The work
The Paumacariya — the Deeds of Paüma, the Prakrit form of Padma, which is Rāma's name here — is the earliest surviving Jain version of the story and the model for many later ones in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Apabhraṃśa and the vernaculars. Vimalasūri opens it with a frank criticism of the version everyone knows: the brahmin poets, he says, have filled the story with impossibilities, and he is setting out to tell what actually happened.
The demythologizing is systematic. Rāvaṇa is not a demon but a vidyādhara — a member of a human race possessing acquired sciences and the power of flight — and a Jain layman of high cultivation who is destroyed by a single failure of restraint. The rākṣasas are not flesh-eating monsters but a lineage with a bad name; the vānaras are a clan whose banner carries a monkey. Rāvaṇa does not have ten heads; the number comes from a necklace of nine jewels that reflected his face.
The Jain frame
The story is fitted into the Jain universal history, in which sets of sixty-three illustrious figures recur in every world-cycle. Rāma is a balabhadra, Lakṣmaṇa a vāsudeva and Rāvaṇa a prativāsudeva, and the pattern requires that the vāsudeva kill the prativāsudeva — so Lakṣmaṇa kills Rāvaṇa, and Rāma's hands stay clean. It also requires their ends: Lakṣmaṇa, having killed, goes to hell; Rāma, after Sītā takes Jain initiation and departs, renounces the kingdom, becomes a monk and attains liberation.
Sītā is not abandoned into oblivion. She is banished on the same slander, bears her sons, and later, having proved herself, refuses to return to Rāma and takes vows instead. The Jain versions are consistently harder on Rāma and gentler on everyone else.
Why it matters
The Paumacariya is the oldest surviving evidence that the Rāmāyaṇa was already, early in its history, a story that different communities told against each other. It is not a heretical footnote to the Sanskrit epic but a parallel tradition with its own long life, running through Raviṣeṇa's Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa, Svayambhū's Apabhraṃśa Paümacariu and a great many later Jain works in Kannada, Tamil and Gujarati.
Method
Vimalasūri's technique is to keep the story and remove the impossibilities. Where the Sanskrit has demons, he supplies a people with a bad reputation; where it has a monkey army, a clan with a monkey emblem; where it has ten heads, a necklace of reflecting jewels. He gives genealogies for everyone, at length, and grounds each character in a chain of past births that explains their conduct — the standard Jain narrative apparatus, in which nothing happens without a karmic cause reaching back through lifetimes.
The result is a Rāmāyaṇa that reads in places like a rationalist critique of the Rāmāyaṇa, written fifteen centuries before the modern versions of that exercise.
The Jain Rāma tradition after Vimalasūri
The Paumacariya founded a literature. Raviṣeṇa turned it into Sanskrit as the Padmapurāṇa in the seventh century; Svayambhūdeva composed an Apabhraṃśa version, the Paümacariu; Guṇabhadra produced a markedly different Digambara telling in which Sītā is Rāvaṇa's daughter; Hemacandra included the story in his great compendium of Jain universal history in the twelfth century. Kannada, Tamil and Gujarati Jain versions followed.
These texts differ among themselves as much as they differ from Vālmīki, and taken together they are the largest body of non-brahmanical Rāmāyaṇa literature in India.
The opening complaint
Vimalasūri begins by saying that the story everyone knows is full of impossibilities — monkeys who talk, a demon with ten heads, flesh-eating night-rangers — and that he is going to tell what actually happened. It is a rationalist framing of a religious narrative, written in Prakrit, and it predates every European exercise of the kind by many centuries.
What he substitutes is not less marvellous, since his vidyādharas fly and command sciences. It is more consistent, and it is fitted to a Jain account of how the world works.
Further reading
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Jaini, Padmanabh S. Collected Papers on Jaina Studies. Motilal Banarsidass, 2000
- Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1999
- Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. University of California Press, 1991
- Sattar, Arshia. Valmiki's Ramayana. Harper Collins, 1996
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- Dasaratha Jātaka — The Dasaratha Jātaka is the Pāli birth-story in which the Bodhisatta is born as Rāma-paṇḍita, a version of the epic with no abduction, no Rāvaṇa and no war, and one of the earliest witnesses to the story outside the Sanskrit tradition.
- Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- Lakṣmaṇa — Lakṣmaṇa is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, who follows him into exile and serves fourteen years as guard and companion, mutilates Śūrpaṇakhā, kills Indrajit, and carries out the order to abandon Sītā.
- Jainism — Jainism is an Indian religion holding that every living thing possesses an eternal soul bound by karma, and that liberation is reached through non-violence, self-restraint and ascetic discipline.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.