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A permission has just been given in the Ashoka grove. Sita has looked at the envoy, judged him skilled in wisdom and strength. She has told him to go, hold Rama‘s feet in his heart, and eat the sweet fruit. She warned him that the grove is guarded by rakshasas, great warriors and heavy ones. He answered that he has no fear of them, so long as she gives her leave gladly. He bows his head to her and goes. What he does next falls half inside that permission and half outside it: the fruit was inside, the trees were outside.
From those few words outside the leave opens the part of Sundarkand in which one envoy, alone, calls the whole order of Lanka before him one rank at a time. First the keepers of the garden, then a company of warriors sent by Ravana. Then Prince Aksha with his troop, then Meghanada. Each time Hanuman is the one left standing. Then a weapon is aimed at him, and he chooses to honor it. Tulsidas sets that choice out in a doha, with the reasoning written in. Bound, Hanuman is carried to Ravana’s court, and there he speaks.
So the episode moves from a garden to a court. In the garden his strength does the work, and his voice is a roar and a challenge. In the court his strength is tied in a serpent noose and his voice speaks at length. The envoy who crept into Lanka by night in a form the size of a mosquito now stands before the whole city. He makes sure the king hears whose envoy he is.
The wrecked garden, the bound envoy
The main figures in this episode
- Hanuman Rama’s envoy. He lays waste a garden, roars three times at the men sent against him, lets a Brahma weapon take him. He pleads with joined hands in the court of the king whose son he has killed.
- Ravana who laughs, grieves for his son, asks who this monkey is and by whose strength, and takes none of the counsel he is given.
- Prince Aksha Ravana’s son, who comes to the grove with countless fine warriors and is felled there.
- Meghanada Ravana’s son, the matchless warrior the verse here calls the conqueror of Indra. He is sent with an order to bind and leave alive, and he carries it out.
- The garden guards and the night-walkers who fight, and some of whom get away to carry the news back.
- The gods and the guardians of the quarters who stand in Ravana’s court with their hands joined, frightened, watching his brow.
- Shiva and Parvati the teller of this story and the one he tells it to. Shiva stops it for one question at the moment the noose goes on.
- Sita who receives the envoy’s bow in the episode’s first words. She is spoken of twice in the court: as the wife who was carried off, and by name in his demand.
- Rama whose strength Hanuman counts out, standing bound in the court, and whose name he keeps back until the counting is done.
Head bowed, into the garden
The episode begins in obedience and leaves it behind within a line. He bowed his head (to Sita, the commentary specifies), went into the garden, ate the fruit, and began to break the trees. Four acts, one after another. Sita’s leave covered the first three. The fourth came from inside him.
The garden had its keepers, many warriors posted there, the very ones Sita had warned him of. Tulsi settles them in half a line: some he killed, and some went and cried out to Ravana, as the commentary says. That half line is the pattern for the fights to come. Each company will split into those who stay on the ground and those who carry the news back. The news has to keep going back, because each new company is sent when word reaches Ravana.
Then Tulsi lets the keepers tell it. “Lord, one huge monkey has come. He has laid waste the Ashoka grove. He ate the fruit and uprooted the trees, and he crushed the keepers and threw them down on the ground.” Each clause is heavier than the last, and the heaviest falls on the keepers themselves. This is how Lanka’s court first meets the envoy: as a report in the mouths of beaten guards.
The warriors Ravana sent
Ravana’s first answer is a number. He sent many warriors, as if the trouble in the garden were a question of how many. Seeing them, Hanuman roared. He had come into this grove small and hidden himself so well in the leaves that Sita did not know he was there. Now he stands in it and roars. It is the first sound Tulsi gives him since he entered the garden.
The whole fight fits in the next half line: he destroyed all the night-walkers, and some, half dead, went off crying out. Tulsi lets some get away each time, for the story’s own reason. If none survived, the king would sit in his court without news, and an envoy who has come to be heard needs heralds.
Prince Aksha, and a troop ground into dust
Then Ravana sent Prince Aksha, his own son, with countless fine warriors behind him. Seeing them come, Hanuman’s first act was a challenge: he took up a tree in his hand, the commentary says, and called them on. The challenge comes before the blow, and Tulsi keeps that order.
Then he felled the prince and roared with a great sound, which the commentary glosses simply as very loud. Ravana’s son is down.
