- Lived:
- late Vedic north India, c. 700 BCE — his textual work belongs to the heartland schools that fixed the Rigveda; the famous debate story places him at King Janaka's court in Videha (the Mithilā region, on today's Bihar–Nepal border)
- Field:
- linguistics and Vedic philology — author of the Rigveda Padapāṭha, the word-by-word text on which the entire oral preservation system was built
- The Big Idea:
- To preserve a scripture exactly, forever, without writing, he first took it apart — every verse resolved into its separate words — and that act of taking-apart was, by many reckonings, the first grammatical analysis of a text anywhere on earth.
- In their words:
- "How many gods are there, O Yājñavalkya?" (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.9, tr. Max Müller)
- If you remember one thing:
- The Rigveda that survives — the one you can still hear chanted, sound for sound — is the text his school fixed and his method carried across nearly three thousand years; he lost the most famous debate in the Upaniṣads, and his machinery preserved the very book that records his defeat.