- Lived:
- born in the late 900s CE (no record survives of the year); ruled Mālwa from Dhārā (Dhar, Madhya Pradesh) c. 1010–1055
- Field:
- kingship — and, under his name, nearly everything else: poetics, grammar, yoga, architecture, astronomy, law, medicine, even shipbuilding
- The Big Idea:
- A king could be a library. Bhoja ran his court as a knowledge-factory that set out to codify every art and science in books signed with the royal name — and then built the books in stone and water, at a scale nobody has matched since.
- In their words:
- "A machine is a contrivance by which the elements — earth, water, fire, wind — each acting by its own nature, are yoked together and made to serve a purpose of one's own intention." (the Samarāṅgaṇa-sūtradhāra's definition of a yantra, chapter 31; our close rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- When he died, the court's epitaph was a pun: adya dhārā nirādhārā — "today Dhārā is support-less." Take away one letter's worth of king and the city of learning loses the prop it stood on. Learning, the verse says, does not float; someone has to hold it up.