- Lived:
- reigned c. 600–630 CE (some historians start him at 590) · Kāñci (Kanchipuram), capital of the Pallava kingdom, in the northern Tamil country
- Field:
- kingship — Pallava dynasty; and, on the side, playwright, pioneer of rock-cut temple architecture, musician, painter, tank-builder
- The Big Idea:
- Temples of brick and timber rot; a temple cut out of living rock is forever. He inaugurated stone architecture in the Tamil country — "without brick, without timber, without metal, without mortar" — and wrote a farce funny enough to still be staged fourteen centuries later.
- In their words:
- "This brickless, timberless, metalless and mortarless mansion of Lakṣita was caused to be made by King Vicitracitta for Brahmā, Īśvara and Viṣṇu." (the Mandagapattu inscription, c. 610 CE, after E. Hultzsch's translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- Every South Indian stone temple you have ever seen — Mamallapuram on its beach, the giant of Thanjavur, the gopurams of Madurai — stands downstream of a curious-minded king who decided, around the year 610, that the gods deserved a house that could not burn, rot or fall down.