Vishnu Sharma

Vishnu Sharma is the author named in the preface to the Panchatantra. According to the preface, a king in southern India despaired of his three sons, who were dull and would not study, until an eighty-year-old Brahmin, Vishnu Sharma, promised to make the princes wise in statecraft and the ways of the world within six months. His method was to tell them stories, and those stories are the Panchatantra. Whether he really lived can no longer be known; the book was compiled sometime between the third century BC and the third century AD.