The doha gives the troop’s fate in three verbs: some he killed, some he crushed, and some he seized and ground into the dust. The survivors carry back an estimate this time: “Lord, the monkey is enormously strong.” Now Lanka itself is saying so.
Do not kill him, bring him bound
The order Ravana gives next turns the episode. Hearing that his son had been killed, he was angry, and he sent the mighty Meghanada, his eldest son in the commentary’s reading. So far everything is as you would expect: a father has lost a child and sends the elder to avenge the younger. The next line is not.
“Son, do not kill him. Bind him and bring him here. Let us see this monkey, and where he is from.” The father whose son has just been killed gives an order of curiosity. He wants to know who this is.
Tulsi says nothing, and the reader sees what Ravana has done. With his own hand he has opened the door by which Rama’s envoy will walk into his court and speak there.
Two great elephants clash
When Meghanada comes, Tulsi weighs both sides evenly, and the result still does not change. The matchless warrior set out, the conqueror of Indra, as the verse calls him here, full of anger at his brother’s death. On the other side, the monkey saw that this time a dreadful warrior had come, as the commentary puts it. Tulsi gives Meghanada his anger and Hanuman a true measure of the man.
Hanuman gnashed his teeth, roared, and ran at him, the third roar in the garden. His first blow fell on the chariot: he uprooted an enormous tree and left Meghanada without one, the tree breaking the chariot and throwing its rider, the commentary adds. The great warriors who came with Meghanada met his bare body: seizing them one by one, he crushed them against his own limbs. That is worth remembering, because in the court, asked by whose strength he did all this, he will not name his body at all.
Having felled them, he closed with Meghanada himself, and the two clashed like two great elephants. The likeness puts them at one height. Nowhere in the episode does Tulsi belittle Meghanada.
Then a fist lands, and what follows is strange. Striking him with his fist, Hanuman went and climbed a tree, and Meghanada fainted for a moment. The one who struck went up into the branches while the one struck lay senseless, and he did not press the chance.
Rising again, Meghanada turned to maya, and made a great deal of it. Tulsi closes the question in half a line: Hanuman cannot be conquered. Strength and trickery have both been tried, and that half line answers both. Then the Brahma weapon comes, because everything else has been spent. The commentary opens the next doha with the words “at last.”
A thought before the Brahma weapon
Now comes the doha the episode rests on, and its build is the first thing to see. The weapon takes a quarter of it. The rest happens in Hanuman’s mind. Meghanada aimed the Brahma weapon, and in the same breath the monkey considered. A battle stops, and a thought begins. In the one instant when nobody thinks, with the arrow about to leave the string, Tulsi makes room for thinking.
And the thought is written out whole. If I do not honor the Brahma arrow, its boundless glory will be undone. What he weighs is the glory of Brahma’s weapon. His own life is on the string. The thought spends no word on it, or on his standing, or on the news he still has to carry back.
Tulsi’s verb is honor: the word for accepting a thing and granting it its due, a word of respect. A beaten man has defeat done to him. Here the arrow is still on the string, and whether it takes effect is left to the one it is aimed at. He decides in the arrow’s favor.
So everything that follows, the binding, the court, the laughter and the abuse, comes with his consent. What would otherwise be called a capture, Tulsi makes one more act of service. If Brahma’s weapon failed against someone, its name would be lessened in the world. Hanuman pays to keep that name whole with his own body.
He who let himself be bound
Even after the decision, Tulsi keeps his strength in sight. Meghanada struck him with the Brahma arrow, and even as he fell he destroyed a great part of the army. The commentary fills in the fall: struck, he came down out of the tree, and he was killing all the way down.
When Meghanada saw that the monkey had fainted, he bound him in the serpent noose and carried him off. The binding came after the faint, and Tulsi lets that order speak for itself.
At exactly this point the teller steps forward. Shiva, telling all this to Parvati, pauses to ask her a question whose answer is in the asking. “Listen, Parvati. The one by repeating whose name the wise cut the bonds of the world: can his envoy come into bondage?” The commentary reads those bonds as birth and death. On the climb up the hill above Lanka Shiva turned to her to say that none of the greatness was the monkey’s own. Now, as the noose goes on, he turns again to guard the meaning of the rope.
Then the half line that explains it. For Rama’s work, Hanuman had himself bound. Tulsi uses the causative, the verb form for having something done by another, and the commentary underlines it with “himself.” Meghanada does the binding. Hanuman has it done. The rope is in the prince’s hands, and the decision is in the prisoner’s.
