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Janaka

जनक Janaka

The philosopher-king of Mithila (Videha), celebrated in the Upanishads as a royal sage and, in the Ashtavakra Gita, the disciple who attains realisation almost at once.

Where this term appears

  • What are the Upanishads? Scriptures

    He is a sage at the court of King Janaka who out-argues every challenger, and who teaches that the self can only ever be the subject, never an object, the knower that cannot itself be known the way a thing is k…

  • The Ashtavakra Gita Philosophy

    One is Janaka , the king of Mithila, the philosopher-king celebrated in the Upanishads as a royal sage.

  • The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: the forest of Yajnavalkya Treatise

    The gold on the horns King Janaka of Videha wants to know who the wisest brahmin in the land is, and he stages a contest to find out.

  • The Classes of the Gods Treatise

    At the court of King Janaka, the fierce sage Yājñavalkya is challenged by a series of questioners, and one of them, Vidagdha Śākalya, asks him a deceptively simple question: how many gods are there?

  • The Ones Who Asked Treatise

    The scene is a great sacrifice held by Janaka, king of Videha, who has offered a thousand cows with gold bound to their horns to whichever brahmin present is the most learned.

  • The Sitting-Near Treatise

    Above all there is Janaka, king of Videha in the far east of the Vedic world, whose court is the stage for the most important debates in the whole corpus, and who more than holds his own with the greatest teach…

  • What the ten amount to: the house read as one Treatise

    The Brihadaranyaka, in Yajnavalkya's private teaching to Janaka, gives an account governed by desire and work, the self fashioning its next body "as a goldsmith takes a piece of gold and turns it into another, …

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