-Western reassessment of broad pedagogical goals at the foundational level. For the definitive statement in this regard, the Summit’s ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’ must be revisited: . . . [the EAS] supported the establishment of the Nalanda University as a non-state, non-profit, secular, and self governing international institution with a continental focus that will bring together the brightest and the most dedicated students from all countries of Asia—irrespective of gender, caste, creed, disability, ethnicity or social-economic background—to enable them to acquire liberal and human education and to give them the means needed for pursuit of intellectual, philosophical, historical and spiritual studies and thus achieve qualities of tolerance and accommodation.58 This critical portion of the statement declared that the new Nalanda University will have a distinctly ‘Asian’ character which includes ‘spiritual studies’, in order to produce ‘tolerance and accommodation’. In 2010, the Indian minister of external affairs chaired an ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations–India post-ministerial meeting’, at which the East Asia Summit foreign ministers reavowed their interest in the Nalanda University initiative, now described as a ‘symbol of Asia’s cultural renaissance’.59 Most recently, India’s 2013 Memorandum of Understanding (currently signed with eight East Asia Summit member states) clarified the intra-regional obectives of Nalanda University as follows: ‘to build an Asian community of learning . . . to create an Asian community by strengthening our regional awareness 56 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (2010), ‘Chairman’s Statement of the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers Informal Consultations’, 21 July, Ha Noi, Viet Nam, <http://www.aseansec.org/24914.htm>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 57 Nalanda University (2012), ‘Home’, <http://nalandauniv.edu.in/>, [accessed 19 January 2014]. 58 East Asia Summit, ‘Joint Press Statement’. 59 Koh, ‘Toward the Realisation of an East Asian Community’. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 22 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY . . . to impart education towards capacity-building of Asian nations in the domain of philosophy, language, history . . . ’.60 The refurbished ideal of Nalanda has been incredibly successful in captivating Indian, Asian, and Western enthusiasts. As framed here, contemporary Nalanda should be not just as humanistic, rational, and scientific as the West but it should exceed those standards by also being morally and culturally resonant. In the third and final section, I explore how Nalanda is reread to serve particularly Indic concerns. Indian visions of Nalanda On 21 August 2010, India’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha, passed the Nalanda University Bill and affirmed the nation’s commitment to develop a modern university near the site of ancient Nalanda in Bihar. The lower house, or Lok Sabha, passed the Bill five days later. Analysis of the parliamentary debates and other Indian sources offers unique insight into the symbolic power of Nalanda to further a range of particularly Indian agendas that diverge significantly from the panIndo-Asian ones considered in the previous section. Below, I consider four aspects of the discourse around Nalanda which highlight how the initiative serves particularly Indic concerns in India. In some cases we see how pan-Indo-Asian themes are reconceived through a nationalist lens; in other cases, we find peculiarly Indian issues. In all cases, the inherent tensions between pan-Indo-Asian, transnational, and Indian nationalist interests are clear. Indian (soft) diplomacy Over the last two decades, Indian foreign affairs has included a strong emphasis on Southeast and East Asia through its ‘Look East’ policy, adopted in 1991. This policy signalled a major commitment by India to reorient attention towards its Asian neighbours with the aim of greater economic and cultural integration. As Christophe Jaffrelot has discussed, ‘Look East’ can also be seen as the contemporary iteration of India’s long-term, nationalist interest in ‘Asianism’, in 60 Memorandum of Understanding on the Establishment of Nalanda University, Prime Minister of India, Press Releases, New Delhi, India, <http://pmindia. gov.in/press-details.php?nodeid=1733>, [accessed 10 March 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 23 which ‘the existence of common traditions is . . . invoked to establish economic links more easily or to enter into regional organizations’.61 After independence, Jawaharlal Nehru tried to rally Asian nations under India’s banner but was largely unsuccessful, as many new Asian nation-states were uneasy about India’s regional ambitions and its proprietary cultural attitude, based on the assumed continuities within ‘Farther India’.62 In the era of ‘Look East’, Jaffrelot cautioned that India’s overtly nationalist interpretations of ‘Greater India’ in ASEAN territory have limited the economic and intra-regional benefits of the policy.63 Recently, some influential Indian voices have integrated the Nalanda revival into the purview of the ‘Look East’ policy. Veteran diplomat N. Ravi suggests that the policy be remade with Nalanda as a focus, in his ‘Look East Policy—Millennia Apart’.64 Likewise, S. D. Muni, a scholar of international relations, takes a similarly instrumental approach to Nalanda regarding India’s intra-Asian interests in his article: ‘Nalanda: A Soft Power Project’. India has, till recently, been rather casual about and indifferent to its strength in the use of soft power in its foreign policy and diplomacy. The goodwill and admiration clustered around India’s cultural footprints in Asia . . . have not been harnessed systematically. Many of the innovative proposals and initiatives have died under the burden of bureaucratic ineptitude and lethargy. It is only now that India is waking up to the use of this asset . . . It will spurt activities and processes towards building an Asian community and cannot be used as an instrument of competitive diplomacy in the region.65 Muni, a realist observer who has been closely allied with India’s state policy, accepts the idea that a ‘secular-Buddhist’ university in Bihar can act as an effective vehicle for India’s ‘ . . . unleashing its 61 Christophe Jaffrelot (2003), ‘India’s Look East Policy: An Asianist Strategy in Perspective’, India Review, 2, 2, p. 61. 