- Lived:
- unknowable as a person — she appears in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (c. 700 BCE), at the court of Janaka in Mithilā, capital of Videha (northern Bihar and the Nepal borderlands)
- Field:
- philosophy — the tradition's exemplary brahmavādinī, a woman expounder of ultimate reality; a daughter of the Garga clan
- The Big Idea:
- Keep asking "and on what does that rest?" until every thing has given way beneath the question — and if they warn you to stop asking, pause, choose your moment, and ask again.
- In their words:
- "As the son of a warrior from the Kāśīs or Videhas might string his loosened bow, take two pointed foe-piercing arrows in his hand and rise to do battle, I have risen to fight thee with two questions." (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.8, in Max Müller's 1884 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- The greatest debate in the oldest Upaniṣad was ended not by the king who paid for it, nor by the champion who won it, but by the one woman in the hall — who was told her head would shatter if she questioned further, held her peace, came back, asked the two hardest questions of the day, and then, unchallenged, announced the result.