The Pala Empire

← Encyclopedia

On the alluvial plain where the Ganges braids toward the sea, sometime around 750, the warring chiefs of Bengal did a thing the chronicles found worth remembering: they elected a king. The land had fallen into what Sanskrit sources call matsya-nyaya, the “law of the fishes” — the strong devouring the weak, the condition of a country with no center after the collapse of authority that followed the death of Shashanka and the brief, exhausting overreach of Harsha. Out of that anarchy the notables raised a man named Gopala. He was, by the tradition that runs through the later copper-plate genealogies, a Buddhist; and the dynasty he founded would hold Bengal and Bihar, with fluctuating reach across the whole northern plain, for more than four centuries — until roughly 1161. For most of that span the Palas were the last royal house on the Indian subcontinent to make Buddhism the work of the state. When their patronage failed, the institutional life of Buddhism in the land of its origin failed with it. What survived did so because the Palas had already sent it north.

The founding and the consolidation

Gopala’s reign (conventionally c. 750–770) is thinly documented; he is more securely known as the father of the dynasty than as the agent of its expansion. To him the tradition attributes the founding of the monastery of Odantapuri in Bihar, the first of the great Pala foundations. The empire’s true architects were his son and grandson.

Dharmapala (r. c. 770–810) turned a Bengal kingdom into an imperial contender. His reign falls inside the long contest historians call the tripartite struggle — the three-cornered war for Kanyakubja (Kanauj), the prestige-capital of the Gangetic heartland, fought among the Palas of the east, the Gurjara-Pratiharas of the west, and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan. Dharmapala was twice defeated by the southern and western powers and twice recovered; at his height he installed a client on the throne of Kanauj and held a grand assembly there at which subordinate rulers from across the north are recorded as attending. The reach was real if not durable: Pala sovereignty over the far west was a matter of suzerainty and ceremony more than settled administration. What endured from Dharmapala was institutional. He founded Vikramashila, on a bluff above the Ganges at modern Antichak in the Bhagalpur district, which would become the premier monastic university of the late Indian Buddhist world; and he founded the vast monastery of Somapura at Paharpur in present-day Bangladesh — its identification fixed by excavated seals reading Shri-Somapure-Shri-Dharmapaladeva-Mahavihariya, the single largest monastic establishment south of the Himalayas.

Devapala (r. c. 810–850) carried Pala power to its widest extent. The court poets credit him with campaigns from the Himalayan foothills to the Vindhyas and from the eastern to the western sea; the rhetoric is conventional, but the kingdom under him plainly dominated the eastern plain and exacted recognition far beyond it. It is from Devapala’s reign that the empire’s outward-facing Buddhist character is documented most vividly. The Nalanda copper-plate, datable to around 860, records that Devapala granted five villages — Nandivanaka, Manivataka, Natika, Hasti, and Palamaka — for the upkeep of a monastery at Nalanda built at the request of Balaputradeva, a Shailendra king of Suvarnadvipa, the Sumatra-and-Java maritime realm of Srivijaya. A Sumatran sovereign endowing a monastery in Bihar, and a Bihar emperor assigning village revenues to maintain it, is a single document opening onto an entire Buddhist world that ran by sea from the Bay of Bengal to the Indonesian archipelago. The Pala court stood at one pole of that world; the temple-building Shailendras, who raised Borobudur in central Java, stood at the other. The same Bay of Bengal that carried the Pala–Shailendra correspondence would later carry the war-fleets of the Tamil Shaiva Chola power, whose eleventh-century raid on Srivijaya marks a sharper, more martial chapter in the long Indic engagement with the archipelago.

