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The host sits on the shore with the sea in front of it and the long search behind. Sampati, the old vulture, has looked across the water and seen Sita in Lanka, sitting lost in thought in a grove of Ashoka trees. He has set out the terms: a hundred yojanas of sea. Whoever can leap it, and has wisdom to go with the strength, can do Rama’s work. Jambavan, king of the bears, has turned to the one who kept silent through it all and told him he was born for Rama’s work. At that Hanuman rose to the size of a mountain, gold in color, and said he could clear the salt sea in play. Jambavan kept his charge short: go, see Sita, and come back with the news.
The fifth sopan of the Ramcharitmanas, the fifth step down into the lake Tulsidas made of his poem, picks up the story at that moment, after three Sanskrit shlokas. A bow to Rama, a prayer to him, and a bow to the servant under whose name this kand is read.
What happens in these two dohas fits in a sentence. Hanuman sets out, leaps over the sea, and is stopped twice above the water. The two stops are different in kind. The first comes from love. The sea wants the traveler to rest a while and asks a mountain to arrange it. The second is sent by the gods, and it blocks his way announcing that the day’s food has arrived. He returns the first with a touch, a bow, and a question. The second he accepts, and then passes through it from the inside. Both times he is carried by more than his strength. The sea is still not crossed when the episode ends. The night-walker who lives in it and catches the shadows of flying creatures comes in the next one.
This is Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, and the crossing here is the one his chaupais tell. Valmiki’s Ramayana has a sea and a leap of its own, to be read in its own right. Tulsi does not say who Mainaka is, or why the sea turns to that mountain. He says only that the sea took the traveler for Rama’s envoy, and all its courtesy follows from that one thought.
From the shore to Surasa’s mouth
The main figures in this episode
- Hanuman who leaves the shore with a promise to his companions, is stopped twice on the way across, and goes on both times.
- Jambavan king of the bears and the eldest in the host. His words were spoken at the end of the previous sopan. Here only their effect is seen.
- Rama whose work is the reason for the journey, and whom Hanuman holds steady in his mind again and again on the way.
- The sea who takes the traveler passing overhead for Rama’s envoy and, unasked, wants to arrange his rest.
- Mainaka the mountain the sea asks to take the traveler’s tiredness away.
- Surasa the mother of the serpents, whom the gods send into his path to test his strength and his wisdom.
The fifth sopan’s invocation
Like every sopan of the poem, this one opens with an invocation, here of three shlokas. Their order says something: first a bow to the master, then a request that names the speaker’s own lack, then a bow to the servant.
The first shloka bows to Rama with a long run of titles. Poddar’s commentary opens them one by one: peaceful, eternal, beyond measure (beyond the reach of proof, the commentary says), sinless, the giver of the peace that is liberation. Served without pause by Brahma, Shiva, and Shesha, known through Vedanta, the lord of the world. Among all of them one word is simply a name: the one called Rama.
One title is worth stopping on: mayamanushya, God seen as a man through his own maya. The lord of everything stands in the world as a human being, and the shloka leaves the two ends side by side without resolving them. The whole kand runs inside that space. A servant sets out to do the work of a master who needs no one’s help.
In the second shloka Tulsidas speaks for himself. “I speak the truth,” he tells Rama. He grants in the same breath that Rama, the inner self of every being, knows it already: there is no other desire in this heart. He offers his testimony and admits it was not needed.
He asks for two things: bhakti that is complete, and a mind cleared of lust and the faults that come with it. The second is the condition of the first, since a full devotion has no room in a mind already crowded with other things. The prayer sits at the head of a kand in which someone appears whose heart truly holds no other desire.
The third shloka bows to Hanuman: a home of measureless strength, his body shining like a mountain of gold (Sumeru, the commentary says). A fire to the forest of demons, lord of the monkeys, Rama’s dear devotee, born of the wind. That golden body is how he stood on the shore when Jambavan’s words reached him. One phrase in the list breaks its pattern: the foremost of the wise.
Strength, body, destruction, and then wisdom. Sampati had already put the two side by side when he set the terms on the shore. Within the next two dohas the gods will test exactly these two things. The one they send will say the same two words as she leaves.
Jambavan’s words, and a farewell
The first chaupai begins after a speech. What needed saying was said by Jambavan at the close of the previous sopan. The verse records only where his words landed: they pleased Hanuman’s heart greatly.
His first words are about the companions he is leaving. “Brothers, bear the hardship, live on roots, bulbs, and fruit, and wait for me until then.” Poddar reads the verb as waiting and watching the road. The cost of that waiting is in the same line: forest food, and a halt in which nothing can be done. He asks nothing for himself and leaves the others a task. Crossing the sea is one man’s work. Sitting on that shore until he returns is the whole host’s. The story hurries past that waiting, and yet it is counted here, in this one line.
“Until I come back having seen Sita.” It is Jambavan’s charge handed back. Then the line that sums him up: “The work will surely be done, because I feel such joy.” For proof he offers one witness only, the joy rising in him.
The farewell takes two motions. He bows his head to everyone, elders and the rest alike, and with Rama held in his heart he sets out, glad. What he places in his heart here is what the next lines will steady.
A fine hill on the shore
Tulsi spends no time on preparation. In two lines four things are done: the hill, the climb, the remembering, and the leap. On the shore of the sea stood a beautiful hill, and Hanuman jumped up onto it as if at play. The commentary takes the word to mean play, done without effort. That word lifts the whole weight off the climb. The poet calls it a jump.
Then one of the most often recited lines of the kand: again and again he called Rama to mind. Then, strong as he was, he sprang with great force. The remembering comes first and the spring after, and the remembering happens many times. His strength is mentioned too, at the end of the line, leaning on the remembering.
