- Lived:
- c. 1105–1167 CE by the traditional Karnataka reckoning, 1131–1196 by another — born at Bāgēvāḍi (Basavana Bagewadi, northern Karnataka) → Kūḍalasaṅgama, at the meeting of the Krishna and Malaprabha rivers → Kalyāṇa (Basavakalyan), capital of the Kalachuri king Bijjala → back to Kūḍalasaṅgama, to die
- Field:
- social reform and Bhakti poetry — brahmin-born treasurer and chief minister who became the organizing genius of the Kannada śaraṇa movement, the community that grew into the Lingayats
- The Big Idea:
- God does not live in temples and does not check your birth certificate. Wear him on your own body, worship him in your own language, let your daily work be the ritual — and let a cobbler argue theology with a scholar as an equal.
- In their words:
- "My legs are the pillars, this body the shrine, my head the golden cupola… what stands will fall; what moves stays forever." (from his most famous vachana; the rendering is ours)
- If you remember one thing:
- A brahmin who defected downward — he threw away his sacred thread, used a king's treasury to feed a revolution of washermen and rice-pickers, and watched the whole experiment burn after one inter-caste wedding pushed it further than the twelfth century would allow.