- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE (moving with the Buddha's own disputed dates) · born a Śākyan noble at Kapilavatthu (Kapilavastu) → the roads of the Ganges plain, beside the Buddha, for twenty-five years; tradition gives him a long widowed old age and a death at 120
- Field:
- monasticism — the Buddha's cousin, attendant and living archive; reciter of the discourses at the First Council
- The Big Idea:
- Every Buddhist scripture on earth opens with his four words — evaṃ me sutaṃ, "Thus have I heard" — because one man made his memory the container of a religion, after negotiating away every perk of the job that would have let anyone doubt it.
- In their words:
- "Eighty-two thousand from the Buddha, two thousand from the monks: eighty-four thousand teachings I have learned." (his own verse, Theragāthā 17.3, in Bhikkhu Sujato's public-domain rendering, lightly compressed)
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who remembered everything was put on trial by the order he had just saved — charged, among other things, with getting women ordained — and answered: I see no fault in myself; but out of faith in the elders, I confess.