- Lived:
- unknowable — the Pañcatantra's own prologue places him at Mahilāropya, "Maidens' Delight," a city in the southern country that no map has ever found; the book bearing his name took shape somewhere between roughly 200 BCE and 300 CE, with most scholars settling near the end of that range
- Field:
- fable — frame-narrator and traditional author of the Pañcatantra, the "Five Treatises" of worldly wisdom, and by that route the most translated literary work India has ever produced
- The Big Idea:
- The unteachable can be taught, if the lesson wears fur. Wisdom that is refused as instruction is swallowed whole as story — and a story, once loose in the world, crosses every border on earth.
- In their words:
- "If I do not, in six months' time, make the boys acquainted with the art of intelligent living, I will give up my own name." (the wager, in Arthur Ryder's 1925 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- An eighty-year-old teacher — possibly imaginary — bet his name that he could make three hopeless princes wise in six months, and won by telling them animal stories; those stories then travelled through Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin into nearly every language of Europe, so that a French child reading La Fontaine and a Punjabi child hearing her grandmother are, without knowing it, reading the same Indian book.