62 The now-classic work of George Cœdès advanced a reading of Southeast Asia as culturally underwritten by Indic civilization, based on his early identification of the historical links between South and Southeast Asia. Since Nehru’s era, the interpretation of a pervasive Indic influence has been challenged as being far less dominant than was argued by Cœdès, especially from Southeast Asian perspectives. See George Cœdès (1968), The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, University of Malaya Press, pp. 33–35; 252–56. 63 Jaffrelot, ‘India’s Look East Policy’, p. 61. Also see Susan Bayly (2004), ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies, 38, 3. 64 N. Ravi (2010), ‘Look East Policy—Millennia Apart’, The Hindu, 7 October 2010. 65 S. D. Muni (2010), ‘Nalanda: A Soft Power Project’, Hindu Online, 30 August. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 24 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY soft power on Asia and the world’ and act as a counterweight to ‘competitive diplomacy’ among Asian nations. He argues that the pan-Asian dream of mutual cooperation is imminently possible and that the Nalanda project could facilitate powerful new intra-Asian connections between nation-states based on common culture rather than trade and policy. But inversely mirroring the pan-Asian ideals introduced previously, Muni reconsiders India’s historic legacy as a pragmatic lever to increase India’s influence in the region. Finally, as discussed in the previous section, the Nalanda revival has been envisioned as promoting a pan-Indo-Asian vision of Asian unity, with India as an exemplar of Asian civilization. During the August 2010 Indian parliamentary debates, many Indian members of parliament echoed similar themes. Yet the forthright style of many Indian parliamentarians produced statements that veer from the guarded language of international diplomacy to reveal an ardently reimagined vision for Nalanda, Asia, and ‘of course, a resurgent India’: Karan Singh: [L]et this not be just another university. Let it be a genuinely trans-national university . . . let us re-establish the links between India and South and South-East Asia that were shattered by centuries of colonial rule . . . Asia is rising again after many centuries of servitude and I sincerely hope that this new Nalanda will become a symbol of a resurgent Asia and, of course, a resurgent India’.66 A second representative example puts this sentiment in even more overtly anti-Western and pro-Indian terms: Girija Vyas: Nowadays, the basis of our thinking and thoughts is European. Under India’s lead, Asia is breaking away from that and taking on a new shape, in which we are on course to achieve signs of economic progress along with ASEAN, by means of (mādhyam) Nalanda university we will realize our ancient prestige (gaurav), in which there is something new and something old as well.67 In these and numerous other instances the ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ rhetoric around Nalanda is reconceived in strongly nationalistic terms that reflect characteristically Indian concerns. In reflecting on the terms of the revival, it is striking to note how Nalanda has captured support for such different reasons. In Amartya Sen’s treatment, the Nalanda 66 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, pp. 18–19. Translation from Hindi by the author; Lok Sabha (2010), The Nalanda University Bill 2010 (Full Uncorrected Text), 26 August, Government of India, New Delhi, pp. 630– 35. 67 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 25 project pragmatically serves the greater aims of pan-Indo-Asianism; in other hands, it is idealistically retooled to fit the interests of the Indian state. This reflects the incredibly broad appeal of the project, while simultaneously unmasking its inherent tensions. In other words, it is clear that Nalanda captures the imaginations of many—what is not clear is the extent to which these visions are shared. Indic educational ideals While the East Asia Summit statements invoke, but do not detail, how Asian ‘spirituality’ will shape Nalanda, Indian parliamentarians offer very closely articulated descriptions of what these educational ideals ought to be. Not surprisingly, we find that these visions differ from the ideals of tolerance, accommodation, and ‘Asian spirituality’ discussed in the previous section. Instead, these ideals are characteristically and paradigmatically Indic. Below, I discuss three of the most frequently used Indic terms in the Nalanda Bill debates and show how they reflect a distinctly Indian conception of knowledge and education which is tied to liberative soteriology, namely vidyā (knowledge, wisdom), dharma (values), and ātma (consciousness, self).68 Vidyā was noted by Yijing in his seventh-century listing of Sanskritderived disciplines at ancient Nalanda. In the 2010 Nalanda Bill debates, vidyā is compared with Western values and educational ideals, and is celebrated as possessing greater moral weight. It is the most regularly recurring Indic term in the debates on the Nalanda Bill in both houses. One eloquent speaker defined vidyā using a well-known Sanskrit idiom, left untranslated in the proceedings: Balavant alias Bal Apte: Information is relevant if it is knowledge, and, knowledge is relevant if it is blessed with wisdom, and, all these put together is one word in this country, which is called ‘vidyā’. Vidyā is knowledge with wisdom, and, we say, sā vidyā yā vimuktaye [that which liberates is knowledge].69 68 All three of these terms must be understood as carrying a much greater semantic weight than that suggested here, as each inhabits a vast range of contexts in Indic literatures, ranging by time and subject matter. 69 Translation from Sanskrit by the author; Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 12. This phrase is used as the school motto of numerous institutions in India, including the Banasthali Vidyapith in Rajasthan and the Birla Institute of Technology in Jharkhand. