Jainism has its own Ramayana. It is called the Paumachariya, it is one of the oldest surviving retellings of the Rama story after Valmiki, and in it Rama kills nobody at all. Lakshmana kills Ravana. Lakshmana and Ravana both go to hell for that killing. Rama does not, and Rama is the one who reaches liberation.
Most Jain families have never been told this. That is the only reason this page exists. It is not an argument that the Jain version is better than any other version, and nothing here is a criticism of the Valmiki Ramayana or of anyone who loves it. Two traditions took the same story and asked different questions of it. This page is about what the Jain answer was.
The text, and how old it actually is
The Paumachariya is a Prakrit poem by the monk Vimalasuri. Its title means the deeds of Pauma, which is the Prakrit form of Padma, the lotus, and Padma is what this literature calls Rama.
Its date is a genuinely open question, and it is worth watching how that question works, because the same care applies to everything else on this page.
What the text says about itself. The colophon places the composition 530 years after the nirvana of Mahavira. On the traditional nirvana date that would put it early in the first century CE.
What that inherits. The traditional nirvana date of 527 BCE is itself an arithmetic result rather than a record, and serious scholars place the nirvana anywhere from 527 BCE to about 425 BCE. We set that problem out on our method page. A date computed from an unsettled date is not a fixed point.
What modern scholarship says. Proposals for the Paumachariya run from the first to the fifth century CE, argued largely from the linguistic evidence of the Prakrit itself. There is no consensus.
So we do what our mission page does and give the range: somewhere between the first and the fifth century CE. What is not in doubt is that it is early, and that it is one of the earliest surviving Ramayanas of any kind.
The scheme that decides the ending before the story starts
Jain universal history counts sixty-three illustrious persons, the shalaka purushas: twenty-four Tirthankaras, twelve Chakravartins, and then nine repeating triads. Each triad is a Baladeva, a Vasudeva and a Prativasudeva. The Baladeva and the Vasudeva are half-brothers. The Prativasudeva is the great adversary.
The pattern is fixed, and it is the same in every one of the nine cycles.
| Role | In the Rama cycle | What the pattern assigns |
|---|---|---|
| Baladeva | Rama, called Padma | Does not commit the killing. Reaches heaven or liberation |
| Vasudeva | Lakshmana | Kills the Prativasudeva. Goes to hell for it |
| Prativasudeva | Ravana | Is killed by his own weapon in the Vasudeva’s hand. Goes to hell |
Rama and Lakshmana are the eighth triad. Krishna and Balarama are the ninth, which is why the Jain Ramayana and the Jain Krishna are two chapters of one book rather than two unrelated epics.
Read the table again and the famous difference stops being a plot twist. Rama does not refrain from killing Ravana because a poet wanted a surprise. He does not kill because a Baladeva does not kill, and the karmic consequence of the killing has to fall on somebody, and the tradition is willing to let it fall on the hero’s own brother. The architecture is karmic rather than devotional. It is a system of consequences, and nobody is exempt from it, including the people the story loves.
What happens at the end of the war
Ravana obtains the chakra, the discus weapon, through long austerity. In the final battle he releases it at Lakshmana. The discus refuses him, circles, and comes to rest in Lakshmana’s hand, and Lakshmana kills Ravana with Ravana’s own weapon.
Rama is present. Rama does not strike the blow.
Ravana goes to hell. Lakshmana, in time, goes to hell too, for that act and for the violent career it completes. This is the part that most surprises a reader coming from the devotional Ramayanas: the text does not exempt the brother of its own hero. Killing binds karma. It binds karma when the person killed is an aggressor, it binds karma when the cause is just, and it binds karma when the killer is loved by the narrator.
Rama’s own ending is slower. When Lakshmana dies, Rama’s grief is so complete that he refuses to accept the death and carries the body, which the Jain retellings dwell on at length. He comes out of it, renounces, takes initiation as a Jain ascetic, attains kevala jnana, and is liberated. Not heaven. Liberation, in that life, out of a life that had a war in it.
Ravana, as this literature has him
Ravana in the Jain texts is not a demon, does not eat human flesh, and is not a figure of horror. He is a Vidyadhara, a member of a class of human beings who possess vidyas, acquired occult sciences. He is a king of great learning and real accomplishment, and in this literature he reveres the Jinas.
