- Lived:
- c. 6th–5th century BCE — his dates ride on the Buddha's contested chronology; born and abandoned in Rājagaha (Rajgir, Bihar), trained at Takṣaśilā (Taxila, in Pakistan's Punjab), practised in Rājagaha for the rest of his life
- Field:
- medicine — physician and surgeon; personal doctor to King Bimbisāra, to his son Ajātaśatru, to the Buddha, and to the entire Buddhist monastic order
- The Big Idea:
- The earliest Indian doctor we can actually watch working — examining, dosing, operating, charging fees, making house calls — and the man whose graduation exam was to find one plant with no medicinal use, and who passed by coming back empty-handed.
- In their words:
- "I have been seeking … but I have not seen anything that is not medicinal." (his examination answer, Mahāvagga VIII, tr. Rhys Davids & Oldenberg)
- If you remember one thing:
- A courtesan's baby thrown on a rubbish heap became the most famous physician of his age — and his hardest case was not a skull or a bowel but a king's conscience, which he treated with the only prescription that works: he took the patient to someone who could actually help.