- Lived:
- unknowable with precision — tradition has him born in a village called Nyagrodhikā and composing his masterwork at Kusumapura, "flower town," a name for Pāṭaliputra (Patna); scholars date him anywhere from the 2nd century CE to the 5th
- Field:
- philosophy — the systematizer of Jainism; author of the Tattvārthasūtra, the first Jain work written in Sanskrit and the one text every branch of the tradition accepts
- The Big Idea:
- The whole of Jain doctrine — souls, karma as sticky matter, the path out — compressed into roughly 350 Sanskrit aphorisms so exact that both halves of a divided religion have kept the same book as scripture for some fifteen centuries.
- In their words:
- "Parasparopagraho jīvānām" — "Souls render service to one another." (Tattvārthasūtra 5.21; since 1975, the motto of the Jain community worldwide)
- If you remember one thing:
- The Jain church split over everything — clothing, women, whether the scriptures had even survived — and could not split this book; and the line that a 2,500-year-old religion chose as its motto sits, quietly, in the middle of a physics lesson.