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In the month of Magha, when the sun passes into Makara, everyone comes to Prayaga. Gods, danavas, kinnaras, and men go down into the Triveni to bathe. The sages among them gather at the hermitage of Bharadvaja, who lives there and loves Rama’s feet. They bathe at dawn and spend the day talking of the Lord. When the month ends they go home. One year Bharadvaja takes hold of the feet of a departing guest, Yajnavalkya, and keeps him, because he has a doubt he is afraid and ashamed to speak. Shiva repeats the name Rama without pause and teaches it at Kashi to the dying. Is that Rama the prince of Ayodhya, who grieved for his wife and killed Ravana, or someone else?
Yajnavalkya smiles, says he can see what lies behind the question, and answers it with a story. The rest of these twelve dohas holds that story, and only pieces of Rama’s own come into it. In the Treta age, Shiva and Sati are walking home from the hermitage of Agastya, where Shiva has just heard the story of Rama. On the road Shiva sees Rama himself, searching the forest for Sita and weeping like any man. Shiva cries out in praise and walks past without a word of greeting. Sati watches her husband salute a king’s son, and a doubt rises in her that she keeps to herself. Shiva sends her to test the prince for herself. She goes in Sita’s form, and comes back to a question waiting for her under a banyan tree. This is the telling Tulsidas named in his preface, Yajnavalkya’s to Bharadvaja, and the Ramcharitmanas turns to it here.
Two people doubt who Rama is in these twelve dohas, and the ground under each doubt is its own. Bharadvaja has heard the story the whole world knows: a prince who suffered in separation from his wife and killed Ravana in anger. Sati’s doubt is about the prince in front of her, searching the forest for that wife, and about her husband, who has just saluted him. Bharadvaja says his doubt aloud and is answered with a smile and a story. Sati keeps hers inside, and her husband, who knows what is within, answers it anyway.
The sages at Prayaga, and the travelers on a Treta road
The main figures in this episode
- Bharadvaja the sage of Prayaga, whose love is for Rama’s feet and whose doubt is about who Rama is. He holds Yajnavalkya back by the feet, washes them, confesses with fear and shame, and hears everything that follows.
- Yajnavalkya the sage of supreme discernment whom Bharadvaja keeps back. He smiles at the question, sees the cunning behind it, and tells the dialogue of Parvati and Shiva, beginning with its time and its cause.
- Shiva who sees Rama on the road home from Agastya’s hermitage, calls out a cry of glory, and walks on without making himself known. Later he explains to Sati, sends her to test for herself, and waits under a banyan repeating the name.
- Sati Daksha’s daughter, walking beside Shiva without knowing what troubles him. A doubt rises in her at the sight of his state, and she keeps it to herself. Sent to test Rama, she takes Sita’s form, is known at once, and sees the road fill with Ramas.
- Rama seen first in the forest, searching for his wife with his brother. Then he is face to face with Sati, his hands joined. Then he is ahead of her and behind her and wherever she looks, in countless forms, with Sita and Lakshmana beside him every time.
- Lakshmana who sees Sati in Sita’s form, is amazed, and keeps silent. He knows Rama’s power.
- Agastya the sage the verse calls Kumbhaja, the pot-born. The commentary gives his name as Agastya. Shiva and Sati stay some days at his hermitage, and his name comes twice in the story.
Prayaga, Magha, and the gathering at Bharadvaja’s hermitage
The story opens on a place, the meeting of three rivers, and on the sage who lives there. Bharadvaja lives at Prayaga, and the first thing said of him is that his love is for Rama‘s feet. After that: he is an ascetic, master of his mind and his senses, kind, and wise on the road of the highest good. The man who is about to ask who Rama is has his love for Rama set down before anything else.
Then the season. In Magha, when the sun goes into Makara, everyone comes to the king of holy places, Prayaga in the commentary’s name. Gods, danavas, kinnaras, and men come in rows and bathe with respect in the Triveni. They worship the feet of Madhava, the Veni Madhava of the commentary, and when they touch the undying banyan their bodies thrill. In the middle of that crowd stands one hermitage, holy and lovely and dear to the best of sages: Bharadvaja’s.