He is destroyed by one thing: his desire for Sita, and his refusal to give it up while he still could. The Jain retellings give him a vow never to take a woman who does not want him, and he keeps it, which is why the abduction in this telling never becomes an assault. He remains, to the end, a man who knows exactly what right conduct is and cannot make himself perform it. That is a harder kind of tragedy than monstrosity, and it is the kind Jain karma theory is built to describe.
Jain tradition goes further still. Ravana’s soul, our texts hold, is destined to become a Tirthankara in a future cosmic age. That is a doctrinal claim rather than a historical one, and we label it as such, but it is the claim that shows what the tradition is really doing here. In the Jain universe nobody is permanently disqualified, because karma is a mechanism and not a verdict.
None of this is offered as a correction to anyone else’s Ravana. The Valmiki tradition is doing something else, with its own integrity, and Jains have lived alongside it for two thousand years without needing to win the argument.
No monkeys, and no cannibals
Vimalasuri states his reason for retelling the story openly, near the start, and it is an unusual reason for a devotional poet: he says the version people tell cannot be true. Beings who eat human flesh, monkeys who talk and fight wars, a brother who sleeps for six months. He treats these as impossibilities that have grown onto the story, and he sets out to give the account he considers credible.
His solution is consistent. The Rakshasas are not demons. They are a Vidyadhara people, a human lineage with a long dynastic history in Lanka, named after an ancestor. The Vanaras are not monkeys. They are a second Vidyadhara people who carry the monkey as their emblem, on banners and on gateways, which is where the name came from.
So Hanuman in the Jain Ramayana is a Vidyadhara prince, a man, with a lineage, a marriage, and a life after the war in which he renounces the world. Sugriva and Vali are Vidyadhara kings, and Vali in this telling is not shot from behind by Rama at all: he has already renounced and become an ascetic.
Whether Vimalasuri’s rationalising is historically closer to any original is not a question we can settle, and we will not pretend otherwise. What is worth noticing is the instinct. An early Jain author looked at a beloved story and decided that reverence required removing what he thought incredible rather than defending it. That instinct is recognisably the same one behind our method page and our corrections log.
Sita
Sita in the Paumachariya is Janaka’s daughter, and the marriage, the exile, the abduction and the war run broadly as a reader would expect.
The differences come after the war. The ordeal by fire is here, and in this telling the fire does not burn her: the pyre becomes water, a pool, and she stands in it. She is vindicated in public. She then does what the men of the story do, which is to leave. She takes initiation as a Jain nun, keeps a severe ascetic life, and the text follows her to her own rebirth rather than leaving her as an episode in her husband’s biography.
There is a second Jain line, quite separate from Vimalasuri’s, in which Sita is the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, exposed at birth because of a prediction that she would destroy her father. It survives in Sanghadasa’s Vasudevahindi. We report it as a variant and not as the Jain position, because there is no single Jain position: there are at least three distinct Jain tellings.
Which Jain Ramayana
There is no single one, and pretending otherwise would be the same flattening we complain about elsewhere.
| Work | Author | Language and date | Tradition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paumachariya | Vimalasuri | Prakrit, 1st to 5th century CE, disputed | Shvetambara |
| Padmapurana | Ravisena | Sanskrit, 678 CE by its own colophon | Digambara |
| Paumacariu | Svayambhudeva | Apabhramsha, around the 9th century | Digambara |
| Uttarapurana | Gunabhadra | Sanskrit, 9th century | Digambara |
| Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, Book VII | Hemachandra | Sanskrit, about 1160 to 1172 | Shvetambara |
| Vasudevahindi | Sanghadasa | Prakrit, early | Shvetambara |
Ravisena’s Sanskrit Padmapurana follows Vimalasuri closely enough that the two are usually treated as one line, and that is worth sitting with: a Shvetambara Prakrit poem became the basis of a Digambara Sanskrit purana. Gunabhadra’s Uttarapurana tells the story differently at many points, and Sanghadasa’s Vasudevahindi differently again. Modern scholarship, following V. M. Kulkarni’s study of the Rama story in Jain literature, sorts the material into these three broad streams.
Hemachandra’s Book VII is the version most Shvetambara readers meet, and it is the version our Munisuvrata page refers to, since Jain chronology places the whole Rama cycle in the era of the twentieth Tirthankara.
