Founding A large number of monasteries or
viharas were established in ancient
Bengal and
Magadha during the four centuries of
Pala rule in
Northeast India (756-1174 AD).
Dharmapala (781-821) is said to have founded 50 viharas himself, including
Vikramashila, the premier university of the era. Jaggadala was founded toward the end of the Pāla dynasty, most likely by Rāmapāla (c. 1077-1120). The five monasteries formed a network; "all of them were under state supervision" and their existed "a system of co-ordination among them ... it seems from the evidence that the different seats of Buddhist learning that functioned in eastern India under the Pāla were regarded together as forming a network, an interlinked group of institutions," and it was common for great scholars to move easily from position to position among them. Jagaddala specialized in
Vajrayana Buddhism. A large number of texts that would later appear in the
Kangyur and Tengyur were known to have been composed or copied at Jagaddala. It is likely that the earliest dated anthology of Sanskrit verse, the
Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, was compiled by
Vidyākara at Jaggadala toward the end of the 11th century or the beginning of the 12th.
Abandonment Śākyaśribhadra, a Kashmiri scholar who was an abbot of
Nalanda Mahavihara and instrumental in transmitting Buddhism to
Tibet, is said to have fled to Tibet in 1204 from Jagaddala when Muslim incursions seemed imminent. Historian Sukumar Dutt tentatively placed the final destruction of Jagaddala to 1207; in any case it seems to have been the last mahavihara to be overrun. ==Excavation and UNESCO status==