- Lived:
- unknowable — his story is set in the herding country and teachers' households of the upper Gangetic plain in which the Chāndogya Upaniṣad took shape, around the 8th–7th century BCE
- Field:
- Upaniṣadic teacher — the boy admitted to Vedic study on honesty alone, later a master with students and a school bearing his name
- The Big Idea:
- Truth is the credential. Asked for his lineage at a teacher's door, a boy repeated exactly the hard thing his mother had told him — that she did not know who his father was — and was admitted on the spot; then four hundred cattle, a bull, a fire and two birds taught him what the classroom was supposed to.
- In their words:
- "I do not know, Sir, of what family I am. I asked my mother, and she answered… 'I am Jabālā by name, thou art Satyakāma.' I am therefore Satyakāma Jābāla, Sir." (Chāndogya Upaniṣad 4.4, Max Müller's 1879 translation, spellings modernized)
- If you remember one thing:
- A mother told her son the one truth that could sink him, he repeated it word for word at a stranger's door, and the door opened — and India has been arguing for over a hundred years about what, exactly, opened it.