- Lived:
- c. 1088, Dhandhuka in Gujarat → the Chaulukya capital Aṇahilavāḍa (Patan), where he served two kings for half a century and died by ritual fast in 1172, aged about eighty-four
- Field:
- Jain monk and ācārya — grammarian, lexicographer, prosodist, logician, poet, historian; his age called him Kalikālasarvajña, "the all-knowing one of the degenerate age"
- The Big Idea:
- One monk wrote his kingdom a complete education — grammars of its languages down to the street speech that would become Gujarati, dictionaries, poetics, a universal history — and then converted its king, turning a medieval state into history's most ambitious experiment in governing by non-violence.
- In their words:
- "He whose passions — the seeds from which the sprout of rebirth rises — have withered away: to him I bow, whether he be Brahmā, Viṣṇu, Śiva, or the Jina." (verses the Jain chronicles say he spoke before the liṅga at Somnath; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A Jain monk wrote the only surviving grammar of Apabhraṃśa — the spoken tongue that grew into Gujarati — inside a royal Sanskrit grammar so celebrated the king paraded it on the state elephant; then he talked the next king into laying down the kingdom's knives.