Pushpagiri

Pushpagiri was a large Buddhist monastic complex, or mahavihara, on the Langudi hills in Jajpur district of Odisha. The 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang described a monastery of this name in the region, and it is ranked with Nalanda, Vikramashila and Taxila as one of the major centres of learning of ancient India, flourishing from roughly the 3rd to the 11th century CE.

For a long time scholars thought Pushpagiri must be one of the nearby sites of Lalitgiri, Ratnagiri or Udayagiri. Excavations on the Langudi hills between 1996 and 2006, however, uncovered a separate site whose inscriptions name the monastery in terms matching Pushpagiri, and most scholars now accept that identification. Ruins of buildings and stupas mark the hilltop, and the site has been opened to visitors.