- Lived:
- c. 1170–1245 — birthplace contested between Kenduli Sasan in Odisha (the claim scholarship currently favours), Jaydev Kenduli in Bengal's Birbhum district, and a Kenduli in Bihar; the life, wherever it began, came to orbit the Jagannath temple at Puri
- Field:
- Sanskrit poetry and music — the Gīta Govinda, the song-poem of Krishna and Rādhā that became the fountainhead of Vaiṣṇava devotional art
- The Big Idea:
- He set God's love life to music — and made God the one who pines. In the Gīta Govinda Krishna burns, begs and bows, and Rādhā, a human woman, is the greater of the two.
- In their words:
- "Place the tender bud of your foot on my head — an ornament there, a balm against love's poison." (Gīta Govinda, canto 10 — the line tradition says the poet dared not write, so Krishna wrote it himself; our translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- A frankly erotic poem has been sung to God at Puri nearly every night for centuries — required by royal inscription since 1499 — because Indian tradition, at its most confident, held the erotic and the sacred in one hand and felt no need to apologize for either.