- Lived:
- undatable except through her text — the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, c. 700 BCE, set in the eastern Gangetic country of Videha (the Mithila region, on today's Bihar–Nepal border); she exists in its pages, in the same scene, told twice
- Field:
- philosophy — named by the text itself a brahmavādinī, a woman who discourses on ultimate reality
- The Big Idea:
- Offered half of everything her husband owned as he prepared to renounce the world, she asked one question before accepting: if the whole earth full of wealth were mine, would it make me deathless? Told no, she handed back the estate and demanded the knowledge instead.
- In their words:
- "What should I do with that by which I do not become immortal? What my Lord knoweth (of immortality), tell that to me." (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.3, in Max Müller's 1884 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- The oldest Upaniṣad twice records a woman stopping the greatest philosopher of the age at his own front door with a question about money that no economist has improved on — and twice records her saying, honestly, that his answer left her bewildered. India put her question, and her bewilderment, at the very center of its oldest philosophy — and then argued for two and a half thousand years about who she was.