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 26 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY Here, the outcome of acquiring vidyā is ‘liberation’, which has an experiential and moral character that is deeply tied to both Hindu and Buddhist soteriology. In the context of contemporary Indian higher education, such aphorisms are relatively common (if highbrow) locutions. Many Indian schools (at all levels) have a Sanskrit motto, which frequently contains the word vidyā. For example, the Sanskrit motto of Banaras Hindu University—‘immortality through knowledge (vidyā)’—similarly suggests that vidyā has a soteriological dimension.70 While the pan-Indo-Asian discourse on Nalanda and spirituality affirms a general investment in the inculcation of moral values, Indian discourse on Nalanda explicitly links the acquisition of knowledge to spiritual liberation. Another related word that appears frequently in the parliamentary debates—dharma—is notoriously difficult to translate from Indic languages. Attested in the Oxford English Dictionary since Sir William Jones’s usage of it in 1796, dharma is translated in English as ‘ethics, custom, religion’ and so on. In the upper house, member of parliament M. Rama Jois engaged in an extended discussion of vidyā in relation to dharma, suggesting that part of Nalanda University’s mandate ought to include an obligation to impart a sense of dharma to its students. Speaking in English, Jois argued that dharma acts as a pre-emptive moral curb against those transgressions associated with a lack of character: ‘ . . . unless vidya is accompanied by character and humanness, it is dangerous’.71 Similar language was used by member of parliament Pramod Kureel, who emphasized the moral character of ancient Nalanda and urged that this standard inform the new iteration of the institution: ‘Nalanda was not just for imparting education to students from the world over. Its role was more in terms of creating a value system.’72 By contrast, the implicit suggestion is that ‘Western’ knowledge—perceived to be untempered by moral character—is substandard and even harmful. 70 Translation from Sanskrit by the author; ‘vidyayā amr.tam aśnute’—Banaras Hindu University (2011), ‘Seal’, <http://www.bhu.ac.in/seal.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 71 Based on Jois’s diction elsewhere in his address, ‘character’ corresponds to the concept of śila, listed among the Buddhist ‘perfections’ and trenchantly associated in modern (Southeast) Asian history with the five moral principles outlined at the Bandung Conference of Unaligned Nations in 1955. Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 59. 72 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 20. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 27 Deeply interconnected in the parliamentary discourse on wisdom, ethics, and moral character is the suggestion that the meaningful education exemplified at ancient Nalanda facilitated students’ knowledge of a higher consciousness. Member of parliament Bhola Singh, speaking in Hindi, united these themes when he made a connection between Nalanda’s curriculum and the potential to achieve knowledge of ātma (self): Bhola Singh: Today, what we study, it’s the opposite of (what was studied) at that time—what we are, what is humanity, where have we come from— that’s what was studied then . . . [w]ithout knowing the self (ātma), one can’t get to know the supreme consciousness (paramātmā). In this connection, the Nalanda university (viśvavidyālaya) had taken a historic step.73 Just as in previous passages, Singh makes a clear statement in favour of Nalanda as an institution that should inculcate essentially Indian religio-philosophical attitudes and experiences. Likewise, N. Ravi echoed the language of the fourth East Asia Summit by including ‘spiritual studies’ in the purview of the University, but extended this significantly by claiming an Indian prerogative of ‘spirituality’, which could ‘catalyse’ the Nalanda revival movement for the next millennium: [The] connection to Nalanda . . . could be the first step in our journey of the next thousand years. India is ideally placed to spur a movement catalysed by spirituality, to reach an ancient destination in the new millennium—a place that set ancient India apart as a pioneer in higher education.74 These views recall earlier statements by nationalist pioneers of Indo-Asianism, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who admired the virtues of the other great Asian civilizations—China in particular—while proprietarily extolling India’s cultural legacy to the ‘Asiatic peoples’, writ large.75 Also, as a variety of spiritual parochialism, in which India is regarded as the origin of authentic spirituality, the contemporary debate again seems to take cues from the religious modernist movement of the last century. One of that movement’s most famous representatives was Swami Vivekānanda of India (1863–1902) who idiosyncratically re-presented aspects of ‘traditional’ Hindu religiosity. 73 Translation from Hindi by the author; Lok Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, pp. 658–59. 74 Ravi, ‘Look East Policy’. 75 See Jawaharlal Nehru (1961), The Discovery of India, Bombay, Asia Publishing House, pp. 138, 151, 192–200. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 28 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY In Vivekānanda’s formulation of modern Hinduism, the very qualities most valued by modernity were not only present in ‘Hinduism’ since its origin but were, in fact, Hinduism’s gifts to the world.76 At one level, the contemporary visions share common cause with the transnational exhortations that Nalanda should be a ‘spiritual’ university. But at another level, the profoundly Indic character of these statements suggests the potential for deep pedagogical and philosophical tensions as the project proceeds. The original Nalanda perhaps succeeded in part because it espoused a comparatively unified worldview. The Nalanda revival so far has leveraged a broad-brush version of that view, driven partially by the contemporary ambition to develop a model of Asian education. But what will happen as views are refined regarding the spiritual or moral truths the project is meant to impart, and in locking down the ‘Asian’ nature of the curriculum? It is unclear to what extent these differences will truly challenge the dominant-Western mode of higher education. However, as the Nalanda revival evolves in its Indian setting and the first cohort of Nalanda faculty and students chart a path together from 2014 onwards, it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the robust national discourse on Nalanda is marked by widely shared Indic educational ideals. Models of Indian education In India, the term viśvavidyālaya is the usual Hindi translation of ‘university’; jāmi’a is the Urdu equivalent. Both terms are used to describe centrally administered, degree-granting institutions, such as the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. In a common practice, the University of Delhi uses the term ‘university’ in its official English name and retains viśvavidyālaya in its official Hindi name (Dillı̄ Viśvavidyālaya). Both versions appear on its bilingual Hindi-English seal. Alongside these two terms—and occasionally in opposition to them—there are numerous other Indic terms for educational institutions which are important for understanding contemporary 76 For example, Vivekānanda, in his 1893 address to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, described his religion as ‘the mother of all religions’, saying, ‘I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance.’ Swami Vivekānanda (1893), ‘Address to the World Parliament of Religions’, World Parliament of Religions, Chicago. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 29 educational milieus in India. Most of these reveal a religious and/or community affiliation with Hindu modes of learning. Some of the most common include: vidyālaya, ‘abode of knowledge’; and mahāvidyālaya, ‘great abode of knowledge’, used widely by the Indian government for secular government secondary schools; sansthān, or ‘institute’ and anusandhāna sansthān, ‘research institute’; kalāman.d.ala, ‘arts college’; and gurukul, a traditional Hindu residential school. Mahāvihāra, ‘great monastery’, and madrasa, ‘school’, are respectively associated with Buddhist and Muslim education. Nearly all of these Indic designations can be found in the contemporary titles of the 130 institutions deemed by the government of India to be universities.77 Referring to the new Nalanda as a ‘university’ may appear to be one point that all parties can agree on as this designation has become the gold standard for institutions of higher learning around the world. Indeed, centres of learning outside of Europe—whatever their scholastic inheritance—have consistently adopted Western standards in converting their institutional designations to that of ‘university’.78 77 Government of India (2011), ‘List of Deemed Universities’, Department of Higher Education, <http://www.ugc.ac.in/deemeduniversity.aspx>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. With conversion to university status, institutes often adopt an English word such as academy, institute, centre, or university. Of all the deemed universities listed, none retain the designation ‘madrasa’ in their present official English name, although it may remain in the Indian language version. However, the term ‘madrasa’ in India has the oldest link to modern (colonial) education: the first British-established institute of higher learning in India was a madrasa. Established by Warren Hastings in 1780, the institute was known officially as the Aliya Madrasah and also the ‘Calcutta Madrasah’; it is now designated as ‘Aliya University’ in English (and Āliyā Viśvavidyālaya in Bengali) since converting to university status in 2007. Additionally, primary schools in India are often known as pāt.hśālā or ‘house of lessons’. 78 The term ‘university’ (universitas) was first used at the University of Bologna, Italy, believed to have been founded in 1088. See Università di Bologna (2011), ‘A.D. 1088: La Rivista Dell’università Di Bologna’, <http://www.unibo.it/ Portale/Ateneo/AD1088.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. The next two European institutions of comparable antiquity are the universities of Oxford (circa 1096) and Paris (circa 1170). Together, these three institutions hold pride of place as the first and oldest modern universities in Europe. Oxford’s year of founding is not recorded but the university notes that teaching in some capacity occurred from 1096; its student intake grew significantly from 1167, when Henry II prohibited Englishmen from studying abroad. The University of Paris was also established some time in the mid-eleventh century, first as a cathedral school and then as a university, some time around 1200. For full details, see l’Université de Paris (2011), ‘Avant L’université De Paris: L’enseignement Supérieur En Europe Dans L’antiquité Et Au Moyen Âge’, <http://www.univ-paris1.fr/universite/presentation/historique/avant-luniversite-deparis/>, [accessed 21 January 2014], University of Oxford (2011), ‘A Brief History of the University’, <http://www.ox.ac.uk/about_the_university/introducing_ oxford/a_brief_history_of_the_university/index.html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 30 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY The institution of higher learning at Nanjing, China, founded around 258 BCE, changed its designation to university in 1888; Al-Karaouine, founded in Fes, Morocco, in 859 became a university in 1947; and Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, founded around 970–972, converted to university status in 1961. For better or for worse, the Western university model dominates global standards of education and has done so since at least the nineteenth century. However, in the Nalanda debates, several members of parliament raised the matter of Nalanda’s designation in explicitly anti-Western terms, calling for the revival to use a different term—vidyāpı̄t.h—claiming that it would better match Indian values. For example, member of parliament Bharatkumar Raut contends that: . . . the Nalanda spirit should be looking into the 21st century needs not only of India or South Asia, but also, of [the] wider global confluence of ideas and confluence of minds . . . [t]his university should be called ‘Nalanda Vidyapeeth’ . . . University is a western concept’.79 From all of the numerous Indic categorizations of institutions of learning, vidyāpı̄t.ha—literally, pı̄t.ha, ‘seat’, ‘chair’ or ‘place’ of vidyā, ‘knowledge, learning, philosophy, skills’—especially recalls the campaign for non-Western, non-colonial education that arose as part of India’s Independence movement. Vidyāpı̄t.h (or vidyāpı̄t.ha) was associated with M. K. Gandhi’s call to boycott British-led institutions of higher learning at a meeting of the Indian National Congress in Nagpur in 1920.80 There are currently numerous vidyāpı̄t.has, known as ‘deemed universities’, such as the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth (T . il.ak Mahārās..tra Vidyāpı̄t.ha) founded in 1921 in Pune, Maharashtra, and the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith (Mahātmā Gāndhı̄ Kāśı̄ Vidyāpı̄t.ha) founded in 1920 in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. The latter was the first exclusively Indianrun institute of higher learning in British India.81 79 Rajya Sabha (2010), Synopsis of Debate: Nalanda University Bill, 21 August, New Delhi. p. 362. 