The empire as patron: the monastic universities

The deepest meaning of the Pala state lies not in its battles but in what it built and sustained. Across Bengal and Bihar the dynasty financed an interlocking network of mahaviharas — great monasteries that were simultaneously residential universities, libraries, scriptoria, and ateliers. Tibetan tradition would later remember five as preeminent: Nalanda, already ancient and inherited by the Palas rather than founded by them; Vikramashila, the dynasty’s own creation and the late period’s flagship; Odantapuri, Gopala’s foundation; Somapura at Paharpur; and Jagaddala, the last of the great houses, established under the later Palas. They were not isolated cloisters. Teachers and students moved among them; a scholar might examine at one and hold a chair at another; the network functioned as a single intellectual system underwritten by royal land-grants.

Nalanda, the most famous of them, had been a center of learning since the Gupta age and had hosted the Chinese pilgrims Xuanzang and Yijing in the seventh century. Under the Palas it remained illustrious, though by the eleventh century its primacy had passed to Vikramashila. The newer university was the more characteristically Pala institution. By the accounts preserved in later Tibetan histories it housed something over a hundred teachers and on the order of a thousand resident students, and it was governed by a college of senior scholars who held endowed chairs known as the dvarapalas, the “gate-guardians,” each notionally warding one of the directions of the compound. These were the most coveted positions in the Buddhist world of the eleventh century, and the men who held them are the men through whom the late Indian transmission ran.

The curriculum of these houses was the full inheritance of Indian Buddhist thought. Its philosophical spine was Madhyamaka, the “middle way” dialectic descended from Nagarjuna, taught alongside the rival idealism of Yogacara and the formidable logic-and-epistemology tradition of pramana that ran from Dignaga and Dharmakirti. But the Pala universities were also the workshops in which the Mahayana sūtra corpus was copied, illuminated, and venerated as the physical body of the Dharma. The Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita — the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, the philosophical heart of Madhyamaka devotion — survives in a series of illuminated palm-leaf manuscripts produced in these scriptoria, their margins crowded with painted bodhisattvas. That painting tradition, in its ornamental Pala script and its vermilion-and-yellow palette, became the direct ancestor of the Tibetan thangka.

The tantric turn: Mantrayana and the great adepts

What makes the Pala period decisive for the history of esoteric Buddhism is that the new tantric literatures did not develop against the scholastic universities but inside them. The mantra- and yogini-tantra cycles — the Mantrayana, the “vehicle of mantras,” with its mandalas, its consecratory initiations, and its disciplines of deity-yoga in which the practitioner cultivates identification with an awakened figure — were studied, systematized, and ritually elaborated by the same Vikramashila masters who held the philosophy chairs. The tantric synthesis of late Indian Buddhism was, in its institutional form, a product of the Pala court’s endowments.

It was also the era of the mahasiddhas, the “great adepts” counted by convention as eighty-four — the song-poets, yogins, and transgressive saints whom later tradition placed at the fountainhead of every tantric lineage. Their world was the Pala world. Several of the most consequential held positions at Vikramashila itself: Naropa as gate-guardian of the northern direction, Ratnakarashanti at the east, the scholar-siddha Maitripa who systematized the doctrine of amanasikara, “mental non-engagement,” that would anchor the Tibetan Kagyu transmission of mahamudra. The vernacular literature of this milieu — the caryagiti, the “performance songs” in Old Bengali and Apabhramsha recovered from a Kathmandu palm-leaf manuscript only in 1907 — encodes contemplative instruction in the deliberately ambiguous “twilight language” of the siddhas, and stands at the head of the literary history of Bengali itself.

The relationship between this Buddhist tantra and the contemporaneous Shaiva and Shakta tantra of early-medieval India is the most consequential live debate in the field. Alexis Sanderson’s monumental study The Śaiva Age argues that Shaivism was the dominant religious-political force of the period and that Buddhist tantra developed through systematic adaptation of Shaiva ritual models, with demonstrable textual borrowing. Christian Wedemeyer, in Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism, resists the “appropriation” frame, reading tantric practice as continuous with mainstream Mahayana and its transgressive register as a semiotics of nonduality rather than a borrowing. Neither has displaced the other; the philological case for specific borrowings remains strong, and the methodological critique of “appropriation” remains sharp. The Pala universities are the ground on which the question is fought, because they are where Buddhist and Shaiva tantra co-existed in measurable contact.

