Yājñavalkya
650 BCE · Mithilā (kingdom of Videha)
legendary/proto-historical; the Bṛhadāraṇyaka layers associated with him are usually dated c. 8th–7th c. BCE, but he is a canonical frame-figure, not a documented historical person
Yājñavalkya is the towering sage of the early Upaniṣadic period, appearing chiefly in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad as a dialectician at the court of King Janaka of Videha (Mithilā). He is credited in tradition with the White Yajurveda (Śukla Yajurveda) and the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. His teachings — the doctrine of the imperishable Self (ātman), the apophatic 'neti neti,' and his dialogues with Gārgī and his wife Maitreyī — became the bedrock on which Advaita and the other Vedāntas built. His historicity cannot be established with precision; the textual strata linked to his name are generally placed in the centuries before the Buddha (c. 8th–7th c. BCE), but he should be treated as a canonical frame-figure of the tradition.
Did you know?
One of the world's oldest philosophy books records a woman as its fiercest cross-examiner
The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad — among the oldest philosophical texts ever composed, older than the classical philosophers of Greece — stages a public debate at the court of King Janaka in which the woman scholar Gārgī Vācaknavī rises to cross-examine the sage Yājñavalkya, pressing him question after question on what the universe is 'woven upon.' She is the only challenger in the account to question him twice. It is one of the earliest recorded philosophical dialogues anywhere, and one of its sharpest interlocutors is a woman.
Meet Gargi Vacaknavi →How we know
The Gārgī–Yājñavalkya exchange is preserved in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (3.6 and 3.8), set at the assembly of King Janaka of Videha. The Upaniṣad is dated by Olivelle to roughly 700 BCE, well over two centuries before Socrates (c.470–399 BCE). Gārgī is described as a brahmavādinī; she presses Yājñavalkya hardest of all the challengers before conceding the contest.
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Mithilā (kingdom of Videha)
What they did here
Traditional birthplace of Yājñavalkya.
About Mithilā (kingdom of Videha)
Mithilā was the ancient kingdom of Videha, a region straddling the present India–Nepal border in the eastern Gangetic plain (northern Bihar and the adjoining Nepali Tarai). In the Upaniṣadic literature it is the court of King Janaka and the setting for the dialogues of the sage Yājñavalkya, a central voice of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Yājñavalkya’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works
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