Jābāli Nāstika Vāda

At Citrakūṭa, Bharata and the royal assembly had come to persuade Rāma to return to Ayodhyā. There the ṛshi Jābāli spoke a nāstika (materialist) argument against the dharma on which Rāma’s exile rested. Jābāli said that duties to the dead, the word of an ancestor and a promise made to someone who has gone have no real basis. He urged Rāma to go back and take the throne. Rāma refused his argument in strong words and defended dharma, the Vedas and the ancestors. Vasishṭha then told the line of the Ikshvāku kings. This is in the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa.

Jābāli’s argument

Jābāli was a learned ṛshi who knew many schools of thought, including materialist ones. He stepped forward in the assembly at Citrakūṭa and spoke to Rāma directly. His argument went like this.

The duty that Rāma was keeping, the promise of his father to Kaikeyī, was the word of a king who was now dead. It had no binding force over the living. Daśaratha was gone. The dead, said Jābāli, have no real tie with the living. The idea that a son owes anything to the word of a dead father, or that ancestors need the rites we offer, is a made-up thing. It is a human construction, useful for order in society but not real. A wise and clever man does not bind himself to duties that exist only by custom.

Jābāli then said that Rāma owed his first duty to Ayodhyā and to the people who needed a king. The prajā (the people) loved Rāma. The ministers served the kingdom, and the city itself was there before them. These were real duties of the present. An empty throne, a kingdom with no rightful king and a people in grief were real harms, happening now. Against these, the word of a dead man to a scheming woman had no weight.

Jābāli urged Rāma to return, take the throne, enjoy the rule that was rightly his, and put aside a duty that was made by custom and was owed to a person who was no longer there.

Rāma’s refutation

Rāma answered Jābāli sharply and with firmness. He did two things. He refuted the view itself, and he held to his own dharma.

On the view itself, Rāma said that the tradition of the ancestors, the authority of the Vedas and the duties that come from them are the base of all ordered life. A king who gives them up, even for what seem good reasons, destroys the order on which society rests. The view that only what is seen with the eye is real, and that duties to the dead and to a given word are only custom, undermines dharma altogether. Rāma was a king, a kshatriya and a son of the Ikshvāku line. If he accepted such an argument, the example he would set would corrupt the whole order of society.

On his own part, Rāma said that the word given by Daśaratha bound him because it was his father’s word. Pitṛ-vākya-pāripālana, keeping the word of one’s father, is an absolute dharma for a son. The death of Daśaratha did not free Rāma from it. It made it bind him more, because now Daśaratha could never release Rāma from the vow. Rāma would return in exactly fourteen years, not one day sooner.

Vasishṭha’s answer

After Rāma had refuted Jābāli, Vasishṭha spoke to the assembly. He told the whole line of the Ikshvāku Sūryavaṃśa. He traced it from Brahmā through Marīci, Kaśyapa, Vivasvān (the Sun), Manu and Ikshvāku, and down through all the great kings to Daśaratha and Rāma.

This narration showed the deep dharma of the Ikshvāku line. In this line the word of the king, the vow of the ancestor and the tradition of kingship in dharma were never to be broken.

Vasishṭha’s narration was itself a proof. The whole holy history of the solar dynasty stood on the very principles that Jābāli had waved away as custom. The Ikshvāku kings had kept their line and their glory by honouring such duties through the generations.

Sources

• Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa, the Jābāli chapters (within Chapters 95–100), Chapters 97–98 for the argument of Jābāli and Chapters 98–99 for the answer of Rāma
• Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa, the chapters of Vasishṭha’s narration