The Dharma Was Built on These Bricks

MY HIGH SCHOOL was a brick building constructed some fifty years ago. As a result, I’ve long associated brick with every clock-watching hour I spent in that school and also—more generally—with dreary architecture of the sixties and seventies. If I’d been pushed to think about it, I’d have realized that bricks were far older than that, but I never really thought about it until I found myself sweating under the fierce Indian sun, surrounded by the seemingly endless, charred brick ruins of Nalanda Mahavihara.

Established in 427 CE, Nalanda was one of