Historical Background of Buddhist Universities
Buddhist Sangha was among those to have set up the earliest universities in the world. Nalanda University (5th – 12th centuries) came into existence seven hundred years before Oxford University, the first to have been established in the English-speaking world and the third in the West. Nalanda was followed by four other big universities: Wickramashila University, Somapura University (now in Bangladesh and a world heritage site), Odantapuri University and Jaggadala University. Those Buddhist universities had a close intellectual connection and working relationship with each other; they reached their peak under the Pala Dynasty (8th – 12th CE).
These universities played a key role in spreading Buddhism to/in Indonesia, China and Tibet. Some had more than ten thousand students; the student-teacher ratio was one teacher to five students, or two thousand lecturers for ten thousand students at Nalanda, a much better ration than the one at top universities in the world today which count one teacher to eight students. Nonetheless, largely due to external circumstances, such Buddhist universities disappeared in India.
Beyond India, it is only within the past 150 years that Buddhist monks and nuns in various countries began setting up universities, and most of the current Buddhist universities have been inspired mainly by the celebrations of the 2500th Years of Buddhism “Buddha Jayanti” (1954-1956), which heralded a revival of Buddhism and Buddhist higher education throughout the Buddhist world, particularly in the Theravada nations.
Today, Buddhist colleges and universities can be found in Laos since 1953, Myanmar since 1954, Sri Lanka since 1958, Cambodia since 1959, Thailand since late 1950s (though Mahamakut Buddhist University and Mahachulalongkorn University were set up in 1887 and 1890 respectively.), Korea since 1953, Japan since 1949, India (Tibetan universities since 1967 and Nava Nalanda Maha Vihara since 1956). Although there have been some setbacks in the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of Buddhist universities came into existence in many countries since 1980, and many of them emphasize the teaching in the English medium.
The Association of Myanmar Buddhist Universities, Academies and Colleges (AMBUAC) was established on 5 February 2016 in order to bring Buddhist education institutions in Myanmar together. The aims of AMBUAC are: