- Lived:
- c. 505 – c. 587 CE (both dates argued) · Avanti, the country around Ujjayinī (Ujjain) — where the rest of the life happened too, in the observatory-city on India's zero meridian
- Field:
- astronomy, astrology and encyclopaedic science — summarizer of all five astronomical schools known to sixth-century India, author of the great compendium of everything a court needed to know
- The Big Idea:
- Say where you got it. He compared India's five systems of astronomy — two of them openly named for the Greek-Roman West — ranked them by accuracy, and wrote that the Greeks, though "barbarians," deserved honour like sages because they had the science right.
- In their words:
- "The Greeks are barbarians (mlecchas), but this science is well established among them, and even they are honoured as sages — how much more, then, a Brahmin who knows the stars." (Bṛhat Saṃhitā 2.15; the rendering is ours, close to N. Chidambaram Iyer's 1884 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- Fifteen hundred years before "who invented it first" became a culture war, India's most famous astronomer named his foreign sources, praised them, ranked them against the home-grown ones — and lost nothing by it. Candor about debts turned out to be a form of greatness.