Foundation
Odantapuri, or Uddandapura, was one of the great monasteries, the mahaviharas, that flourished in eastern India under the Pala kings from the eighth to the twelfth century, alongside Nalanda, Vikramashila, Somapura and Jagaddala. Tibetan historians, such as Taranatha in the seventeenth century, attribute its foundation to the first Pala king, Gopala, or to his son Dharmapala, in the eighth century. It stood a few kilometres from Nalanda, at the place now called Bihar Sharif.
The Tibetan connection
Tibetan sources say that when the Tibetan king Trisong Detsen founded Samye, the first monastery in Tibet, in the later eighth century, it was modelled on Odantapuri. The Indian abbot Shantarakshita, who ordained the first Tibetan monks there, had come from Nalanda. Samye's plan, with a central temple representing Mount Meru surrounded by shrines representing the continents and a circular wall, follows a cosmological diagram, and it is not certain how closely it resembled the Indian monastery.
Odantapuri's monks were trained in the tantric and scholastic traditions of late Indian Buddhism, and it supported a large community. Tibetan accounts give numbers of monks in the thousands, figures that should be treated with caution.
Destruction
At the end of the twelfth century Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji, a Turkic commander serving the Ghurids, raided south Bihar. The historian Minhaj al-Siraj, writing in the 1250s and drawing on the account of two men who had taken part, describes how Bakhtiyar's men attacked a fortified place whose inhabitants were mostly shaven-headed Brahmans, killed them, and found it full of books that no one could read. When people who could read them were found, it turned out that the whole place was a college, called in the Hindi language a vihara. Most historians identify this account with Odantapuri, and date it to about 1193, though the date and the identification with one monastery rather than several are debated. The region took its name, Bihar, from the viharas, and the town that grew on the site became Bihar Sharif, later a seat of Sufi saints.
Many monks fled to Nepal and Tibet, carrying manuscripts with them, and the monasteries of eastern India did not recover.
The site
The monastery's remains have not been conclusively identified. A large mound in Bihar Sharif, under the fort hill and the town, is often proposed as its site, and occasional finds of Buddhist sculpture support the general location. Systematic excavation has not been possible because of the town built over it.
Further reading
- Snellgrove, David. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Serindia, 1987
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
- Lopez, Donald S. The Story of Buddhism. HarperSanFrancisco, 2001
See also
- Pala dynasty — The Pala dynasty was a Buddhist-patronizing dynasty that ruled Bengal and Bihar from the mid-8th to the 12th century CE, founded by the elected king Gopala and reaching its territorial and cultural height under Dharmapala and Devapala.
- Nalanda — Nalanda was a major Buddhist monastic university in ancient Magadha, in present-day Bihar, active from roughly the 5th to the 12th century CE and among the earliest and most influential centers of higher learning in the premodern world.
- Vikramashila — Vikramashila was a Buddhist monastic university in Bihar founded under the Palas, a major centre of tantric study, destroyed at the end of the twelfth century.
- Destruction of Nalanda — The sack of Nalanda Mahavihara in Bihar, conventionally dated to 1193 CE and attributed to the Turkic military commander Bakhtiyar Khalji, ended the working life of one of the ancient world's largest Buddhist monastic universities.
- Tibet — Tibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.