80 Tilak Maharasthra Vidyapeeth (2010), ‘About Us’, <http://www.tmv.edu.in/ aboutus.asp>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 81 Its curriculum was based on Gandhian principles, its medium of instruction was primarily Hindi, and its aim was complete autonomy from the colonial government of the time. Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith (2011), ‘History of Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith’, <http://www.mgkvp.ac.in/>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. A third institution founded on similar principles was the Kashi Vidyapith, created as an answer to the establishment of Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in 1916 (also in Varanasi, by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya). This institution was founded as a http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 31 There is thus an important history of indigenously conceived forms of higher education in India that is linked to Indian sovereignty and is expressly anti-colonial. It is this history that members such as Balavant (alias Bal Apte) refer to when they suggest that the term ‘university’ be abandoned altogether, arguing that English terminology is deficient and should be augmented with the Indian notion of vidyāpı̄t.ha: ‘adopt that word, bring it into English and enrich that language’.82 Apart from its historical resonances, the contemporary significance of the term vidyāpı̄t.ha appears somewhat unclear. In the past, vidyāpı̄t.has were associated with social uplift, while the colonial universities furthered social differentiation through English education. The first ‘modern’ Indian universities were the three Presidency universities, founded in 1857 in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, which were intended to impart the English language and European values. In Masks of Conquest (1989), Gauri Viswanathan argues that the establishment of the centralized university system in India advanced many imperial objectives, from producing candidates for the civil service to ‘creating a class that might emulate Europeans . . . and increase demand for the consumption of British goods [and] the advancement of European knowledge and European culture’.83 Yet in the post-independence era, Nalanda University Vice-Chancellor Gopa Sabharwal notes that, in terms of gender relations, these universities achieved ‘more for the emancipation of women than any other institution . . . [and allowed] men and women unrelated by kinship, to interact freely’.84 One potential point of distinction may be the positive emphasis that the vidyāpı̄t.ha historically placed on inculcating morality. Viswanathan notes that the colonial government had a ‘ . . . hostility to a moral emphasis in education’, which was set in the 1854 dispatch of Lord Halifax that informed the curriculum of the Presidency universities.85 Yet contemporary Indian universities (in principle) embrace this mode as well. Banaras Hindu University, an institution intended to combine Western and Indian modes of learning and curriculums, identifies the ‘modern’ residential university and was associated with the British, the Congress Party (Annie Besant), and the early use of English-medium instruction. 82 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 13. 83 Gauri Viswanathan (1989), Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York, Columbia University Press, p. 146. 84 Gopa Sabharwal (2011), The Nalanda University: Past, Present and Prospects, Nalanda Sriwijaya Centre, Singapore, p. 7. 85 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, p. 146. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 32 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY following as one of its core objectives: ‘ . . . the building up of character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education’.86 While it may be difficult to differentiate between the ethical nature of the modern Indian university and the contemporary vidyāpı̄t.ha, the particular history of the vidyāpı̄t.ha in India already represents a fully realized alternative model of education which resonates with India’s Independence movement and confrontation with its colonial past. While pan-Indo-Asianists may extol Nalanda for its ability to forge Asian connections, other parties in India may see the new Nalanda as an opportunity to showcase Indic educational ideals and modern India’s particular history on a pan-Asian stage. Indian Buddhism, secularism, and egalitarianism The idea of Buddhism, so important to the Asian imagining of the Nalanda revival, also has strikingly different modes of reception among certain sectors in India. When compared to the relative cultural influence of Buddhism in many ASEAN nations, Buddhism exerts a marginal cultural influence within Hindu-majority India; there are just eight million Buddhists in India, representing just 0.8 per cent of the general population.87 However, contemporary Indian Buddhism has a highly charged affinity with the political enfranchisement of low-caste electorates, on account of its association with Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution and a champion of low-caste equality in India. Born into a Dalit family, Ambedkar famously rejected Hinduism as inherently inequitable and converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands 86 ‘Objectives of the university: (1) To promote the study of the Hindu Shastras and of Sanskrit literature generally as a means of preserving and popularizing for the benefit of the Hindus in particular and of the world at large in general, the best thought and culture of the Hindus and all that was good and great in the ancient civilization of India; (2) to promote learning and research generally in Arts and Sciences in all branches; (3) to advance and diffuse such scientific, technical and professional knowledge, combined with the necessary practical training as is best calculated to help in promoting indigenous industries and in developing the material resources of the country; and (4) to promote the building up of character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education.’ Banaras Hindu University (2011), ‘Objectives of the University’, <http://www.bhu.ac.in/aboutbhu/obj.html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 87 <http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/religion.aspx>, [accessed 18 April 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 33 of supporters in Nagpur, Maharashtra.88 This public political act mobilized a new movement of ‘Ambedkar Buddhists’ in India which is associated with the rejection of caste and caste-based inequality. Numerically, a very small community of Indians professes to be Ambedkar Buddhists. Yet Ambedkar’s relationship to social justice means that ‘Buddhism’ in India has a special link to the historically disenfranchised communities known as ‘Scheduled Castes’ (16.2 per cent), ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (8.2 per cent), and ‘Other Backward Castes’.89 In the words of member of parliament Pramod Kureel, ‘the Scheduled Castes, “Scheduled Tribes”, and “Other Backward Castes” of this country . . . may not be practicing Buddhism . . . but as a value system [it] has a special place in their hearts’.90 Collectively, these three groups potentially represent a strong numerical majority of the general population, so that Ambedkar Buddhist identity politics resonates with an influential section of the Indian electorate. Ambedkar’s repudiation of Hinduism also leads to an unusual connection between Buddhism and secularism that is highly specific to India. This is partially because of Ambedkar Buddhism’s promise of a new egalitarian religious identity through denunciation of the Hindu caste system.91 According to member of parliament Baishnab Parida, ‘[Buddhism] has established a new order and a casteless society which the great Buddha has given not only to the Indian people but to the entire world.’92 In almost any other context, it is difficult to imagine a similarly robust relationship between a particular 88 Ambedkar developed a neo-Buddhist creed that included distinctive vows for converts, such as disavowing faith in Hindu deities, caste, and class injustice. See Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1956), ‘Twenty-Two Vows’, <http://www.ambedkar.org/ impdocs/22Vows.htm>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. The Nagpur site of the conversion is now revered as dı̄ks.abhūmi, (‘teaching ground’). 89 Census data was not collected by the government of India for ‘Other Backward Classes’ in 2001 as the definition of this category is both dynamic and controversial. Estimates range hugely, from between 30 and 50 per cent of the Indian population, depending on factors such as the inclusion of non-Hindus in the total percentage. For more details on this issue, see the Annual Report of the National Commission for Backward Classes: <http://ncbc.nic.in/Pdf/annual.pdf>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 90 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 26. 91 Given the backdrop of an (approximately) 80 per cent Hindu majority in a secular republic, many members of parliament affirm a ‘secular’ definition of Nalanda in the Bill alongside its Buddhist one, including Shrimati Preneet Kaur, the minister of state in the Ministry of External Affairs, responsible for proposing the Bill. Many other members speaking on the Nalanda Bill use these terms alongside one another, indicating a harmony of meaning between the ‘Buddhist’ and ‘secular’ that would be unusual outside of the context of India. 92 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 360. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 34 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY religion and secularism as a political ideology. Yet given India’s Hindumajority context and the role of caste-politics in Indian democracy, ‘Buddhism’—here read as the Buddhism of Ambedkar—is understood as being in concert with low-caste political goals and secular ideals. For this reason, Indian members of parliament representing low-caste voters may regard the Nalanda project as an avenue to advance the interests of their constituents. Finally, Ambedkar Buddhism is strongly associated with the midtwentieth century ‘revival’ of Buddhism in India and the rise of lowcaste politics in western and northern India. As described by Ram Vilas Paswan, ‘[w]hen we talk of Nalanda, Buddhism comes to our minds which has given India significant identity in the world. Baba Saheb Ambedkar revived it in 1956.’93 Prior to the large-scale conversion of Dalits inspired by Ambedkar, Buddhists in India were largely restricted to small Himalayan border populations, such as those in Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh (which later included refugees from Tibet), and so on. In contrast, Buddhism has been a continuously relevant and dominant social force for many East Asia Summit nations—reform and renewal movements notwithstanding. In some East Asia Summit countries—whether Theravada or Mahayana— Buddhism may be the official state religion, as in Cambodia94 or the de facto state religion, as in Myanmar and Thailand. In summary, Buddhism in India has a complex history that lends itself to two very different readings. In the pan-Indo-Asian recension, India, as Buddhism’s place of origin—is relatively unencumbered by contemporary entanglements of religiosity and national practices— and can thus offer a welcoming home to all contemporary and national forms of Buddhism without privileging or threatening the status of any of them. In the Indo-centric view, however, Indian Buddhism is richly resonant with numerous themes that are difficult to translate outside of India: the rise of low-caste politics, anti-caste movements, secularism (as opposed to religious communalism), the political empowering of Dalits, Adivasis, and others disadvantaged by the caste system, and so on. These divergent interpretations reveal 93 Rajya Sabha, The Nalanda University Bill 2010, p. 366. Constitution of Cambodia (1993) Article 43, ‘Buddhism shall be the religion of the State Kingdom of Cambodia’, The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, <http://cambodia.ohchr.org/klc_pages/KLC_files/section_001/section_01_01_ENG. pdf >, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 94 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 35 the complexity of Nalanda as both an Asian and Indian symbol and its capacity to be framed in the service of very different agendas. Prospects and reflections The tabling of the Nalanda initiative is proof of the strong mutual desire among Asian nations to develop intra-Asian cultural relationships. Collective goodwill towards the project is deep, as acknowledged in an Economist editorial: ‘ . . . the project’s appeal is clear: Nalanda offers both a glimpse of a glorious past and a chance of a bit of neighbourly collaboration’.95 Even China and India recently spoke in terms of this new common language of