Dharmapala founds the monasteries of Somapura and Vikramashila

Clay seals found in the excavations at Paharpur bear the legend ‘of the community of venerable monks of the great monastery of the illustrious Dharmapaladeva at the illustrious Somapura’, which identified the ruins with the Somapura monastery and its founder; Tibetan writers, Taranatha among them, attribute it instead to his son Devapala. A quadrangle about 280 metres across was lined, in its last phase, with 177 monks’ cells facing inwards to a huge cruciform shrine that rises in three terraces to about 21 metres and is decorated with terracotta plaques and stone reliefs. UNESCO, which inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 1985, notes that its plan influenced Buddhist architecture as far away as Cambodia, and scholars have compared its shrine with temples of Burma and Java, including those of the Prambanan plain.

Vikramashila is ascribed to Dharmapala by Tibetan tradition, which also credits him with fifty religious foundations and the patronage of the scholar Haribhadra. Known mainly from Tibetan sources, which speak of more than a hundred teachers, it was above all a school of Tantric Buddhism. Excavations at Antichak near Bhagalpur by Patna University (1960–1969) and the Archaeological Survey of India (1972–1982) uncovered a square monastery about 330 metres across with 208 cells around a cruciform brick stupa that closely resembles the shrine of Paharpur. In the 11th century the Vikramashila scholar Atisha went to Tibet and became one of the founders of the Sarma traditions there. Vikramashila was destroyed around 1193 by the troops of Bakhtiyar Khalji, and Somapura declined in the 12th century.