Sanatani
Opening your Sanatani workspace
Skandha 9, adhyayas 10-11 · Saptah day 4
The whole Ramayana told in two chapters — and what the Bhagavatam chooses to stress when it has room for so little.
By the time Shuka reaches Rama, the ninth book has followed the line of Ikshvaku through Mandhata, Harishchandra, Sagara, Bhagiratha and Khatvanga. Then, for two chapters, the list of kings becomes a story. Khatvanga's line runs through Raghu and Aja to Dasharatha, and to Dasharatha, at the gods' prayer, Hari himself is born, dividing himself into four: Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughna.
Shuka does not pretend to tell it in full. Parikshit, he says, has heard the story of Sita's lord many times from seers who knew it. What he offers first is a single long verse that holds the Ramayana in one breath: the kingdom left for a father's word; the forest walked on feet so tender they could not bear even the touch of Sita's hand; the beloved lost; the ocean trembling at Rama's anger; the bridge; the wicked consumed like a forest in fire. Then he gives a brisk account.
That account moves fast. As a boy Rama protects Vishvamitra's sacrifice from the demons who trouble it. In Janaka's court he breaks Shiva's great bow, which it took three hundred men to carry in, as easily as an elephant snaps a stalk of sugarcane, and wins Sita. On the road home he humbles Parashurama, who had cleared the earth of kings again and again. Then his father, bound by a promise to his wife Kaikeyi, has to send him away, and Rama gives up kingdom and comfort without clinging to either and goes to the forest with Sita and Lakshmana.
In the forest Shurpanakha is disfigured, and Rama destroys Khara, Dushana and their army. Ravana, hearing of Sita's beauty, sends Maricha in the form of a wondrous deer to lead Rama away, and while Rama is killing it, carries Sita off. Here the text adds something Valmiki's reader might not expect. Rama wandered the forest with his brother in grief, it says, showing by his own state what becomes of those attached to a woman. The Lord's sorrow is played out in full, and the Bhagavatam names it as a lesson rather than a weakness to be hidden.
He performed the last rites for Jatayu, who had died for his sake, made friends with the monkeys, killed Vali, and through the monkeys learned where Sita was held. At the shore the ocean would not give way until Rama's anger rose, and then it came before him in person and showed him how to cross. A bridge was built of mountains, Vibhishana came over to his side, Lanka was besieged, and in the battle Ravana fell to Rama's arrow. Sita was found in the Ashoka grove, worn thin with grief. Rama returned in the Pushpaka chariot to find that Bharata had been living as an ascetic, with Rama's sandals in his place on the throne. Bharata came out to meet him carrying the sandals on his head, and Rama was crowned.
The eleventh chapter covers what many retellings rush past. Rama ruled as an ideal king, performed great sacrifices, and gave away the land itself as the priests' fee; they returned it, content with his spirit. Walking the city at night in disguise, he overheard a man refuse to take back a wife who had stayed in another man's house, adding that he was not Rama, to take back Sita. Rama gave Sita up. She went to Valmiki's hermitage, where she bore twin sons, Kusha and Lava, and later, entrusting them to the sage, she entered the earth. On hearing it, Rama could not hold back his grief, though he tried, and the text remarks that if attachment between man and woman does this even to the lords of the world, what then of an ordinary householder? Afterwards Rama lived in restraint, kept the sacred fire for thirteen thousand years, and returned to his own abode.
What does so short a telling stress? Not the war. Near its close Shuka says plainly that killing demons and bridging the sea are not Rama's real glory. He took a body in play at the gods' request; no one equals him; what need had he of monkeys to defeat his enemies? His glory is his name and his conduct, which purify whoever hears of them, and the text says that the people of Kosala who saw him, touched him or simply followed him went where yogis go. Elsewhere, in the fifth book (5.19.5), the Bhagavatam gives the reason in one line: the Lord's human birth is to teach human beings, not only to kill a demon.
That is why Rama belongs in a book of dynasties. The ninth skandha is about lines of kings, most of whom pass in a sentence. In Rama the line produces the king it existed for, and the Bhagavatam, with room for so little, keeps the word kept for a father, the grief shown openly, the brother with the sandals on his head, and the ordinary people of a city who went home with their king.
Opening your Sanatani workspace