Ravana’s court, and Garuda among snakes
The scene moves to the court. Hearing that the monkey had been bound, the night-walkers ran, and they all came to the court for the spectacle. The commentary opens it as a show, the kind of thing a crowd gathers for.
In the very next line Tulsi turns the looking around: Hanuman went in and saw Ravana’s court. The one everybody came to see is the one doing the seeing. And Tulsi grants what he sees its full size: its splendor, the commentary says, was beyond telling.
Then the picture of Ravana’s whole power at once. The gods and the guardians of the quarters stand with their hands joined, humble and frightened, watching his brow, reading his mood from it, the commentary adds. None of them knows what will be wanted next, so all eyes are on one face.
And in that court stands a bound monkey. Seeing that might, Hanuman felt no fear at all. He stood as Garuda, king of birds, stands fearless among a host of snakes. The whole court has become a nest of serpents and the prisoner the bird who eats them, a fitting likeness for an envoy in a serpent noose. In the grove he told Sita that by Rama’s might the smallest snake can eat Garuda. Here the verse gives him the other half of that picture.
The doha shows two things in Ravana, one after the other. Seeing the monkey, Ravana laughed aloud, speaking abuse as he laughed. Then he remembered his son’s death, and grief rose in his heart. The son he remembers is Aksha. The son who brought this prisoner in is Meghanada. Ravana is setting eyes on Hanuman for the first time. Hanuman has seen him twice already, asleep in his palace and in the grove with his sword drawn. The master of this court is split in two inside: the one who laughs at the prisoner, and the one who has lost a son to him.
Ravana’s question
Now the questioning begins, and Ravana’s question is the one that will be turned against him. “Who are you, monkey? By whose strength have you laid waste the garden?” He wants the source of the strength, and soon he will hear it, at greater length than he wished.
Then he puts his own name in the middle of it. “Or have you never heard of me with your own ears?” It is an introduction dressed as a question. And straight after, he admits the one in front of him is unafraid: “Fool, I see you entirely without fear.” The insult attached shows how much that galls him.
His last two questions turn into threats. “For what offense did you kill the night-walkers? Tell me, fool: have you no fear for your life?” Ravana has asked five things: who the monkey is, by whose strength, whether he has heard of Ravana, what the offense was, and whether he fears for his life. Of Sita, whom he holds in his own grove, he asks nothing. Three of the five circle back to himself. In the answer he will hear about someone else.
By whose strength maya creates
Hanuman’s answer begins here, and for several lines it gives no name. It counts deeds first. “Listen, Ravana. He by whose strength maya creates the hosts of universes.” Ravana asked about strength, and the answer takes up that very word and goes back to where the worlds come from.
Then three great names, each working on lent strength. “He by whose strength Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva create, preserve, and destroy.” The commentary names the third Mahesha. “He by whose strength the thousand-headed one,” Shesha, the serpent, in the commentary, “bears the universe on his head, with its mountains and forests.” All of it said to Ravana’s face, in his own court.
Then from the cosmos to history. “He who takes on many bodies to protect the gods, and who teaches fools like you.” The prisoner speaks of a teacher, and the king can work out for himself who the pupil is.
Then the bow. “He who broke Shiva’s hard bow, and with it crushed the pride of the host of kings.” That bow, in the Balkand, ten thousand kings together could not stir. It stayed as unmoved as a faithful wife’s mind at a lecher’s words. Janaka’s bards announced that Ravana himself took one look at it and quietly slipped away. Last, a list closer to home. “He who killed Khara, Dushana, Trishira, and Vali, every one of them a man of matchless strength.” Khara, Dushana, and Trishira were three brothers, and it was Ravana’s sister Shurpanakha who carried their deaths to this city. Vali was the king with whom Ravana once kept friendship, as Angada will remind this same court in the Lankakand. Hanuman is crossing names off Ravana’s own map.
“His envoy am I”
Now the doha that ties the answer into one knot. In its first line Hanuman grants Ravana his conquests and names their price. “By a fraction of a fraction of whose strength you have conquered all that moves and all that stands still.” The victory is real, and it is borrowed. A fraction of a fraction: Ravana’s whole conquest of the worlds ran on one grain of strength, and the grain was lent.
