Balkand · Shiva’s Answer, and the Glory of Rama’s Story

Parvati is still speaking. Under the banyan on Kailasa, seated at Shiva’s left, she has asked whether the Rama he repeats day and night is the prince of Ayodhya or some other. She has told him what she saw in the forest in her former life and what it cost her. She has put her head on the ground and begged him for Rama’s pure glory. Her plea runs on. What she asks for is the whole of Rama’s story, named part by part in the order she wants it. From the reason a Brahman without attributes takes on a body to the way he went at last to his own abode with his subjects. After that the truth the knowing sages are immersed in, and after that whatever she has not asked.

What is at stake is her old doubt. She has said that some of it remains, and before the telling of Rama’s descent begins, Shiva answers it. He is silent first, for two dandas, with all of Rama’s deeds risen in his heart. Then he bows to Rama as a child and praises her question. He names the one thing she said that did not please him, and answers it with likenesses, a teaching, and his own testimony of what he does at Kashi.

Her doubts go. She holds his feet and asks again the question she asked first: for what reason did Brahman take a human body? Shiva, glad, praises her. The two readings of the poem, the nine-day and the month-long, pause there, between the doubt that has gone and the telling of the descent that has not yet begun. Then he names the story he is about to tell, the Ramcharitmanas, as the one Kakabhushundi told and Garuda heard. He says that how that dialogue came about he will tell later.

Who is in the conversation on Kailasa

The main figures in this episode

• Parvati who names what she wants told and in what order. Her doubt Shiva answers. She holds his feet when it is gone, and ends by asking her first question again: why did Brahman take a human body?
• Shiva who sits silent for two dandas before his first word, bows to Rama twice, praises his wife and rebukes one thing she said. He teaches her that saguna and nirguna are one and gives his testimony of what he does at Kashi. At the end he names the story he is about to tell as the one Bhushundi told and Garuda heard.
• Rama the one all of this is about. His deeds and his form rise in Shiva’s heart. He is bowed to as a child and named as Dasharatha’s son and the lord of Kosala. He is present in no scene of the episode.
• Dasharatha named twice in the verse, once for his courtyard and once as Rama’s father, and both times to say who Rama is.
• Kakabhushundi the crow who told this story at length. Shiva names him in the first of the sorthas that close the episode as its teller.
• Garuda the king of birds, who heard the story from Bhushundi. How that dialogue came about, Shiva says, he will tell later.

Even what she did not ask

She goes on. “Though a woman is not entitled, I am your servant in mind, deed, and word. The saints hide no hidden truth where they find one who is entitled and in distress. In great distress I ask: have mercy and tell Rama’s story. First, having thought it over, tell the cause: why does nirguna Brahman take on a saguna body?” Nirguna is Brahman without attributes, and saguna is the same Brahman with them. Her first question is why the one becomes the other. The word she gave as the saints’ condition, distress, is the word she uses of herself in the next line.

Then the list, in the order she wants it. “Then tell of Rama’s descent, and tell his generous deeds as a child. Tell how he married Sita, and for what fault he gave up the kingdom. Tell the boundless deeds he did living in the forest, and how he killed Ravana, master. The many lilas he did when he sat as king, tell them all, Shiva.” The doha takes the list to its end. “Then tell the wonder Rama did: how, with his subjects, he went to his own abode.” Of everything she has named, the going is the one thing she calls a wonder, and she asks how he went with his people.

She goes on past the story. “Then explain that truth in whose realization the knowing sages are immersed, and describe bhakti, knowledge, realization, and dispassion, each with its divisions. And Rama’s many other secrets, tell those too, master. Your discernment is wholly pure. Whatever I have not asked, do not keep that hidden either.” She asks for the story, then for that truth, then for the secrets, and then for whatever she has not asked.

Her last line is about him. “The Vedas have called you the guru of the three worlds. What do other base jivas know?” A jiva is an embodied self, any creature that lives in a body.

Two dandas of silence

Her question, natural, handsome, and without guile, pleased Shiva’s mind. Into his heart came all of Rama’s deeds. His body thrilled with love, and his eyes filled with tears. Rama’s form came into his heart, and he found boundless joy. The commentary adds that the one who found it is himself the form of supreme bliss.

