- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE · Kapilavatthu (Kapilavastu), capital of the Śākya country near the present India–Nepal border → the towns of the Gangetic plain, wandering with the Buddha's order; he outlived his teacher and recited the entire monastic law at Rājagaha (Rajgir)
- Field:
- monastic law — master, referee and living archive of the Vinaya, the legal code of the Buddhist order
- The Big Idea:
- Equality can be engineered. The Buddha's order ranked its members by one thing only — the moment of ordination — so when six princes asked that their own barber be ordained ahead of them, they were asking to bow to him for the rest of their lives. On purpose.
- In their words:
- "The Śākyas are fierce. They will think that these young men have been brought by me to destruction, and they will slay me." (Upāli's reasoning on the road, in the Vinaya's Cullavagga, translated by T. W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg)
- If you remember one thing:
- A civilization that ranked people by birth watched a barber outrank six princes because a rule said so — and the rule held for the rest of their lives, which is more than any sermon on equality has ever managed.