- Lived:
- birth year unknown, probably early 14th century, in the Kannada–Telugu country of the Deccan → a career at Vijayanagara, the new imperial city on the Tungabhadra river (its ruins are today's Hampi, Karnataka); died 1387
- Field:
- Vedic scholarship and statecraft — minister of the Vijayanagara empire under Bukka I and Harihara II, and the name over the Vedārthaprakāśa, the great commentary on very nearly the whole Veda
- The Big Idea:
- India's reciters had preserved the sound of the Vedas perfectly for over two thousand years while the meaning of their archaic language slowly slipped away — so Sāyaṇa organized a state-funded workshop of scholars that glossed the Veda word by word, line by line, and made the oldest texts in continuous religious use on earth readable again.
- In their words:
- "The Veda is the text that makes known the means — beyond the reach of perception and inference — of gaining what is desired and warding off what is not." (his celebrated definition, from the introduction to his Ṛgveda commentary)
- If you remember one thing:
- Every modern translation of the Ṛgveda still argues with a fourteenth-century prime minister — corrects him on one page, leans on him on the next — because without the commentary that carries his name, nobody today could read the Veda at all.