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OCTOBER 1991
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Sri Sankar Dayal Sharma, Vice-President of India,
releasing the Illustrated Jaina Ramayana
maņa was the eighth Nārāyaṇa, and Rāvana, the eighth Pratinārāyaṇa. Råma performed many heroic deeds, ruled over his kingdom as a just and popular ruler, abdicated his throne, renounced worldly life and pleasures, practised austerities as an ideal ascetic, obtained kevala-jñāna becoming thereupon Arhat-Kevalin, the perfect man-god, and finally attained nirvāņa or mokşa. Since as an ascetic he came to be designated Padma or Padma Muniśvara, the Jaina Puranic account relating his story has usually been called the Padma-purâna or Padma-carita (Apabhramsa Pauma-cariu and Prakrit Pauma-cari yam). Not only Rama himself, but his parents, brothers, wife Sita, the veritable paragon of virtue, brother-in-law Bhāmandala, friends and allies like Hanumāna, Sugriva and Vibhişaņa, and his arch enemy Ravaņa, the notorious king of the golden city of Lanka, are living characters in the Jaina version of the Rāma story. The principal events and their sequence are more or less the same as in Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, the earliest and main source of the Brahmanical version. In fact, the earliest available Jaina version of the story is the Pauma-cariu, composed in Prakrit verse, by saint Vimala, in Mahavira niryāna year 530, that is, only three years after the beginning of the Christian era, thus within a century or so of the publication of Valmiki's Rāmāyana. In his prologue Vimala explicitly avers that the chief object in writing his Pauma-cariu was to present and publicise the true account of Rāma's story, as handed down to him in the Jaina tradition which reached back to Rama's own times,
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