admiration, referring to each other as ‘neighbours’ and part of the ‘Asian family’ at a bilateral meeting between Wen Jiabao, the former Chinese premier, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in December 2010.96 Initially, there were many doubts about the project’s viability, particularly regarding funding. While all East Asia Summit members supported the project, only seven major commitments had been confirmed by late 2012, from China, Singapore, Thailand, and India. The largest contribution came from India: the Indian government committed ten million US$ towards the initial endowment (approved for release in January 2014), while the state of Bihar donated 446 acres of land.97 In 2010, China ‘welcomed’ India’s efforts to revive Nalanda and agreed to make a major donation. This pledge was fulfilled in November 2011 when Zhang Yen, the former Chinese ambassador to India (2008–2012), formally presented one million US$ towards the 95 The Economist (2010), ‘Ivory Pagodas: An Ancient Pan-Asian University Might Yet Open Again’, 2 September. 96 ‘India and China, being each other’s neighbour, have a shared interest in the stability, prosperity and security of the wider region. They agreed to intensify their dialogue on various aspects pertaining to this region and work together on realizing their common goals. The two sides believed that as members of the Asian family, stronger neighbourly relations and mutually beneficial cooperation between India and China help foster a peaceful and stable regional environment that promotes equality, mutual trust and mutual respect.’ Ministry of External Affairs India (2010), ‘Joint Communiqué of the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China’, 16 December, <http://mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/5158/ Joint+Communiqu+of+the+Republic+of+India+and+the+Peoples+Republic+ of+China>, [acessed 22 March 2014]. 97 Ministry of External Affairs India (2010), ‘Written Reply to Lok Sabha Question: Nalanda University Bill’, Press Information Bureau-Government of India, <http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=64617>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 36 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY construction of a ‘Chinese-style library’ at the new university. In his address, he noted that, ‘Nalanda University is a symbol of the centurylong cultural and (friendly) people-to-people exchanges among Asian countries in general, and between China and India in particular.’98 In 2010, Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister, announced that Australia would contribute a Chair of Ecology and Environment Studies to India’s Nalanda University, characterized as ‘a regional centre of learning’.99 Finally, news reports in 2011 suggested that a private donor had committed one million US$, and in March 2012, the government of Thailand donated 100,000US$, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shared news of developments on Nalanda with Lee Myung-Bak, president of South Korea.100 The university’s proposed location in Bihar is inspired but it has also posed deeply challenging logistical problems for the project. Bihar has long endured a reputation as India’s most troubled state in terms of law and order problems, human development indicators, infrastructure, caste-based violence, corruption, and so on. Numerous infrastructural milestones are planned, including the construction of an airport. Nevertheless, putting early scepticism in its place, Nalanda University is now reported to be on track to welcome its first batch of academic staff and students in September 2014.101 Chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar has been heralded for his efforts to rehabilitate the state and was re-elected in a landslide for a second term of five years in November 2010. While Amartya Sen confirmed that Kumar’s government has been ‘impeccably cooperative’, the project’s success naturally depends on more than state (and federal) government 98 However, a new area of Sino-Indian tension emerged in August 2011 which threatened to overshadow the donation. Chinese media reports indicated that a Hong Kong-based group, believed to be linked closely with the Chinese government, had signed an agreement with UNIDO, the UN’s industrial-development organization, for a proposed a three-billion dollar project to develop Lumbini, Nepal, a site revered as the Buddha’s birthplace. It is presently unclear whether this initiative will be pursued. See The Economist (2011), ‘A Bizarre Project in Nepal—at Buddha’s Birthplace: A Chinese Development Proposal Causes Disbelief’, 20 August. 99 Prime Minister of Australia Press Office (2010), ‘Prime Minister Attends East Asia Summit in Hanoi’, 31 October, <http://pmtranscripts.dpmc. gov.au/browse.php?did=17447>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 100 See <http://pmindia.gov.in/press-details.php?nodeid=1401>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. 101 See <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Nalanda-Universitysacademic-session-to-start-in-September-Amaratya-Sen/articleshow/28608507.cms>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 37 support.102 As just one example of local opposition, Chief Minister Kumar and then-president of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam visited Nalanda in February 2008 where they were pelted with stones by local farmers aggrieved with the compensation offered for the land commandeered by the state of Bihar for the project.103 At the federal level, there continue to be concerns about the role of the government in university affairs. The internationally scrutinized staging of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October 2010 shows that effective implementation of large-scale multi-year projects—even those of great international prestige for the state— continues to be an issue for the federal government of India.104 Amartya Sen has been a tireless advocate of all things Nalanda, but his remarks in some interviews since 2011 reveal dissatisfaction with ‘administrative delays’ and ‘bureaucratic control’ in India.105 For example, Gopa Sabharwal was selected by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the university’s vice-chancellor in September 2010, yet the appointment was not officially confirmed until March 2012. Some Indian mass media commentators, especially Tehelka and the Bihar Times, have been extremely critical of almost every aspect of the revival—from the inclusion of business and technology in the proposed curriculum and the up-and-down status of the university’s website to the vice-chancellor’s qualifications and salary and even the location of the university’s temporary rented offices in New Delhi against the charge that they ought to be in Bihar.106 Furthermore, the wisdom of launching this institution may generally be called into question, given that higher education in India is in need 102 Sinha ‘Q & A’. Anand Mohan Sahay (2008), ‘Brickbats Not Bouquets for Kalam in Nalanda’, Rediff India, Patna, 8 February. Before becoming chief minister, Kumar was elected to the Lok Sabha from Nalanda constituency in 2004. 