For two dandas he stayed immersed in the rasa of that meditation, a span the commentary gives as two ghadis, less than an hour. Then he drew his mind out, and only then, glad, he began to tell Rama’s deeds. The rasa he was lost in was Rama’s, the same Rama whose story he was about to tell, and the story waits on the silence.

From here the speaker is Shiva: a husband under a banyan answering his wife, and the one in whose mouth the story of Rama’s descent will come.

A bow to the child form

His first words are a bow, and the bow begins with the one bowed to unnamed. “Without knowing whom, even what is false seems true, as a snake is seen in a rope one has not recognized. And knowing whom, the world is lost, as the confusion of a dream goes when one wakes. I bow to that same Rama in his child form, by repeating whose name every siddhi comes easily. Home of good, remover of ill, may he who plays in Dasharatha’s courtyard be gracious.” The rope and the dream come first, and then the next line turns: that same Rama, as a child, with a courtyard to play in, and the courtyard his father’s. The one by knowing whom the world is lost is bowed to as a boy at play.

Having saluted Rama, Shiva, glad, spoke in a voice the verse calls nectar, and the first thing he said to his wife was praise of her. “Blessed, blessed are you, Parvati. No one is a benefactor like you. You have asked for the story of Rama, a Ganga that purifies the world for every world. You love Rama’s feet. You have asked your question for the good of the world.”

Then the doha. “By Rama’s grace, Parvati, in my judgment there is no grief, delusion, doubt, or confusion in your mind, even in a dream.” The one about to answer a doubt says that the doubt is absent from the mind that raised it, and sets the absence down to Rama’s grace. Then the next line. “Even so, you raised that doubt. By its telling and hearing, everyone’s good is done.” The commentary reads the second statement as the reason for the first: she raised that old doubt so that the telling and hearing of this account would do everyone good.

Those who have not heard this story

Now a list of the body, part by part, with a likeness for each. “Those who have not heard the Lord’s story with their ears, their ear-holes are the same as snake holes. Eyes that have not seen the saints are counted among the eyes on a peacock’s feathers. Heads that do not bow at the feet of the Lord and the guru are like bitter gourds.” The eyes on a peacock’s feathers are counterfeit eyes, the commentary says.

Then the heart, the tongue, and the breast. “Those who have not brought the Lord’s bhakti into their hearts are, living, the same as the dead. The tongue that does not sing Rama’s virtues is like a frog’s tongue. The breast that does not rejoice to hear the Lord’s deeds is as hard and cruel as the thunderbolt.” Then he turns to her by name. “Parvati, hear Rama’s lila. It does good to the gods and bewilders the danavas.” One lila, and two things it does.

The doha gives the story a shape. “Rama’s story is like the cow of the gods: served, it gives every joy. The company of the good is all the worlds of the gods. Knowing this, who would not hear it?” The commentary names the cow as Kamadhenu. Two more likenesses follow. “Rama’s story is the beautiful clap of the hands that drives off the birds of doubt. Rama’s story is the axe to the tree of the Kali age. Hear it with respect, Parvati.” Doubt, in this picture, is a flock that a clap scatters.

One thing that did not please him

Before he comes to it he sets the size of what she has asked for. “The Vedas have sung Rama’s handsome names, virtues, deeds, births, and acts as past counting. As Rama is endless, so are his story, his fame, and his virtues many. Even so, seeing your great love, I will tell it as I have heard it and as my wit allows. Parvati, your question is naturally handsome, delightful, and approved by the saints. It pleased me.” As I have heard it: Yajnavalkya had said the same words at Prayaga when he began Rama’s story, and the verse gives them now to Shiva.

Then the one thing. “One thing did not please me, though you said it under delusion, Parvati. You said that Rama is some other, whom the Vedas sing and on whom the sages fix their meditation.” The cause, delusion, is given before the thing itself is named. What she had asked under the banyan, whether he is the king’s son or some unborn other, he gives back as a statement she made: that Rama is some other. That is the thing he did not like.

What follows is aimed at the people who say and hear such things. “Such things are said and heard by base men seized by the demon of delusion: hypocrites, turned from the Lord’s feet, who know neither the false nor the true. The ignorant, the unlearned, the blind, the luckless, on whose mind, a mirror, the moss of the senses’ objects has gathered. The lecherous, the deceitful, the very crooked, who have not seen an assembly of saints even in a dream. They speak words the Vedas do not sanction, those who do not see gain or loss. With a dirty mirror and no eyes, how are the poor things to see Rama’s form?” The verse brings back the mirror of a few lines before, and adds that the eyes are missing too.

