The University of Nalanda c18.27

c18.27

Explaining, first, the causes of Nālandā’s artistic influence over the Malay Archipelago, he says that Nālandā, in the beginning, brought to bear its cultural influence over the Archipelago, for “among the constituent parts of Hindu-Javanese culture, one of its essential features, Mahāyāna Buddhism originates from Nālandā.”² In support of this remark, he cites epigraphical evidence. “For in the Malay inscription of Crīvijaya found at Talang Toewo and dated in the year 684 A.D,” he says, “there occur some terms which are of a distinctly Mahāyānist character. M. G. Coedes³ has proved that they belong to the sphere of the Vajrayāna or Tantrayāna which arose at Nālandā from the Yogācāra school at a time not long anterior to that of the inscription of Talang Toewo.” “So we may take it for established,” says Kempers, “that Nālandā has exercised a great influence on the religious life in Malay Archipelago,” and further (because of the close epigraphical similarities of the Pāla and Java inscriptions) that relation between the Nālandā monastery and the Archipelago must have been continuous.⁴