104 BBC (2010), ‘Q & A: India’s Commonwealth Games Crisis’, 22 September. 105 Aarti Dhar (2011), ‘Bureaucratic Hurdles Delaying Nalanda Varsity: Amartya Sen’, The Hindu, 8 October; Sinha ‘Q & A’. 106 The Indian Ministry of External Affairs has confirmed this curriculum for Nalanda’s seven founding schools: Historical Studies; Ecology and Environment Studies; Buddhist Studies, Philosophy and Comparative Religion; Languages and Literature; International Relations and Peace Studies; Information Sciences and Technology; Business Management in relation to Public Policy and Development Studies. See <http://www.nalandauniv.edu.in/schools.html>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. Also see Iftikhar Gilani (2011), ‘A Scam in the Name of Reviving Nalanda Heritage’, Tehelka, New Delhi. The Bihar Times regularly publishes ad hominen remarks about Amartya Sen: see, for example, Bihar Times (2012), ‘Kalam’s Letter Bared Truth About Nalanda University’, Patna, 17 June. 103 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 38 ANDREA MARION PINKNEY of reform. The Times Higher Education world university rankings are dominated by American institutions, but numerous Asian universities have made the cut—from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Yet not a single Indian university is listed within the top 300 institutions, and only one falls within the top 400— the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. Ranked within the 301st and 350th range, IIT Bombay is part of the autonomously functioning IIT network, granted by an act of parliament in 1961.107 And, almost simultaneously, the federal government launched a second international university with special operational status: the new South Asian University, which welcomed its first cohort of students in 2010. The rationale for this, as stated by one of its architects, was to ‘facilitate autonomy from bureaucratic stranglehold’.108 As the project continues to move forward, it will have many challenges to overcome, perhaps none greater than reconciling the past Nalanda with the future Nalanda. And yet there are grounds for optimism. To understand why, it is instructive to consider the state of intra-Asian relationships among the Buddhist communities in nearby Bodhgaya, Bihar. There, for the better part of a century, representatives from various Buddhist nations have shown limited engagement with one another.109 While these groups participate in some collaborative projects, they generally operate in tandem in Bodhgaya rather than in concert. However, a now-annual event (inaugurated in 2006) has newly united representatives from numerous Theravadin Buddhist countries in collaboratively chanting the Pali Tipit.aka in the precincts of the Mahabodhi temple, the site where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment in 107 Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2011–2012), <http:// www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011–2012/top-400. html>, [accessed 21 January 2014]. 108 South Asian University (2012), ‘About the University’, <http://www. southasianuniversity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= 3&Itemid=128>, accessed 20 January 2014]. 109 Facilities are sponsored by nearly every Buddhist country: the first Burmese rest house was established in Bodh Gaya in 1877; the current Burmese Vihāra was established in 1936; the Thai Monastery was constructed in 1966; the Japanese rest house was formally opened in 1970, although Japan has liberally supported the Mahabodhi society since the nineteenth century—Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko visited Bodhgaya in 1960. For full details on this history, see David Geary (2009), ‘Destination Enlightenment: Buddhism and the Global Bazaar in Bodh Gaya, Bihar’, PhD thesis, University of British Columbia. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93 NALANDA REVIVAL AND ASIAN EDUCATION 39 Bihar.110 Each country sponsors separate national stalls, where monks in the unique dress of their state distinctively intone the scriptures. Collectively, the event gives a moving impression of both the diversity and unity of practices encompassed by the Theravadin Buddhist schools. The final effect, however, is somewhat cacophonous, as each group simultaneously chants over one another at different levels of amplification. As illustrated by this anecdote, certain elements of Buddhism, such as reverence for the sites associated with the historical Buddha, may be embraced universally by Buddhists worldwide. But in the case of the Tipit.aka chanting, we can see how difficult it can be to harmonize the highly refined and culturally embedded practices drawn from the mosaic of practices found among Asian Buddhists. In contrast, the comparison between Bodhgaya and Nalanda is provocative: could a secular, modern university, which takes historical Buddhism as a symbolic icon, transcend national interests and norms? Can a denatured decoction of intra-Asian Buddhism and Asian education mediate the differences between pan-Indo-Asian and Indian visions of Nalanda? Will the intersection of these two streams foster the realization of a pan-Indo-Asian model of higher education? India’s strategy of ‘looking east’ is being ardently reciprocated by those in Singapore, Japan—and even China—who are ‘looking west’ to India in the name of Buddhism, education, and a resurgent Asia for the third millennium. Analysis of the Nalanda revival project can thus offer important insights into contemporary efforts to develop an Asian model of education, through the rereading and rewriting of the ancient Nalanda Mahāvihāra from multiple intra-Asian perspectives. 110 Tipitaka Chanting Council (2011), ‘Mission’, <http://www. tipitakachantingcouncil.org/index.php/2013-11-11-03-12-15/mission>, [accessed 22 March 2014]. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Jul 2014 IP address: 24.202.103.93