“Those who have no discernment of nirguna and saguna babble many invented words. Wandering the world in the grip of the Lord’s maya, there is nothing they might not say. The wind-sick, the possessed, and the drunk do not speak considered words. Those who have drunk the wine of great delusion, do not lend an ear to what they say.” The wind-sick, the commentary explains, are those in the fevers and madness that come of a disorder of the wind.

Then the sortha turns back to her by name. “Think it over in your heart, give up doubt, and worship Rama’s feet. Hear, Parvati, my words, the rays of the sun to the darkness of confusion.”

Saguna and nirguna are one

Now he takes up the two words of the question she asked first, nirguna and saguna, and begins by removing the difference between them. “Between saguna and nirguna there is no difference at all. Sages, Puranas, the wise, and the Vedas all sing it. That which is without attributes, without form, unseen, and unborn becomes saguna through the love of its devotees.” He names who says so: four witnesses, sages, Puranas, the wise, and the Vedas.

Then the likeness. “How is the one without attributes the same as the one with them? As water and hail are not different. He whose name is the sun to the darkness of confusion, how can delusion be spoken of him?” Both are water, the commentary says, and so nirguna and saguna are one. The sun and the darkness of confusion, the image he gave his own words in the sortha, he now gives to Rama’s name.

“Rama is the sun of being, consciousness, and bliss. There is not a trace of the night of delusion there. He is by nature light itself, the Lord, and there, moreover, no dawn of realization comes.” A dawn needs a night before it, the commentary explains. Where there is no night of ignorance there is no dawn of realization either. The Lord is knowledge by nature, always.

Then things are put in their places. “Joy and grief, knowledge and ignorance, the sense of I and pride are the properties of the jiva. Rama is Brahman pervading all. The world knows it: supreme bliss, the lord beyond the highest, the ancient one.” Knowledge and ignorance stand in the same list, on the jiva’s side. The doha closes with a name and a bow. “The renowned Purusha, the treasury of light, manifest, the master of the high and the low: that Rama, the jewel of Raghu’s line, is my master.” The commentary reads the master of the high and the low as the lord of the jiva, of maya, and of the world. Saying this, Shiva bowed his head. His answer opened with a bow to the child, and this second bow comes in the middle of it, as he speaks to his wife.

A finger on the eye

“The ignorant do not understand their own confusion. And those dull creatures lay delusion on the Lord, as the ill-thinking, seeing a cover of cloud in the sky, say that the sun has been covered.” The fault in the one who sees is charged to the thing seen.

Two more pictures follow the cloud. “One who looks with a finger pressed on his eye, to him two moons appear. Parvati, delusion about Rama is like darkness, smoke, and dust appearing in the sky.” The second moon is made by the finger. On the third picture the commentary adds a bracket: the sky is pure and untouched, no one can soil it or touch it, and so is Rama.

Then a short account of how anything is known at all. “Objects, the senses, the gods of the senses, and the jiva: all are made conscious, one by another. He who is the supreme illuminator of them all is Rama, beginningless, the lord of Ayodhya.” The commentary draws the chain: objects are lit by the senses, the senses by their presiding gods, and those gods by the conscious jiva. The one who lights all of them is Rama. “The world is what is lit, and Rama is its light. He is the lord of maya, the home of knowledge and virtue. By his reality even insentient maya, with delusion’s help, seems real.” The doha gives two likenesses for that seeming. “As silver appears in a shell, and water in the rays of the sun: though false in all three times, no one can remove that confusion.”

Then a line on the pain. “In this way the world rests on the Lord. Though it is unreal, it does give pain, as when, in a dream, someone cuts off a head: without waking, the pain does not go.” The verse gives that pain one end, waking. The next line says by whose grace. “By whose grace such confusion is wiped away, Parvati, that is the gracious Rama. No one has found his beginning or his end. Guessing by wit, the Vedas have sung of him thus.”

What the Vedas sing is a list of what he does without. “Without feet he walks, without ears he hears, without hands he does deeds of many kinds. Without a mouth he enjoys every taste. Without speech he is a great speaker. Without a body he touches, without eyes he sees, without a nose he takes in every scent. So otherworldly in every way are his doings that his greatness cannot be described.” Eight organs are taken away, and all eight of their works remain. Then the doha names him. “He whom the Vedas and the wise sing of in this way, and on whom the sages fix their meditation. He is Dasharatha’s son, the friend of his devotees, the lord of Kosala, the Lord.” The one described without feet or hands is given a father’s name and a kingdom.