Tulsi’s word for that remembering is sambhari, holding steady, the word for what you do with something that could slip from your hand. It is the very thing he placed in his heart a few lines earlier. The placing happened once. The steadying happens over and over on the hilltop, in the moments before the push.
The push is more than the hill can bear. The rock he stood on sinks that instant into Patala, the lowest of the worlds. Tulsi says it in one line, with no wonder, and moves on. Whatever that much force pushed off from could only go down.
Then the one picture he gives of the flight: Hanuman went the way Rama’s unfailing arrow goes. Unfailing means an arrow that is never wasted. It goes where it was sent and does not turn aside for what it meets on the way. In this picture Rama is the archer and Hanuman the arrow.
Mainaka, and the rest returned
Now the sea speaks. It took the traveler passing overhead for Rama’s envoy, and told the mountain Mainaka to take his tiredness away. Let him rest on you, the commentary says. The only reason the verse gives is the errand: the sea took him for Rama’s envoy.
The sea sets no condition. It does not block the way, asks for nothing, and sets no test. It simply holds that someone travelling on another’s business makes his tiredness the sea’s business too. Of the two stops on this road, this is the one that comes from love, and it is answered with love.
Hanuman touched the mountain with his hand, bowed to it, and spoke. Poddar hears him speak to it as to a brother. “Without Rama’s work done, where is rest for me?” The touch tells the mountain its offer was taken as it was meant. The bow keeps the giver’s honor whole. The answer says why the rest goes untaken.
And the answer is a question. For someone whose work lies unfinished, rest is on the far side of the work, so he never has to say no. By touching the mountain he gave it what it was asking for, and took nothing more.
The test the gods sent
The first stop came from love. The second is sent by the gods, the very ones in whose interest this whole errand is being run. What they send is a test.
The gods saw Hanuman on his way. To learn the measure of his strength and his wisdom they sent Surasa, the mother of the serpents. Poddar puts one word over their purpose: to test him. The two things to be tested were counted together in the invocation.
Her first sentence is plain information, given in the gods’ name. “Today the gods have given me my food.” Hanuman lets it stand. He asks only for time. He counts out what is left of his errand: “Let me do Rama’s work and come back, and give Rama the news of Sita. Then I will come and enter your mouth. Mother, I speak the truth. Let me go now.” She has come to eat him, and he calls her mother, and he puts nothing behind his word except the truth. The promise to come back is given whole.
When she would not let him go by any means, he said something shorter still: then swallow me. He had hoped to put the condition off. Now he accepts it in full, with his work undone and the sea still beneath him. Everything that follows happens inside that accepted condition.
From one yojana to a hundred
She opened her mouth a yojana wide, four kos by Poddar’s reckoning, and Hanuman made his body twice that. She made it sixteen yojanas, and at once he stood thirty-two. One rule runs both counts: whatever opens before him, he becomes twice its size.
Each time Surasa widened her mouth, Hanuman showed her a form twice as large. Then she made it a hundred yojanas, four hundred kos in the commentary’s count, as wide as the sea he was crossing. And there the line turns over: Hanuman took a very small form.
That turn is the hinge of the episode. Doubling was the answer to the question about strength, and by a hundred yojanas that answer was complete. Becoming small answers the second question, the one about wisdom. The gods asked two things, and both answers were given in front of the same open mouth, one after the other.
He went into her mouth and came straight back out. The condition was kept exactly as spoken: he was to enter her mouth, and he did. Then, before saying a word about it, he bowed his head and asked her leave to go. It is the third time he has bowed: to his companions, to the mountain, and now to the one who came to eat him.
Surasa answers with the two words the gods had in mind when they sent her. “What the gods sent me for, I have found: the secret of your wisdom and your strength.” Her word for secret means the inner truth of a thing, what cannot be seen from outside. The examiner herself says the test is over. What follows is a blessing: “You will do all of Rama’s work, for you are a treasury of strength and wisdom.”
With that she went her way, and Hanuman went on, glad. The story pauses on the word it set out with. He left the shore glad, with Rama in his heart. Now, glad, he goes on. Between the two lie a sea, a sunken hill, and an open mouth, and the gladness has not moved.
The head bowed three times
From the farewell on the shore to Surasa’s blessing, Hanuman bows his head three times and never lifts a weapon. The biggest event, the leap over the sea, gets two lines. The growing and shrinking before Surasa’s mouth gets six, and not one blow is struck in them. The first thing the Sundarkand teaches is that before the work you have set out to do, rest grows small, and so does argument.
The second is sambhari. Climbing the hill was play and the spring was strength, but what he did just before the spring was remember, and remember again. The method for everything still to come is in that one line, with no mantra and no ritual.
The third is strength and wisdom. Sampati set the task in those two terms. Jambavan, calling the silent one forward, named him the wind’s equal in strength and a store of wisdom. The invocation counted them together, the gods tested them, and the blessing returned in the same two words. Everything Hanuman carries alone toward Sita is counted out in the first two dohas.
The quietest line in the episode is the first, where he asks his companions to wait for him until then. The story leaves them and goes out over the sea. But that shore, that food of roots and fruit, and that waiting lie under the whole kand, unspoken of until he comes back.
And last, the sea, which speaks and never shows itself. It recognizes him, honors him, and arranges his rest without being asked. Hanuman touches that offer, bows to it, and goes on. Neither did anything wrong, and the one who reaches the far shore is the one who left the offered rest where it lay.
The same story, elsewhere: Valmiki’s Ramayana, chapter 19: The Leap Across the Sea.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Sundarkand, doha 1 to 2, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.