Tara and the iconography of a Buddhist state

The deity who presided over the Pala century was Tara, the savioress, the bodhisattva who hears the cry and crosses to the one who suffers — tarini, “she who ferries across.” Her cult, already old, reached its full flowering under the Palas; their imperial banner, by one tradition, carried her figure. Out of the bronze-casters’ workshops at Nalanda and at Kurkihar near Bodh Gaya, and from the black-stone ateliers of Bengal, came image after image of Tara, of Avalokiteshvara, of Manjushri and Maitreya and Vajrapani, of Prajnaparamita personified as the mother of all buddhas — the whole expanded pantheon of late Mahayana and Vajrayana given sculptural form. The Pala “Eastern Indian” style, with its lustrous black chlorite, its sharp linear elegance, and its crowded subsidiary figures, is one of the great achievements of Indian sculpture; through the bronzes carried north and the manuscripts that traveled with the teachers, it set the visual grammar of Buddhist art across the Himalayas and into Tibet. Eastward too its reach is legible: the polylobed arches, Buddha-niches, and ornamented doorways of the temple-plain at Bagan, the Burmese Theravada capital on the Irrawaddy, carry the marks of Pala-Bengal models transmitted across the Bay. The state did not merely tolerate the Buddha’s religion. It rendered it in stone and metal as the public face of sovereignty.

The transmission north: Atisa and the seeding of Tibet

The Pala achievement that most outlived the Pala state was the export of its Buddhism to Tibet during the phyi dar, the “later diffusion” of the Dharma across the Himalayas after the collapse of the old Tibetan empire. The corridor ran through the Pala universities, and its single most important traveler was Atisa.

Atisa Dipankara Shrijnana, born in Bengal in 982, was the abbot-scholar most closely identified with Vikramashila — a master of the full scholastic and tantric curriculum who had studied as far afield as the Buddhist communities of Suvarnadvipa across the sea. When the kings of the western Tibetan realm of Guge, alarmed at the disorder into which Buddhism had fallen after the persecutions of the ninth century, sought a teacher of unimpeachable authority to set it right, they sent embassies and treasure south to the Pala domains. The invitation, pressed by the royal monk Yeshe-O and renewed by his successor Jangchub-O, drew Atisa out of Vikramashila around 1040; he reached Tibet in 1042 and spent the last twelve years of his life there, dying in 1054. At Jangchub-O’s request he composed the Bodhipathapradipa, the “Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment,” sixty-eight verses that founded the entire lamrim — “stages of the path” — genre of Tibetan literature. The Kadam order grew from his teaching and was later absorbed into the Gelug.

Atisa was not alone. The same decades saw Marpa make his journeys from southern Tibet to study under Naropa and Maitripa, carrying home the transmissions that founded the Kagyu; Drogmi carried the lineage of the siddha Virupa that became the Sakya Lamdre. What Tibetan Buddhism received in these generations — its tantric canon, its lineage charters, its Vajrayana liturgical cycles, its philosophy, even the painted palette of its sacred images — it received from the Pala-sustained universities of Bengal and Bihar. The other surviving channel ran across the lower passes into the Kathmandu Valley, where the Newar Vajrayana of the hereditary Vajracharya priests preserves to this day the only continuously living Indic tantric Buddhism on the subcontinent itself, transmitting in Sanskrit the Cakrasamvara and Hevajra cycles that the Pala masters had codified.

Decline, the Senas, and the end

The empire that did all this was, by the time of its greatest cultural reach, already in long decline as a power. After Devapala the dynasty contracted; for the better part of a century the Palas were a regional kingdom among rivals, their western and southern conquests gone. Mahipala I, who came to the throne around 988, mounted a determined recovery — extending Pala authority again toward Varanasi and restoring the dynasty’s fortunes enough that later memory treats him as a second founder. A further crisis followed: the Kaivarta revolt, a rising in the Pala heartland of Varendra in northern Bengal that wrested the homeland away, until Ramapala (r. c. 1077–1120) recovered it — a struggle commemorated in the Ramacharita of the court poet Sandhyakar Nandi, a deliberately double-meaning Sanskrit poem that narrates at once the life of the god Rama and the campaigns of the king. Ramapala is the last Pala ruler of real consequence.