The testimony of Kashi

After the teaching comes his own practice, in his own words. “By the strength of whose name I free of sorrow the creature I see dying at Kashi. That Lord is my master, lord of the moving and the still, Rama, who knows the inside of every heart.” The commentary adds what the freeing is: he gives the dying one the mantra of Rama, and the freedom from sorrow is liberation.

Then the reckoning of the name. “Even when a man says his name helplessly, the sins made in many births burn away. Those who remember him with respect cross the ocean of being as if it were a cow’s hoofprint.”

Then the warning. “Rama is that supreme Self, Parvati. To say there is confusion in him, your words are most improper. The moment such doubt is brought into the heart, knowledge, dispassion, and every virtue go.”

At Shiva’s words, which break confusion, the whole fabric of her false reasoning vanished. Love and faith in Rama’s feet arose in her, and the dreadful impossibility passed, which the commentary explains as a false notion of what cannot be. The verse calls what went a fabric, a thing built, and names what arose in its own order: love, then faith.

The same question, asked again

Again and again she took hold of Shiva’s feet, joined her hands, and spoke fine words, as if they had been steeped in the rasa of love. “Hearing your voice, like the rays of the moon, the heavy autumn heat of delusion has gone. Gracious one, you have taken away all doubt. I have come to know Rama’s true form.”

“Master, by your grace grief is gone now, and by the favor of your feet I am happy. Now, knowing me your servant, though a woman is by nature dull and unknowing, tell me what I asked first, if you are pleased with me.” What she now holds settled she says in one line. “Rama is Brahman, pure consciousness, imperishable, free of everything, and dwelling in the city of every heart.” What she still asks is the question she began with. “For what reason, master, did he take a human body? Explain it to me, Shiva.”

At Parvati’s most humble words and her pure love for Rama’s story, Shiva, naturally wise, rejoiced in his heart. He praised her in many ways, and then he spoke. The doha calls him here Kama’s foe, the one who burned the god of desire, and the question before him is why Brahman took a body. Between that doha and the sorthas that follow, the two readings of the poem pause: the nine-day reading at its first pause, the month-long reading at its fourth. The pause falls where the doubt has gone and the telling of the descent has not yet begun.

Then he names the story. “Hear, Parvati, the auspicious story, the pure Ramcharitmanas, which Bhushundi told at length and Garuda, the king of birds, heard.” The crow’s name, which the commentary gives in full as Kakabhushundi, appears here in Shiva’s mouth as its teller, and Garuda’s as its hearer. “How that noble dialogue came about, I will tell later. Hear the descent of Rama and his deeds, most beautiful and sinless. The Lord’s virtues, name, story, and form are boundless, past counting, without limit. I tell them as my own wit allows. Parvati, hear with respect.” As my wit allows: he said it before the rebuke, and he says it again before the story.

Rama absent, and the question still open

Rama is in every part of this conversation and in none of its scenes. His deeds and his form rise in Shiva’s heart. He is bowed to as a child in a courtyard. He is named as the sun with no night, as the light of the world, as Dasharatha’s son and the lord of Kosala. As the name by whose strength the dying at Kashi are freed of sorrow. Dasharatha himself is named twice, once for his courtyard and once as a father, and both times to say who Rama is. The whole of it is two people talking under a tree, and what they talk about is a third.

The order of the answer is worth seeing. Shiva bowed to a child and called his wife blessed. He spoke of ears and eyes and tongues, and only after that of the one without attributes who takes on attributes through love. His testimony came near the end, and it was the testimony of something he does at Kashi. He bowed twice: once before his first word to her, and once in the middle of his teaching, at the name of his master.

She called herself his servant in the first line of this episode and again in her last plea, and the question she ended on is the question she put first. The doubt that stood in its way, whether the Rama of Ayodhya is the Brahman the Vedas sing, is answered inside this episode. The question itself, why that Brahman took a human body, is still open when she asks it again. Shiva’s answer to it, inside these lines, is to bid her hear, and to name the story he is about to tell. The next episode opens on the reasons for the descent.

Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Balkand, doha 110 to sortha 120 (d), read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.