What this page does not claim
Not history. Nothing here is a claim that the events happened, or that a Jain text is a better historical source than a non-Jain one. The Rama story reaches us as literature in every tradition that has it, including ours.
Not a ruling on other Ramayanas. Jains have their own Ramayana. That is the whole of the point. Where the Valmiki tradition differs, it differs. It is not being corrected here, and a Jain who loves it is not doing anything wrong.
Not a claim of priority. We do not assert that the Jain version came first. It is early, it is independent, and the question of what depends on what is not settled.
Devotional claims are labelled. That Ravana’s soul will attain Tirthankarahood, that Rama attained liberation: these are the tradition’s own statements about its own cosmology, held on the authority of the tradition, and we present them as that.
Related
- Krishna, Neminatha and the Jain Harivamsha
- Jain history: patronage and persecution both
- Munisuvrata: the Tirthankara in whose era Rama lived
- Neminatha: the 22nd Tirthankara, and Krishna’s cousin
- Our missions: claim your story
- The birth stars of the 24 Tirthankaras
Frequently asked questions
↳ Is there a Jain Ramayana?
Yes. The Paumachariya of Vimalasuri, a Prakrit poem dated somewhere between the first and the fifth century CE, is the Jain Ramayana, and it is one of the oldest surviving retellings of the Rama story in any language. Later Jain versions include Ravisena's Sanskrit Padmapurana of 678 CE and Book VII of Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra. Rama is called Padma, which is what gives the poem its name.
↳ Does Rama kill Ravana in the Jain Ramayana?
No. Lakshmana kills Ravana, with the discus that Ravana himself had obtained and released. This is the single largest difference between the Jain telling and the Valmiki telling, and it follows from the structure of Jain universal history rather than from a storyteller's choice. Rama is a Baladeva and Lakshmana a Vasudeva, and in all nine cycles of that pattern it is the Vasudeva who does the killing and carries the karma of it.
↳ Why do Lakshmana and Ravana go to hell?
Because both killed. Jain karma theory does not treat violence as cancelled by the justice of the cause, so a killing binds karma for the person who commits it whatever the provocation. Lakshmana and Ravana are both reborn in hell, while Rama, who kills nobody, renounces after Lakshmana's death, attains omniscience and is liberated. Jain tradition holds that both souls rise again in time, and that Ravana's will eventually become a Tirthankara.
↳ Is Ravana a demon in Jainism?
No. He is a Vidyadhara, a human being of a class that acquires occult sciences, and the Jain texts treat him as a learned and capable king who reveres the Jinas and is destroyed by a desire he will not release. Vimalasuri explicitly rejects the idea that the Rakshasas ate human flesh, and explains them instead as a Vidyadhara lineage. Hanuman, in the same way, is a Vidyadhara prince rather than a monkey, and the Vanaras are a people who carry the monkey as their emblem.
↳ Do Jains worship Rama?
Jains honour him as one of the sixty-three illustrious persons and as a soul who attained liberation, which in Jain terms is the highest thing that can be said of anyone. That is veneration of an example rather than petition to a deity: Jainism has no creator god and does not hold that a liberated soul intervenes in the world, so nothing is asked of him. Whether a Jain household also keeps the wider Indian observances around Rama is a matter of family practice, and the tradition has never treated it as a betrayal.
Sources and labels. The Jain Rama cycle as summarised here follows Vimalasuri's Paumachariya and Ravisena's Padmapurana in the standard published accounts of them, together with Book VII of Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra in Helen M. Johnson's translation, which is the edition we read for Hemachandra throughout this site. The classification of Jain Rama narratives into the Vimalasuri, Gunabhadra and Sanghadasa streams follows V. M. Kulkarni's study of the story of Rama in Jain literature; that is modern scholarship rather than tradition, and is labelled as such above. The dating of the Paumachariya is unsettled and this page gives the range rather than a year: the colophon's own reckoning of 530 years after Mahavira's nirvana inherits the unsettled nirvana date discussed on our method page. The 678 CE date for Ravisena rests on that work's own colophon. The scheme of nine Baladeva, Vasudeva and Prativasudeva triads within the sixty-three shalaka purushas is standard across both traditions. That Ravana's soul will attain Tirthankarahood in a future age is a claim of tradition and is marked as one. We make no claim about the historicity of any Ramayana, and no claim that the Jain version is prior to or better than the Valmiki version. Corrections are seva: tell us.