After him the end came quickly. The Sena dynasty, Brahmanical in orientation and rising from the south of Bengal, displaced the Palas across the twelfth century; the last Pala claimants held only fragments of Bihar by the 1160s. With the change of dynasty went the royal land-grants on which the monastic economy depended. The Senas did not endow the mahaviharas; the great houses, already cut off from a broad lay base and concentrated in a few enormous establishments, were dangerously exposed. When the Ghurid commander Bakhtiyar Khalji’s cavalry struck into Bihar around the turn of the thirteenth century, the monastic universities — Odantapuri certainly, Vikramashila and Nalanda in the same span — were sacked and their communities scattered. The collapse of institutional Buddhism in eastern India was not a single catastrophe but the convergence of several: the withdrawal of Pala patronage, the Sena reorientation, the Turkic raids, the monasteries’ own isolation from the countryside. The Tibetan monk Dharmasvamin, visiting Nalanda in the 1230s, found a handful of monks still teaching amid the ruins.

The polity was gone, and with it the patronage that had fed the monasteries. By then the Pala houses had already sent their learning north — Atisa to the courts of western Tibet, the lineages of Naropa and Virupa into the schools that carried them, the black-stone iconography of the Kurkihar bronzes copied by Himalayan casters. What the dynasty itself had raised still stands on the Bengal plain: at Paharpur the cruciform brick mass of the Somapura Mahavihara, the largest monastery the subcontinent ever built, its terraced courts open to the same sky twelve centuries after Dharmapala enclosed them.

Scholarship and sources

The political reconstruction of the dynasty rests on its epigraphic record — copper-plate land-grants and stone inscriptions — read against the Ramacharita of Sandhyakar Nandi and the testimony of Tibetan historians, above all Taranatha’s seventeenth-century History of Buddhism in India. The single richest document for the empire’s Buddhist and maritime reach is the Nalanda copper-plate of Devapaladeva, recovered in 1921 from Monastery 1 at Nalanda and recording the Shailendra-endowed monastery and the five granted villages; it remains the foundational testimony to the long intercourse between the Pala court and the Srivijaya world.

The institutional and religious history is treated most fully in Ronald M. Davidson’s Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (Columbia, 2002), which sets the rise of the tantric synthesis squarely within the Pala political economy, and continued in his Tibetan Renaissance (2005) on the transmission north. The Buddhist–Shaiva question is argued in Alexis Sanderson’s “The Śaiva Age” (in Shingo Einoo, ed., Genesis and Development of Tantrism, 2009) and contested in Christian K. Wedemeyer’s Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism (Columbia, 2013). The siddha milieu and its vernacular songs are edited and studied in Per Kvaerne’s An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (1977) and Roger R. Jackson’s Tantric Treasures (2004). On the art, the Pala school of illuminated manuscript painting is documented in the surviving Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita folios held in major collections — among them a Pala-period folio in the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and in the bronze hoards of Nalanda and Kurkihar. On Atisa and the founding of the lamrim tradition, the biographical record is gathered at the Treasury of Lives. The Mahayana sūtra literature that the Pala scriptoria copied and venerated — including the Perfection of Wisdom corpus — is available in the early critical translations gathered in the Sacred Books of the East.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49, 1894) — the Mahāyāna sūtra inheritance copied and worshipped in the Pala scriptoria

→ Related: Buddhism · Buddhist Madhyamaka · Indian Mantrayana · Mahasiddha Tradition · Vajrayana Deity Yoga · Tibetan Buddhism · Tibetan Vajrayana · Newar Vajrayana · Tara · Buddha · Gupta Empire · Chola Empire · Pagan Bagan