Nalanda University in ancient India was a renowned center of ............

Concept: In early-medieval India a mahavihara was a large residential monastic university maintained by a religious order. The tradition such a centre belongs to is fixed by three things - the textual corpus taught in it, the ordination lineage of its resident teachers, and the patronage recorded for it - not by the range of subsidiary subjects it happened to offer.

Application: Nalanda, in present-day Bihar, was established under Gupta patronage (traditionally credited to Kumaragupta I, c. 5th century CE) and functioned as a Buddhist mahavihara until the late 12th century. Its residents were ordained Buddhist monks, its core curriculum was the Tripitaka together with Mahayana philosophy, Abhidharma and Buddhist logic (pramana), and the seventh-century Chinese pilgrims Xuanzang and Yijing, who studied there, describe monastic ordination and Buddhist doctrinal study as the centre of its life; the mahavihara housed several Buddhist doctrinal schools rather than a single sect. Vedic texts, grammar, medicine and astronomy were taught as subsidiary subjects, which is exactly why the affiliation test above matters.

Cross-check - how the four traditions were organised:

• Brahminical learning was carried by brahmana teachers in gurukulas and in ghatikas attached to temples, not by a monastic order.

• Jain learning was carried by monastic acharyas at centres such as Shravanabelagola and the Jain mathas of Gujarat and Karnataka, and preserved in jnana-bhandaras.

• Kshatriya learning is the occupational training of a varna - archery, horsemanship and statecraft - and never founded residential universities.

• Buddhist learning was the tradition organised as large residential mahaviharas under royal patronage, the form Nalanda took alongside Vikramashila and Odantapuri.

Result: Nalanda was a renowned centre of Buddhist learning.