Bhagavatam · The Rama Katha of the Bhagavatam

On the bank of the Ganga, Parikshit watched the water a while, then turned to Shukadeva. “Lord, I have heard that Rama, whom the whole world called God, came into this same Ikshvaku line I was born into. But a thorn sits in my mind. If he was Shri Hari himself, why did he bear the bitterest pains a man can bear? A father lost, a wife torn away, years of loneliness. I have only a few days left, Muniwar, and I need to know this. If God himself does not step around sorrow, on what strength is the devotee meant to live?”

Shukadeva was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Rajan, that is the very heart of the Rama katha. The seers who know the truth have sung the deeds of Sita’s lord at great length, and you have heard them many times over. What Vyasa set down here, in a handful of shlokas, no one has said with the same stillness. Listen.”

Ayodhya, of the Ikshvaku line. Khatvanga’s son Dirghabahu, Dirghabahu’s far-famed son Raghu, Raghu’s son Aja, and Aja’s son the great king Dasharatha. Three queens: Kausalya, Kaikeyi, Sumitra. The palace was full, and still one corner of it stayed bare, the corner where no child’s laughter ever rang.

Then the gods prayed, for the weight of the rakshasas on the earth had grown past bearing. In answer, the supreme Brahman himself, the Lord Shri Hari, the same Lord Parikshit had once seen standing guard within his own mother’s womb, took birth as the sons of King Dasharatha. He came in four forms. As Rama he came in his own fullness; as Bharata, Lakshmana, and Shatrughna he came as parts of himself.

Rama was born of Kausalya, Bharata of Kaikeyi, Lakshmana and Shatrughna of Sumitra. The bare corner of the palace filled, and the four brothers grew up side by side.

The boys grew. Rama was the eldest, and from his earliest years there was a stillness in his eyes that could stop even his elders where they stood.

Vishvamitra took them into the forest to guard his sacrifice. There, alone, with Lakshmana standing by only to watch, Rama beat back Maricha and the other demons who prowled the nights. Then came Janaka’s choice-marriage at Mithila. In a hall built for it, before an assembly of the chosen heroes of the whole world, lay the terrible bow of Shiva, so heavy that three hundred men together had barely carried it in. Rama lifted it like a plaything, strung it, and as he drew it he broke it clean in the middle, the way a young elephant snaps a stalk of sugarcane in play. So he won Sri herself, the goddess of fortune who rests forever on the Lord’s chest, come now to earth as Sita, a match for Rama in virtue, temper, age, and form.

On the road home they met Parashurama of the Bhrigus, who twenty-one times had swept the earth clean of the kshatriya race. Rama quieted his swollen pride on the spot. Then they reached Ayodhya, and the city began to make ready for the coronation. In a single night the wind turned.

Dasharatha stood caught between his given word and his love for his queen, and an old father’s throat closed on him. Somehow he brought himself to tell Rama. Not a line moved on Rama’s face. To make his father’s word true he accepted exile that same hour, and said only, “It is your word, Father. I will go today.”

Kingdom, fortune, mother, kin, friends, and palace, he let them all go the way an ascetic free of every tie lets go of his own breath. The silk came off and the bark went on. Sita and Lakshmana fell in beside him without a word, as though the forest were their home too. His feet were so tender that even Sita’s touch had once seemed almost too rough for them, and now they would cross a country of thorns.

In the forest, when those feet grew weary on the stony paths, Hanuman and Lakshmana would knead them and rub the ache away. There Shurpanakha came, and there her nose and ears were cut off and she was sent away disfigured. Her kinsmen came to avenge her, and Rama, the great bow steady in his hand, destroyed them: Khara, Dushana, Trishira, and the rest, fourteen thousand demons in all.

Shurpanakha carried her account of Sita’s beauty to her brother Ravana, and it set him on fire. He sent the demon Maricha ahead in the shape of a golden deer to draw Rama away from the hermitage. Rama followed it and brought Maricha down with a single arrow, and in that gap Ravana carried Sita off, the way a wolf carries off a lamb. Robbed of her, Rama wandered the forest with Lakshmana like a man undone, showing in his own person the plight of everyone bound by love. They gave the vulture-king Jatayu, who had died fighting Ravana for Rama’s sake, the last rites a devoted son would give a father. Rama killed the demon Kabandha, made a friend of Sugriva, brought down Vali, and through Sugriva and Hanuman learned at last where Sita was held. Then he turned toward the sea.

Shukadeva said all this in one breath, the way a man sweeps his arm to show a whole range of mountains from far away. “The seers have sung it at length, Rajan, and I will not slow down for the war. The place I mean to stand is past all of it.” Still, the sea had to be crossed, and Lanka had to fall.

Rama sat down at the water’s edge and waited three days and nights, without food or drink, asking the ocean to give him a way across. The sea gave nothing back. On the third day his patience broke. He lifted his bow, and the look in his eyes set the creatures of the deep thrashing and stilled the roar of the waves. Then the lord of the ocean rose up in a living form, laid offerings at Rama’s feet, owned him as the most ancient Person and the ruler of all nature, and begged him to raise a bridge and cross.

