- Lived:
- unknowable — a king of Videha, the country of Mithilā on today's Bihar–Nepal border, known only from ritual and philosophical texts composed around the 8th–7th centuries BCE
- Field:
- philosopher-king and patron — convener of the debates recorded in the oldest Upaniṣad, and eventually a debater in his own right
- The Big Idea:
- Fund the argument; do not fix the result. A throne that paid for truth-telling without dictating the truth made possible the first great philosophical tournament on record — and then the patron sat down among the students.
- In their words:
- "Unlimited is my wealth. At the same time I have nothing. If the whole of Mithilā be consumed in a conflagration, I shall incur no loss." (words the Mahābhārata, centuries later, gives to a Janaka of Mithilā; K. M. Ganguli's translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- A king filled his courtyard with a thousand cows, tied gold to their horns, and told the most learned men of the age that whoever truly knew should drive them home — and when the arguing was over, the king himself asked the best questions in the room.