This teenager monk will answer 200 questions in one go

Muni Padmaprabhchandrasagar is a 17-year-old Jain monk, who will be showcasing his exceptional memory power on September 2, at Palace Grounds in Bengaluru. He will be taking 200 questions at one go and answering them in the same order. The challenge here is -- the young monk will allow random people from the audience to throw any questions from the 200 lot to which he will give its answer.

For the general public, he will be most likely called a prodigy. But according to the Jain jargon, Muni will become 'Maha Shatavdhani', which, according to a TOI report, is one who can store and retrieve 200 nuggets of knowledge on a range of subjects from shlokas and mathematical equations to synonyms and antonyms, and foreign phrases. And ‘Shatavdhani’ is a person who can recall 100 things at a go.

'Avdhan', the latter part of the Jain terms above, is defined by the experts as the process of having the attention span to carry out an entire activity.


Muni is one of the three disciples of Acharya Nayachandrasagar Ji and has studied till eighth standard. He has performed Shatavdhani back in 2014 in Mumbai and now is keeping ready for one step ahead.

The event usually includes sessions where monks are asked to answer questions, sing ragas, remember foreign phrases and do calculations. And to distract the concentration of the monks, loud music is played, which is a common practise since the Buddha days where demons disguised as beautiful women and tried to lure Buddha to break his meditation phase.

Muni's mentor Nayachandrasagar works with 35,000 children through Saraswati Sadhana Research Foundation to enhance their memory power.

According to a ToI report, a study on 104 of the foundation's students done by Dr. Paresh Doshi of Mumbai’s Jaslok Hospital have showed improvement in the working memory and attention of children who had undergone training.