Latest / The Srivijaya Empire: Southeast Asia's Forgotten Maritime Superpower — Fexingo History / Srivijaya's Buddhist University: Learning at the Crossroads
Transcript
- Lucas: So we've talked a lot about Srivijaya's trade, its ships, its wars. But there's another side to this empire that doesn't get as much attention — Srivijaya as a seat of learning. A kind of Buddhist university network that drew scholars from across Asia. Luna: I remember Yijing studied there, and Atisha too. But was it a formal university like Nalanda? Lucas: Not exactly a single campus. More like a cluster of monastic centers, especially around Palembang and later Muaro Jambi. They had libraries, translation bureaus, scriptoria — places where monks copied and translated texts from Sanskrit into Chinese and Tibetan. Yijing spent about six years there in the late 600s, and he wrote that Srivijaya had over a thousand monks studying the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya — that's the monastic code. Luna: A thousand monks. That's a serious scholarly community. Lucas: It was. And the curriculum wasn't just Vinaya. They studied Mahayana sutras, logic, grammar, even tantric texts. The Maharajas actively sponsored this. Balaputradewa, the Sailendra king who built the Golden Tara statue we discussed, also donated funds and built viharas — monks' residences. We know from a Nalanda copperplate inscription that he actually built a monastery at Nalanda itself, funded by revenues from five Indian villages. Luna: So he was supporting learning both at home and abroad. That's like a medieval endowment. Lucas: Exactly. And there's evidence that Srivijaya wasn't just importing knowledge — it was producing it. Atisha, who studied there under Dharmakirti, later said that Suvarnadvipa — that's the Sanskrit name for Sumatra — was a place where the Dharma flourished. He brought that learning to Tibet, where it shaped the Kadam school. So Srivijaya was a key node in the transmission of Buddhism from India to East Asia. Luna: What kind of texts were they translating? I imagine Chinese monks came specifically to get Sanskrit originals. Lucas: Yes. Yijing's account lists dozens of texts he collected in Srivijaya — sutras, commentaries, treatises. He translated several himself after returning to China. The monks there worked in multilingual teams: a Chinese monk would read the Sanskrit, a local Srivijayan monk who knew Chinese would help with the rendering, and then a scribe would write it out. It was like a medieval translation bureau. And they used high-quality paper from China, which was imported as part of the tribute trade. Luna: That's remarkable. So the empire's wealth from trade directly funded this intellectual work. Lucas: Absolutely. The same ports that handled pepper, camphor, and glass beads also brought in palm-leaf manuscripts, ink, and scholars. Srivijaya's strategic location wasn't just about commerce — it was about the flow of ideas. And the monasteries were often located near the ports, so monks arriving by ship could settle in quickly. Muaro Jambi, for instance, is right on the Batang Hari River, which was a major trade route. Luna: Did this university network survive the Chola attacks in the 11th century? Lucas: It took a hit. The 1025 Chola raid on Palembang disrupted the court and probably damaged some monasteries. But Muaro Jambi seems to have continued as a Buddhist center well into the 13th century. Chinese sources from the Song dynasty still mention monks traveling there. The real decline came later, with the rise of Majapahit and the shift of power to Melaka. By the 14th century, the great monastic centers were mostly abandoned or converted. Luna: It's a bit sad — all that accumulated knowledge, the libraries, the translation work — just scattered. Lucas: It is. But the texts survived, many of them in Chinese and Tibetan translations. So in a way, Srivijaya's scholarly legacy lived on in the monastic traditions of China and Tibet. The university network was less about buildings and more about the transmission of ideas across generations and oceans. Lucas: And honestly, thinking about how these monks and scholars dedicated themselves to preserving and sharing knowledge — it makes you appreciate the infrastructure that made it possible. The ships, the ports, the patronage of the maharajas. A whole ecosystem. Luna: It really puts the empire in a new light. Not just traders and warriors, but also educators and translators. Lucas: Exactly. And if today's conversation felt worth a cup of coffee to you, there's a link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Listeners like you keep this show ad-free and focused on stories like this one. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to support the research and time that goes into each episode. Lucas: So coming back to those monastic libraries — archaeological work at Muaro Jambi has uncovered fragments of Buddhist texts, including some in Sanskrit and local scripts. They suggest a vibrant intellectual life that we're only starting to piece together. Luna: What kind of scripts? Were they using Pallava or something local? Lucas: Both. The earliest inscriptions from Srivijaya use a variant of Pallava script derived from South India. But by the 8th and 9th centuries, a local script evolved — often called Kawi or Old Javanese script, though it was used across Sumatra too. So the monks were comfortable with multiple writing systems, which made them ideal translators. They'd read a Sanskrit text in Pallava and render it into Chinese characters, or into Tibetan, or into local languages. It was a genuinely cosmopolitan environment.