So the bridge went up, built of mountain peaks and whole trees that the monkey chiefs tore loose and carried in their hands. On Vibhishana’s counsel Rama crossed into Lanka, a city Hanuman’s hands had already put to the torch, with Sugriva, Nila, Hanuman, and the vanara army behind him. Ravana threw his captains out against them, Kumbhakarna and Meghanada, Prahasta, Atikaya, and the rest, and one by one they fell, and every follower Ravana had fell with them.

At the end Ravana himself came on in fury, mounted in the Pushpaka car he had once seized from Kubera, and struck Rama with sharpened, crescent-headed arrows. Rama named his crime aloud, that he had stolen another man’s wife while her husband’s back was turned, and loosed a single arrow already fitted to the string. It split his heart, hard as stone. Like a good man whose store of merit has run dry, Ravana pitched from the car, blood pouring from all ten of his mouths, his people crying out around him as he fell.

Mandodari and the women of Lanka came pouring out to keen over him, and in their grief they saw the truth: it was the power of Sita’s virtue that had brought their lord to this. Rama had Vibhishana perform the funeral rites for his kinsmen and set him on the throne of Lanka, with rule and long life to the end of the age. Then he found Sita in the Ashoka grove, worn thin by the sickness of separation, and tenderness filled him at the sight. His fourteen years in the forest were complete.

He flew home to Ayodhya in the Pushpaka car with his brothers and Hanuman, flowers falling on the way as Brahma and the guardians of the worlds sang his deeds. At Nandigrama, Bharata had kept the throne empty and himself like a hermit: bark for clothing, matted hair, a bed of kusha grass, a little barley boiled in cow’s urine for food, and Rama’s wooden sandals set on his own head in the place of the king. He came out with the whole city behind him, laid the sandals at Rama’s feet, and dropped down before him, and Rama held him a long time and wept over him. The old queens rose like bodies coming back to life and gathered their sons into their laps. Vasishtha unbound Rama’s matted hair and bathed him with the waters of the four seas, the way the teacher of the gods once bathed Indra.

Bharata pressed the throne on him, and Rama took it and kept his people the way a father keeps his children. While he reigned, the Treta age wore the face of the golden first age. Sickness and grief, fear and old sorrow went out of the world, and death took no one before his time. The forests and rivers and hills and seas gave people whatever they asked. He held to one wife his whole life long and lived as a careful householder, doing each thing in its own season and never once bending what was right, so that the world would have a pattern to follow.

He offered the great sacrifices, and through them worshipped his own Self in the form of Vishnu. When they were done he gave the earth away: the four quarters to the priests who had served the fire, and all the land that lay between to his own teacher, keeping for himself only the two cloths on his body and the ornaments he wore. Sita kept nothing but the marriage-thread at her throat. The Brahmanas, undone by such giving, pressed it all back into his hands.

Then one night Rama went out through the city unknown, telling no one, to hear for himself how his people lived. He overheard a man shutting his wife out of the house. “I will not keep you again, having lived under another man’s roof. Rama may keep his Sita if he pleases. I will not take you back.”

Something settled inside Rama, a stone that dragged down with every breath. He was a king, and the tongue of the world is not easily stilled. He sent Sita away to the forest, heavy with child, alone, to the very woods the two of them had once walked together.

In the shade of Valmiki’s hermitage Sita gave birth to her twin sons, Lava and Kusha, and raised them through the years on the strength of those two boys. The sage Valmiki performed their birth rites and every sacrament in its turn.

The family went on around them. Lakshmana’s sons were Angada and Chitraketu, Bharata’s were Taksha and Pushkala, Shatrughna’s were Subahu and Shrutasena. Bharata, conquering the quarters, put down the gandharvas in their tens of millions and brought their wealth home to Rama, and Shatrughna killed the demon Lavana, son of Madhu, and raised the city of Mathura on the ground where Madhu’s forest had stood.

Through those years, alone in Ayodhya, Rama carried her absence like an illness that would not lift.

In Valmiki’s hermitage Sita placed her two sons in the sage’s hands, fixed her mind on Rama’s feet, and looked down at the ground. The earth opened, and Sita passed into the world of the earth goddess, back into the same soil she had once risen from in the furrow of Janaka’s plow.

When the news reached him, everything he knew gave way, and Rama grieved as any man grieves. The Bhagavata stops here to say a plain, hard thing. The love a man and a woman carry for each other brings fear and sorrow even to the strong, and far more to anyone whose heart is fastened to his home. Even the Lord, wearing a man’s body, let that grief be seen on his face.

He stayed on in Ayodhya, king and husband and God all at once, the three of them pulling against one another inside him.

Shukadeva paused. “See, Rajan. When Shri Hari puts on a man’s body, he does not turn his face from a man’s pain. He takes it on, the whole of it, so that no grieving creature can ever say the Lord never knew its hurt.”

For thirteen thousand years after that Rama kept the fire unbroken and held to a strict vow. Then one day he set those lotus feet, the feet the thorns of the Dandaka forest had once pierced, in the hearts of everyone who remembers him, and went back to the self-luminous realm he had come from. And the seers say still that whoever saw him, or was touched by him, or only keeps his story running in the mind, is loosed from the knots of karma.

Parikshit stayed silent a long time. Then he said only, “Muniwar, the thorn is out of me now.” A wave of the Ganga struck the bank once and slid back.