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Yuddha Kand · Episode 2
When the ocean will not yield to Rama's prayer, the vanara Nala builds a bridge across the sea, which the Ocean himself bears up.
A retelling of Valmiki's Ramayana, not a translation. Where a later tradition adds to the story, we mark it.
The army stood at the edge of the world, and the world ended in water.
A hundred yojanas of open sea stretched between the southern shore and Lanka. (A yojana is an old Indian measure of distance; traditions count it as several miles, so the sea was very wide.) Rama's army had marched here with the momentum of a righteous cause. Now they stood on the sand and stared at the ocean, and the ocean stared back, uncrossable.
No vanara could swim a hundred yojanas. No bridge had ever spanned such a distance.
Rama lay down on a bed of kusha grass at the water's edge, faced the sea, and prayed to Sagara, lord of the waters, for passage. He lay there for three nights.
The ocean did not appear.
Rama's patience ended. In Valmiki's telling, he rose in anger, took up his bow, and sent his arrows into the sea until the waters were churned and its creatures were in distress. Lakshmana caught hold of the bow and said that this was enough.
Then Sagara rose from the waves, bright with jewels, and stood before Rama with his palms joined.
Sagara said that he was fathomless, and that it was his nature that he could not be swum across or made solid. But he would arrange a way for the vanaras to cross, and he would bear it.
Rama said that his great arrow, already drawn, must not be wasted, and he asked where it should fall. Sagara named the land of Drumakulya to the north, where fierce robbers lived. The arrow struck there. The land dried and became a desert, and Rama granted it a blessing: it would still give some roots, fruits, milk and herbs.
Then Sagara spoke of Nala, a vanara of the army, son of Vishwakarma, the divine architect. His father had given him a boon, and he had his father's skill. Let him build a bridge across the sea, said Sagara, and the sea would hold it up.
Nala, the son of the divine architect, set to work, and the vanaras brought trees and stones to the shore for him.
Stone by stone, the bridge held. The ocean, true to Sagara's word, bore the weight without swallowing a single stone. (In the tradition many households know best, the vanaras also inscribed each stone with Rama's name before setting it in the water, and it was the name, not the engineering, that kept the stones from sinking. That image is not in Valmiki's account; there, the bridge stands on Nala's craft and the ocean's promise alone.) The bridge held because the builder was gifted and because the ocean had given its word.
Each day the bridge grew longer: fourteen yojanas on the first day, twenty on the second, twenty-one on the third, twenty-two on the fourth and twenty-three on the fifth. On the fifth day, the bridge was complete.
It stretched a hundred yojanas across the open ocean and was ten yojanas wide, so the whole army could cross it.
Ahead lay Lanka. Ahead lay Ravana. Ahead lay the war that would decide the fate of dharma in the age.
But the bridge was already a great thing done. The ocean, which had ignored three nights of prayer and yielded only when Rama's anger rose, now held the bridge on its surface, as if it had simply been waiting to be asked in the right way.
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