The sages and rishis who come to bathe gather there. Every morning they bathe with eagerness, and afterward they tell one another of the Lord’s qualities. A doha counts the subjects of that talk: the nature of Brahman, the rule of dharma, the division of the tattvas. Devotion to the Lord joined with knowledge and dispassion. Three of the four are subjects. The fourth has a person in it, because devotion is to someone.
A doubt he is afraid and ashamed to speak
So they bathe for the whole of Magha, and then each goes back to his own hermitage. It happens every year, and every year the joy is great. One year, when the month in Makara was over and all the great sages had left, Bharadvaja took hold of the feet of Yajnavalkya, a sage of supreme discernment. He kept him.
What a hermitage owes a guest was done in full. Bharadvaja washed his feet with respect, seated him on a holy seat, worshiped him, and praised him. Then, in a pure and gentle voice, he spoke. “Master, I have one great doubt, and the whole essence of the Vedas is in your hand. Fear and shame come over me in the saying of it, and if I do not say it there is great harm.” The commentary opens the three words. The fear is that the sage might think he is being tested. The shame is that so much of a life has gone by without this knowledge. The harm is that he would stay ignorant.
He gives the rule he is about to act on, with its witnesses. “The saints say this, Lord, and the Vedas, the Puranas, and the sages sing it: clear discernment does not arise in a heart that conceals from the guru. Thinking so, I lay my delusion open. Take it from me, master, and show grace to your servant.”
The doubt comes with its proofs first. The saints, the Puranas, and the Upanishads have sung the boundless power of Rama’s name. Shiva, the undying, a mass of knowledge and virtue, repeats it without pause. Beings in the world are of four sources, and whoever dies at Kashi gains the supreme state. That too, Bharadvaja says, is the glory of Rama’s name, since what Shiva in his compassion teaches the dying there, the commentary explains, is that name. Then the question. “Who is that Rama, Lord? I ask you. Explain it to me.”
And he says at once where his trouble lies. “One Rama is the prince of Ayodhya’s king, whose deeds the whole world knows. He suffered boundless sorrow in separation from his wife, and when anger came he killed Ravana in battle.” Of all those deeds he names two, the sorrow and the anger. The doha puts the doubt at its full size: “Lord, is it that same Rama, or some other, whom Shiva repeats? You are the home of truth and you know all. Weigh it with discernment and tell me.”
The answer begins with someone else’s doubt
Bharadvaja adds one request: “Tell me that story at length, master, by which my heavy confusion may be erased.” Yajnavalkya’s first answer is a smile. Then he explains it. “Rama’s majesty is known to you. You are Rama’s devotee in mind, deed, and word, and I have understood your quick wit. You want to hear Rama’s hidden qualities.” That, the commentary adds, is why he asked as if he were very foolish. The recognition matches the first line said of Bharadvaja, that his love is for Rama’s feet.
Then he begins. “Son, listen with respect and a settled mind. I tell Rama’s handsome story.” He introduces the story with two likenesses, one in each of two chaupais. Great delusion is a vast buffalo demon, Mahishasura in the commentary’s name, and Rama’s story is the terrible Kalika who destroys him. And Rama’s story is like the rays of the moon, which the saints drink the way chakora birds do. The same story is Kalika to delusion and moonlight to a saint.
The second half of that chaupai turns the page toward another doubt. “Just such a doubt Parvati made, and then Shiva told it at length.” The man who found his doubt hard to say is told that someone else once had the very same one. The doha names what is coming and turns to the listener. “I tell now, according to my wit, that dialogue of Parvati and Shiva: at what time it came about, and for what cause. Hear it, sage, and your sorrow will be erased.” Two things come before the dialogue, its time and its cause. From here Yajnavalkya is the teller, and Bharadvaja listens at Prayaga while the story moves to a road in another age.
