Bhoja (Raja Bhoj of Dhārā)
A figure from the books
#Bhoja
Bhoja (Raja Bhoj of Dhārā) · r. c. 1010–1055 CE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Kingship — and, under his name, nearly everything else: poetics, grammar, yoga, architecture, astronomy, law, medicine, even shipbuilding.
“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.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“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.”
From the book
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