Jabali


Jabali is a character in the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. A learned Brahmin priest and an advisor of Dasharatha, he unsuccessfully tries to persuade Rama to give up his exile, using rational arguments.

Attempt to persuade Rama

In Ramayana, Rama abandons his claim to the royal throne and goes on a 14-year exile, in order to help his father keep a promise. Rama considers his decision as his dharma, necessary for his father's honour. In Ayodhya Khanda, Jabali accompanies Bharata to the forest, as part of a group that tries to convince Rama to give up his exile.
Jabali uses nihilist reasoning to dissuade Rama from continuing the exile. He states that those give up artha for the sake of dharma suffer in this life and meet extinction after their death. Showing further disbelief in the concept of afterlife, he criticizes the shraddha ritual, in which people offer food to their dead ancestors. He calls it a wastage of food, and sarcastically suggests that if food eaten by one person at a given place could nourish another person at another place, shraddha should be conducted for those going on long journeys, so they would not need to eat anything. However, even after listening to the arguments of Jabali and others, Rama refuses to give up his exile and extols the virtues of following the dharma.

Rama's response

's Ramayana contains a section that describe's Rama angrily denouncing Jabali, which includes the following verses:
Ramayana Translation by Ralph T. H. GriffithTranslation by Shyam RanganathanTranslation by D. H. Rao & K. M. K. Murthy
निन्दाम्यहं कर्म पितुः कृतं त ।
द्यस्त्वामगृह्णाद्विषमस्थबुद्धिम् ।
बुद्ध्यानयैवंविधया चरन्तं ।
सुनास्तिकं धर्मपथादपेतम् ।।
यथा हि चोरः स तथा हि बुद्ध |
स्तथागतं नास्तिकमत्र विध्हि |
तस्माद्धि यः शङ्क्यतमः प्रजानाम् |
न नास्ति केनाभिमुखो बुधः स्यात् 		My father's thoughtless act I chide
That gave thee honoured place,
Whose soul, from virtue turned aside,
Is faithless, dark, and base.
We rank the Buddhist with the thief,
And all the impious crew
Who share his sinful disbelief,
And hate the right and true.
Hence never should wise kings who seek
To rule their people well,
Admit, before their face to speak,
The cursed infidel.
I denounce the action mentioned below, of my father, who picked up you as his councilor-priest, a staunch unbeliever, who has not only stayed away from the path of dharma but whose mind is set on a wrong path opposed to the Vedic path, nay who is moving about in this world with such an ideology conforming to the doctrine of Chaarvaaka, who believes only in the world of senses as has been set forth in your foregoing speech.
It is a well-known fact that a follower of Buddha deserves to be punished precisely as a thief ; and know a nastika to be on a par with a Buddhist.
I accuse the act done by my father in taking you into his service, you with your misleading intelligence, a firm atheist fallen from the true path.
It is an exact state of the case that a mere thought deserves to be punished as it were a thief and know an atheist to be on par with a mere intellectual. Therefore, he is the most suspect, and should be punished in the interest of the people. In no case should a wise man consort with an atheist.

In these and subsequent verses, Rama becomes so angry that he denounces his own father for keeping Jabali as an adviser. He accuses Jabali of being an atheist, and states that those following the nastika path deserve to be punished. In the subsequent verses, he emphasizes the importance of following the dharma. Jabali then retracts his statements, saying that he was merely arguing like a nihilist to convince Rama to come back, but he is not actually a nihilist. Vashistha supports Jabali, stating that he was speaking in the interest of Rama.
These verses depicting Rama's anger are considered a later insertion in Valimiki's original text. Every canto of Ramayana ends with one long shloka written in a different metre, compared to the other verses. However, the version of the canto containing these verses contains six long shlokas in a different metre. The dialogue between Rama and Jabali is finished in the first shloka, in which Rama is not depicted as annoyed. However, the next few shlokas re-open the dialogue abruptly, and the tone of the conversation contradicts the tone of the earlier dialogue. In his translation, Griffith calls these lines "manifestly spurious" and cautions that these need to be "regarded with suspicion". August Wilhelm Schlegel, who translated Ramayana to German, also called these lines fake, and later regretted not having excluded them from his translation.
According to Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, Rama's outburst against Jabali in these verses is an example of "Brahmanical counteroffensive against all anti-Vedic ideals and movements". Although Rama appears to identify Jabali's views as Buddhist, Jabali's arguments reflect the Lokayata school of thought. William Theodore de Bary calls Jabali's speech a parody of Buddhist scepticism and antinomianism.