Coming back from Agastya’s hermitage
The story goes to the Treta age. Once, Shiva went to the sage Kumbhaja, Agastya in the commentary’s name, and Sati went with him. The sage worshiped them, knowing his guest for the lord of all. Then there was giving on both sides. Agastya told the story of Rama at length, and Shiva heard it with the greatest joy. Then the sage asked Shiva about bhakti, devotion to the Lord. Shiva, finding him fit to hear it, told him, with its secret, the commentary adds. In one hermitage Shiva was first the hearer and then the teller. Telling and hearing tales of Rama’s qualities, he stayed some days. Then he asked leave of the sage and set out for home with Sati.
In those same days, to lift the burden of the earth, the Lord had taken birth in Raghu’s line. At his father’s word he had given up the kingdom and, detached, in an ascetic’s dress in the commentary’s reading, the imperishable one was wandering the Dandaka forest. The hero of the story Shiva had just heard was in the forest at that very time.
Shiva went along thinking. How could he have the sight of him? Rama had come down in a secret form, and if Shiva went to him, everyone would know. The wish to see him was there, and so was the thing that held him back. His going would give the secret away. There was great agitation in Shiva’s heart, and Sati, walking beside him, was unaware of it. The sortha says it with the poet’s own name inside: Tulsidas says there was fear in his mind and greed in his eyes, the greed for a sight of him. A frightened mind and greedy eyes in one man, and the woman beside him unaware of either. What Sati sees next, she sees without knowing why.
The one who knows no parting, weeping in the forest
Shiva’s thinking went on. Ravana had asked for his death at a man’s hand, from Brahma, the commentary says, and Rama meant to make Brahma’s word come true. “If I do not go, the regret will stay with me.” He turned it over, and no plan came together. So Shiva fell into worry. At that very time Ravana went and took Maricha with him, and Maricha at once became the false deer. While Shiva on his road was wondering how to see Rama without being known, Ravana was setting his trap.
The fool carried off Sita by guile. Rama’s real power was beyond his knowing. Rama killed the deer and came back with his brother, Lakshmana in the commentary’s naming. At the sight of the hermitage, empty, as the commentary says, his eyes filled with tears. One chaupai holds the abduction, the fool’s ignorance, the return, and the tears. Then the plain statement: Rama, distressed by separation like a man, and the two brothers wandering the forest in search of her. He never has union or separation with anyone. In him the pain of separation was seen openly. The poem states the contradiction outright and follows it at once with a doha. “Rama’s doings are most wonderful. The supremely wise know them. The dull of wit, under delusion, hold something else in their hearts.” Two kinds of onlooker are named before any onlooker arrives.
At that moment Shiva saw Rama, and great joy rose in his heart. He gazed with filled eyes at that ocean of beauty. The eyes the sortha called greedy were full now. Knowing the time to be wrong, he did not make himself known. He said only, “Glory to Saccidananda, the purifier of the world,” Saccidananda being the name that means being, consciousness, and bliss. He walked on. He went along with Sati, thrilling again and again as he walked, and the thrill was there beside her to be seen.
What rose in Sati’s mind
Sati saw that state of Shiva’s, and a great doubt rose in her heart. The verse is clear that the doubt came from the sight of him. Her reasoning, which the commentary hears as said in her mind alone, begins with respect. Shiva is adored by the whole world. He is the lord of the world. Gods, men, and sages all bow their heads to him. And he has saluted a king’s son, calling him Saccidananda, the supreme abode. She has heard the words. He was lost in that son’s beauty, and even now, walking beside her, the love in his heart cannot be checked.
Then her doubt takes the shape of a question, in the language of the scriptures. Brahman is all-pervading, stainless, unborn, without parts, without desire, and undivided, and even the Vedas do not know it. Can that take a body and become a man? She goes further. Vishnu, who wears a man’s body for the good of the gods, is all-knowing too, like Shiva. Would he, the home of knowledge, Lakshmi’s lord, the enemy of the asuras, search for a woman like someone who knows nothing? She grants the descent. Her question is smaller and sharper, and it turns on the searching. Bharadvaja, from the deeds he had heard of, had named the sorrow and the anger. Sati names the search for a woman.
