Naciketas
50 BCE
legendary; a frame-character of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (text c. 5th–1st c. BCE)
Naciketas is the legendary protagonist of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad. Sent to the abode of Yama, the god of death, by his angry father, he extracts three boons, the third of which is the secret of what lies beyond death — Yama's answer is the Upaniṣad's teaching on the eternal Self (ātman). The text is a literary and philosophical composition, and Naciketas is a narrative frame-figure rather than a documented sage; the Kaṭha Upaniṣad is conventionally placed in the middle Upaniṣadic period.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Naciketas’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Graeco-Roman world
Jewish world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.