- Lived:
- unknowable — tradition places his hermitage on the banks of the Tamasā river near the Ganges, in the country the Rāmāyaṇa itself moves through; the poem bearing his name took shape between roughly the 8th and 4th centuries BCE, with additions into the 3rd century CE
- Field:
- poetry — by tradition the ādi kavi, the "first poet" of Sanskrit, and composer of the Rāmāyaṇa
- The Big Idea:
- Poetry begins in compassion. Grief at the death of a single bird broke out of one man as metre, and in that metre he told the story of Rāma — the story half of Asia has been retelling for two and a half thousand years.
- In their words:
- "Hunter, may you never find rest for endless years — for you struck down one of this pair of krauñca birds at the height of its love." (the Rāmāyaṇa's own account of the first verse ever spoken, Bālakāṇḍa 2)
- If you remember one thing:
- Everyone on earth seems to know Rāma and Sītā; almost nobody can say one true sentence about the poet who made them — and the honest sentence is that a curse born of pity became the first poem, and the first poem became the imagination of a civilization.