History of Chemistry in Ancient and Medieval India, Incorporating the History of Hindu Chemistry by Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray c17.19

c17.19

It will be noticed that the monks of the monasteries of Udandapura and Vikramsila on their dispersion carried with them their learning and arts in the same manner as the Byzantine Greeks on their expulsion from Constantinople bore with them their intellectual treasures to the Italian cities. In the kingdom of the Deccan and in Tibet the Buddhist refugees found hospitable asylums, just as the Greek philosophers found in the Florentine Republic under the Medici. From the eleventh century the Deccan thus became the refuge and the centre of literary activity in general, while in the Northern India it was more or less arrested by the inroads and ravages of the Mohammedans. We thus find that Tantric mysticism with alchemy as an integral part was cultivated in the universities of Nalanda, Udandapura and Vikramsila in Magadha and Central India and from thence it spread to Bhot (Tibet) and the regions lying to the south-east of it, and to South India.