The Book presents a brief account of the great higher learning Buddhist Institutions of Ancient India. Some of those flourished several centuries before the higher learning institutions of the then western world. The reader may have comprehensive ideas of the education imparted in those institutions during the long period of about 2,000 years beginning with the 5th century BC and ending with the 12th century AD. The Universities of ancient India do not connote all the features possessed by the modern Universities of the East and the West of present day. But those Universities of ancient India had also impressive teaching and research program. Many of the teachers of those universities were scholars of very high eminence and repute. In addition, there existed very ideal teacher-student relationship, which has no parallel in the long history of educational thought and practice. This book will enable the reader to compare the present institutions with those of ancient India and realize that the centers of high learning in ancient India were unique in their organization and scholarship during those distant times when elsewhere in the world very few had thought of organized education at the university level.

The Indian subcontinent is the birthplace of Buddhism. Here is where the Buddha was born, where he lived and died. Here is where the first Buddhist councils were established, where the first monks practiced meditation, where the first stupas were built, where the great monasteries like Nalanda were established, where scholars from elsewhere in the Buddhist world came to learn Buddhism and so on. The earliest historical sites related to Buddhism were here too. In this book we provide an overview of historical sites related to Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent: including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal. Here too, we only mention some of the most important sites, for listing out all sites related to Buddhism is virtually impossible on account of their great number. We have also covered holy sites belonging to all the important sects of Buddhism, including Theravada and Mahayana and Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism. Our preference is to focus on historically important and more famous sites. For the purposes of this book, we leave out other important Asian Buddhist countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, China and Japan for now. We will consider covering those sites in a separate book at a later time. For the purpose of covering the sites, we group them based on proximity. The author has personally visited most of the sites mentioned in this book in India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The aim of this book is to provide the prospective traveler and pilgrim an overview of the sites so that they too can visit and see for themselves.

An indispensable resource for readers investigating how religion has influenced societies and cultures, this three-volume encyclopedia assesses and synthesizes the many ways in which religious faith has shaped societies from the ancient world to today. Each volume of the set focuses on a different era of world history, ranging through the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. Every volume is filled with essays that focus on religious themes from different geographical regions. For example, volume one includes essays considering religion in ancient Rome, while volume three features essays focused on religion in modern Africa. This accessible layout makes it easy for readers to learn more about the ways that religion and society have intersected over the centuries, as well as specific religious trends, events, and milestones in a particular era and place in world history. Taken as a a whole, this ambitious and wide-ranging work gathers more than 500 essays from more than 150 scholars who share their expertise and knowledge about religious faiths, tenets, people, places, and events that have influenced the development of civilization over the course of recorded human history.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This interdisciplinary study is the first book to provide a complete survey of Śrī Nālandā Mahāvihāra from the perspective of its educational curricula as well as its religious influence. It provides detailed descriptions of the origin, growth, management, and academic and cultural life of Nālandā, with particular attention to its pedagogy, curriculum, teachers, and students. It also presents an alternative interpretation of nationalist and popular notions about Śrī Nālandā as an international university and proves that it was, at its core, a Buddhist monastery and an institution of Buddhist learning focused on the study and promotion of Buddhism.

This open access book critiques real world learning across both the curriculum and extracurricular activities. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as business, health, fashion, sociology and geography, the editors and authors employ a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how this concept is being applied in higher education. Divided into three parts, the authors and contributors analyse broader applications of real world learning, student experience of practicing in a real world setting, and how learning strategies can be employed to engage students in real world learning. The editors and contributors provide up-to-date, cross-disciplinary and international insights into how real world learning could be integrated into the higher education curriculum to support effective, relevant and life-long learning for 21st century students.

In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka’s life from the knot of legend that surrounds it, Nayanjot Lahiri presents a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens our understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka’s lifetime and dominion. At the center of Lahiri’s account is the complex personality of the Maurya dynasty’s third emperor—a strikingly contemplative monarch, at once ambitious and humane, who introduced a unique style of benevolent governance. Ashoka’s edicts, carved into rock faces and stone pillars, reveal an eloquent ruler who, unusually for the time, wished to communicate directly with his people. The voice he projected was personal, speaking candidly about the watershed events in his life and expressing his regrets as well as his wishes to his subjects. Ashoka’s humanity is conveyed most powerfully in his tale of the Battle of Kalinga. Against all conventions of statecraft, he depicts his victory as a tragedy rather than a triumph—a shattering experience that led him to embrace the Buddha’s teachings. Ashoka in Ancient India breathes new life into a towering figure of the ancient world, one who, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, “was greater than any king or emperor.”