recitation.” Nalanda was a center for advanced teaching, and by the 600s
pupils had to pass an entrance examination, perhaps to keep down their
numbers. After passing preliminary courses and tests in Mahayana philoso-
phy, students took specialized schools of discussion. Debates before the assem-
bly were the place where one acquired a reputation, and learned men came
from around India to advance their careers. In all, there were five such ma-
havihara universities in Bihar and Bengal at the time; the second most famous
was Vikramashila, with 1,000 students (Dutt, 1962: 204, 235, 313, 327,
331–348, 360).
Cosmopolitanism was also promoted by the appearance of libraries, such
as the one at Nalanda which burned uncontrollably when sacked by the
Muslims. We know that at Nalanda not only were the texts of the rival
Buddhist philosophies studied, Hinayana as well as the Mahayana, but also
secular topics such as logic, medicine, and grammar, and even the Hindu
specialties, the Vedas, magic (Atharvaveda), and Samkhya (Dutt, 1962: 333).
On the other side, it was from this time forward that Hindu philosophers wrote
critiques of rival factions, both Hindu and Buddhist. Cultural capital was
explicitly borrowed; an instance of repeated crossover between the camps is
the work of Shankarasvamin (600s), a Nyaya logician whose commentary on
Dignaga became the most famous introductory logic text in Buddhist China
and Japan (Nakamura, 1980: 300).
This society was sophisticated and rather worldly. As we can tell from the
classic Hindu dramas and poetry of the Gupta period (Kalidasa, Bhasa, the
novelist Dandin) and from the lifestyle depicted in the erotic handbook the
Kamasutra, religion was a taken-for-granted institution of the social world,
not necessarily an otherworldly preoccupation, and monks could be spies and
go-betweens for love affairs. The culminating Buddhist philosopher Dhar-
makirti, whose philosophy limits knowledge to the world of experience, had
a rather secular reputation. It is not surprising that the Lokayata, the materi-
alist “heresy” dating from the time of the Buddha, had its last living repre-
sentatives in Jayarasi and Purandhara, contemporaries of Dharmakirti (Das-
gupta, 1921–1955: 3:536). The changeover to Hindu intellectual dominance
that followed resembles somewhat a “Protestant” Reformation against a Ren-
aissance-like decadence of Buddhist “Catholicism.”
In this period crystallized what later came to be regarded as the orthodox
Hindu “six darshanas.” Retrospective ideology traces Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya,
Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, and Vedanta back to the early Upanishadic period or
before. But it is reasonably clear that until around 200–300 c.e. or even later,
there were no Hindu philosophical schools as such, holding distinctive territo-
ries in the intellectual attention space. There was a morass of positions and
tendencies, none of which rose clearly above the others, and none defended by
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