And she is held from the other side too. Shiva’s word cannot be false, and everyone knows that Shiva knows all. Scripture on one side and her husband’s word on the other, and she cannot hold both as true. So the doubt in her mind grew past measuring, and no understanding woke in her heart.
Though Sati said nothing openly, Shiva, who knows what is within, knew it all. Bharadvaja had spoken through his shame. Sati did not speak, and still everything was known, because the one beside her knows what is within. Shiva gave the doubt its name. “Listen, Sati: that is your woman’s nature. Never hold such a doubt in your heart.” For his proof he reached back to the hermitage they had just left. “He whose story the sage Kumbhaja sang, whose bhakti I told that sage: that same one is my chosen deity, Rama, whom the steadfast sages serve always.” Both halves of what passed at Agastya’s hermitage now stand as witnesses.
In a chhand he completes the introduction. Wise sages, yogis, and siddhas meditate on him without pause with clear minds. The Vedas, the Puranas, and the Agamas sing his fame, saying “not this.” That same Rama, Brahman that pervades everything, lord of all the worlds, master of maya, has come down in Raghu’s line for the good of his devotees. By his own will, the commentary adds. He stays ever his own master. Sati had called the Vedas as her witnesses, that even they do not know Brahman. Shiva calls the same Vedas, singing that very one’s fame with “not this.”
It did not settle. The sortha says it briefly: though Shiva explained many times, the teaching did not lodge in her heart. Then Shiva, knowing in his mind the power of the Lord’s maya, laughed and spoke.
Then why not go and take the test?
“If there is so much doubt in your mind, why not go and take a test? I sit here in the banyan’s shade until you come back to me.” He sends her to test, and he tells her where to find him when she returns. Then the condition: “Do whatever will take this heavy delusion and confusion from you, thinking it through with discernment.” At Prayaga Bharadvaja had asked Yajnavalkya to weigh it with discernment and tell him. Here Shiva tells Sati to think it through with discernment and act. Sati went with Shiva’s leave, and as she went she wondered what to do. The decision to test came first. The way of testing would come later.
Left alone, Shiva reasoned in his mind, and the reasoning was bitter. There was no welfare left for Sati. If even his word could not move the doubt, then fate had turned against her, and no good would come of it. He had said none of this to her. To her he had spoken only of the banyan’s shade. Then he did what remained. What Rama has made will be, and who would add branches to it by argument? So saying to himself, he began to repeat the Lord’s name. Sati went to where Rama, the home of joy, was.
On the way she thought it over again and again. Then she took Sita’s form and walked ahead on the very road by which Rama was coming. The test is whether this prince searching for his wife is God, and for the test she takes the wife’s own form.
Lakshmana saw her first. He saw the guise Sati had made and was amazed. Great confusion filled his heart. He could say nothing and grew very grave. Steady of mind, he knew Rama’s power. Then Rama, for whom all this was made. Rama, who sees everything and knows every heart, knew Sati’s deceit at once, he at whose very remembrance ignorance ends. The word used of Shiva when he read his wife’s silence is used of Rama now: the one who knows what is within. Sati had hidden her doubt from one such knower and walked straight up to another in disguise.
Even there, before the all-knowing Lord in the commentary’s words, Sati wished to conceal. Yajnavalkya, who is telling it, turns to his hearer: “See the power of a woman’s nature.” Praising the power of his own maya in his heart, Rama laughed and spoke in a gentle voice.
Rama joined his hands and made his salutation to her, and gave his own name with his father’s. The doubt had been whether a king’s son could be Brahman, and he introduces himself by his father’s name. Then he asked, “Where is Shiva? Why do you wander the forest alone?” The woman in front of him wears Sita’s form, and he asks her where her husband is. He spoke to Sati under the dress. The commentary says the salutation too was to her.
