Adhyaya 25

Chapter 25 is a tīrtha-māhātmya related by Śrī Sūta to the sages of Naimiṣāraṇya. He proclaims the greatness of Jābālītīrtha on Veṅkaṭādri, a sacred ford said to destroy all sins. The sages ask about a man named Durācāra and the nature of his wrongdoing. Sūta explains that Durācāra, a brāhmaṇa living near the Kāverī, kept long company with perpetrators of mahāpātakas—such as a slayer of a brāhmaṇa, a drinker of liquor, a thief, and one who violates the guru’s bed. The text sets out a graded teaching on ritual-social defilement: through prolonged cohabitation, contact, eating, and sleeping with such offenders, one’s “brāhmaṇya” steadily diminishes until one becomes equal in fault. Durācāra is then afflicted, seized by a vetāla, and wanders in misery. By residual merit and providential convergence he reaches Veṅkaṭādri and is plunged into Jābālītīrtha; he is immediately freed from the vetāla and from sin. He approaches the sage Jābāli for an explanation, and Jābāli reveals that the vetāla was once a brāhmaṇa who neglected the prescribed pārvaṇa-śrāddha on the death-day, was cursed by the ancestors, and became a vetāla—yet bathing in Jābālītīrtha releases even such a being to Viṣṇuloka. The chapter warns that neglecting śrāddha for deceased parents leads to a vetāla-state and then to hell, and it closes with a phalaśruti: mere bathing at Jābālītīrtha removes even hard-to-expiate sins, including those without a clear prāyaścitta in smṛti, and hearing this account is likewise purifying and liberative.