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Reflections on the Jābāli Episode in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa (Ayodhyākāṇḍa)

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An Erratum to this article was published on 12 September 2015

Abstract

Jābāli, one of the priest-cum-counsellors of king Daśaratha, has long been recognized as an odd character, preaching materialism in order to persuade Rāma to go back to Ayodhyā after the death of his father. The critical edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa reveals several stanzas interpolated in the vulgate so as to denigrate Jābāli and brand him as a rank opportunist. In spite of that, whatever remains of Jābāli’s speech addressed to Rāma evinces one of the basic tenets of materialist ontology, i.e., denial of the existence of any other-world (paraloka), and hence the futility of performing rites for the ancestors (śrāddha). However, nothing is said about the epistemology, (specially concerning the instruments of cognition), ethics, and metaphysics of materialism as it existed at the time when the Rāmāyaṇa was redacted. Considering all this it is better to call Jābāli a proto-materialist who speaks of a philosophy akin to the teachings of Ajita Kesakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha, whose doctrine has been dubbed as that of annihilation (ucchedavāda) in the Tipiṭaka. Both of them belong to the pre-Cārvāka materialist tradition in India.

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    Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

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Bhattacharya, R. Reflections on the Jābāli Episode in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa (Ayodhyākāṇḍa). J Indian Philos 44, 597–615 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10781-015-9278-3

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