The doha gives the effect. Rama’s words were gentle and full of hidden meaning, and hearing them Sati was deeply abashed. Afraid, she set off toward Shiva, with a great worry in her heart.
Wherever she looked, the same
On the way back she said it to herself, in her own words: I did not heed Shiva’s word, and I laid my own ignorance on Rama. The commentary reads the lines as her thought as she walked. What was lacking in her she had written to his account. The doha about the dull of wit had said just this, that they hold something else in their hearts. Then her fear: what answer shall I give Shiva now? A dreadful burning rose in her heart.
What happens next has its reason stated. Rama knew that Sati had come to sorrow, and so he revealed some of his power and showed it to her. The reason given is her sorrow, and the measure given is some. What she is shown is a part.
Walking the road, Sati saw the first wonder. Ahead of her went Rama with Sita and Lakshmana. The commentary adds why Sita was shown, so that the separation and sorrow Sati had imagined for him would leave her mind. She turned and looked behind, and there too was Rama with Lakshmana and Sita, in beautiful dress. Wherever she looked, there Rama sat, and skilled siddhas and great sages served him.
Then the numbers grew. She saw many Shivas, many Brahmas, many Vishnus, each of boundless power and each beyond the last. All of them bowed at Rama’s feet and served him, all the gods in forms of every kind. The two gods her doubt had set face to face, Shiva and Vishnu, were there in numbers, and Brahma with them. In the next doha the picture came onto her own kind: countless matchless Satis, consorts of Brahma, Brahmanis in the commentary’s word, and Lakshmis. Each matched the form of her god. Wherever she saw a Rama, she saw as many of all the gods with their shaktis, their powers, and the moving and unmoving beings of the world in many kinds. The one who had come to test now stood inside the picture, and she was countless there.
Then what the vision is for, said in the verse’s own way. “The gods worship the Lord in many forms. A second form of Rama she did not see. She beheld many Ramas with Sita, and their forms were not many.” Everything else on that road changes its dress. Rama’s form stays one, and Sita is with him every time, the lost wife whose search had started the doubt. “The same Rama, the same Lakshmana, the same Sita.” Seeing this, Sati was very afraid. Her heart trembled, she lost all sense of her body, and she shut her eyes and sat down in the road.
She who had set out to see had closed her eyes. When she opened them and looked again, there was nothing there. The road was empty. Then, bowing her head again and again at Rama’s feet, she went to where Shiva was. The result of the test is written in that one act, the bowing again and again. The road leads her back to the man sitting under the banyan repeating the name.
When she came near, Shiva laughed and asked after her welfare. Then he asked the question she had dreaded all the way back: “How did you take the test? Tell me the whole thing truly.” First her welfare, then the question, and in the question the word there is no getting around now: truly. The episode stops on that question.
Discernment, and concealment
From Bharadvaja’s hermitage to that road in the Treta age, no doubt is broken by argument. At Prayaga Bharadvaja asked his question and was answered first with an event. On the road Shiva explained to Sati many times, it did not lodge, and in the end he sent her to test. Rama saluted, gave his name, and then showed her some of his power.
One word comes twice. In Bharadvaja’s doha, concealment from the guru is what keeps clear discernment out of a heart. On that rule he set his shame aside and spoke. In the line about Sati before Rama, concealment is what she wished for even there, before the one who knows every heart. And discernment comes four times in this short stretch: as Yajnavalkya’s title when he is held by the feet, as the rule in Bharadvaja’s doha. As Bharadvaja’s request to him, and as Shiva’s condition to Sati. The one who was sent with that word, and chose a disguise, sat down in the road with her eyes shut.
And the dialogue of Parvati and Shiva, announced in the doha at Prayaga, has still to begin. What has been told is its time and its cause, the story of how the same doubt rose in Sati’s mind. The dialogue itself lies ahead. The next episode opens on Sati’s answer to the question under the banyan. She took no test, she says. She saluted as he did.
The same story, elsewhere: the Shiva Purana: Sati and Rama.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Balkand, doha 44 to 55, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.