The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c9.s2.9

c9.s2.9

The Nâlandâ corporation was a residential-teaching university like the *El Azhar* at Cairo and gave instruction, room, board, and medicine free of any cost whatsoever. Hiuen Thsang was very much impressed by its architectural magnificence. "The richly adorned towers", as we read in his Chinese biography, "and the fairy-like turrets, like pointed hill-tops are congregated together. The observatories seem to be lost in the vapors of the morning and the upper rooms tower above the clouds".³ This was the institution that inspired in subsequent years the monastery-college at Horiyuji near Nara in Japan. And it is on record that the Afghan scholar Vîra-deva was elected Chancellor here in the ninth century then enjoying the patronage of Deva-pâla,⁴ the Bengali *sârvabhauma* of Eastern India. It is obvious that for several centuries after their establishment the Universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford⁵ would certainly have envied the material endowments and international reputation enjoyed by the presidents and faculties of Nâlandâ for about seven hundred years (c 500—1200). The long story of this university bears undoubted testimony to the continuous and cumulative organizing ability of the race in which it flourished.