In the second line the word order does its own work. “His envoy am I, whose beloved wife you carried away.” First the relation, then the I, and at once the offense, a taking by stealth, the commentary says. In this doha Hanuman says three words about himself, his envoy am I. Asked by whose strength, he has given a full answer and left his own strength out of it entirely. In the grove he said nearly the same words to Sita, with an oath after them. In the court he says them to the man who took her, with her abduction after them.
Sahasrabahu and Vali remembered
What Hanuman says next sounds like praise and means something else. “I know your greatness well. You fought a battle with Sahasrabahu. And fighting with Vali, you won fame.” Two proofs of Ravana’s greatness, and both are fights. How each one ended, the Manas leaves for Angada to tell in this same court in the Lankakand. Hanuman adds no insult. He names two occasions from the king’s own record and leaves them there.
The commentary calls these words pointed, and Ravana’s reply sits beside them: he laughed and put the matter aside. The one who has an answer gives it. The one who has none laughs and turns the talk. Through this whole episode Tulsi gives Ravana laughter, abuse, questions, threats, and, inside, a grief for his son.
“I was hungry, so I ate the fruit”
Now Hanuman accounts for the charges, and his account is startlingly plain. “I ate the fruit, lord, because I was hungry. By a monkey’s nature I broke the trees.” An envoy in a king’s court admits that one of his deeds came from the habits of his kind alone. He told a mother he was hungry, and he tells a king the same.
Then the killing, and he begins with a rule everyone in the room accepts. “The body is dear beyond everything to every creature, master. When those who walk the crooked road began to strike me, those who struck me I struck.” The attack came from their side, and the sentence stops there. The body that crushed Meghanada’s warriors is spoken of only as a body dear to its owner.
And now Hanuman says himself what Shiva told Parvati as the noose went on. “On top of that, your son bound me.” He gives the binding to Ravana’s son and says nothing of the weapon he chose to honor. “I feel no shame at all at being bound.” It is said in the serpent noose, before a crowd that came running for the show.
The reason comes with it. “I want to do my own Lord’s work.” A rope is a disgrace when it stops someone from his work. This rope has carried the envoy into Ravana’s court and set him in front of the king himself.
Hands joined, a counsel
Then something nobody in that court expected. The bound envoy stops accounting for himself and starts giving advice. “I make my plea with joined hands, Ravana. Give up your pride and hear my counsel.” He is tied in a serpent noose, and he joins his hands. From the first word of this speech to its last doha, the one thing he asks for himself is a hearing.
His first counsel is about lineage: “Consider your own house, and look.” The commentary reads it as a holy house, and in a few lines it will be named. The second is larger: “Give up your delusion and worship the one who takes away the fear of those who are his.”
Then a picture that climbs every stair of fear at once. “He for fear of whom Death himself, who devours gods, demons, and everything that moves and stands, is greatly afraid.” The king asked whether he feared for his life. The answer is a report on what the taker of lives fears. “Never make enmity with him.”
And straight after it, the demand. “At my word, give Sita back.” The sea was leapt, the city searched, the grove wrecked, armies felled, a noose put on, a court filled. And what he asks of Ravana takes four words of Awadhi. Until this instant nobody in that court had spoken her name.
The fault of one who comes for refuge is forgotten
Right after the demand, Hanuman says something larger than the demand: even after the offense, the road is open. The first line of the doha calls Rama the keeper of those who come to him for refuge, an ocean of compassion, and Khara’s foe. That last name matters. Khara was named a few lines ago among the men Rama killed. Now the same name comes back as the address where mercy can be found. Ravana is being sent to the one who did the killing.
The second line has a single condition. “If you go to him for refuge, he will forget your offense and keep you,” in his own refuge, the commentary says. The word is forget. What was done stays done, and still there is room. In his own court, Ravana is offered pardon by someone who has nothing of his own to give, not even the use of his body.
Do not be the stain on a clear moon
What follows is a remarkable proposal for what it leaves in place. “Hold Rama’s lotus feet in your heart, and rule Lanka unshaken.” Ravana keeps his kingdom, made steady. What Hanuman asks for is a place in his heart.
Then lineage becomes a picture. “The fame of the rishi Pulastya is a spotless moon. Do not be the stain on that moon.” The house Ravana was told to consider now has its name. The Balkand says Ravana was born into Pulastya’s pure line, and the Lankakand will call him Pulastya’s grandson to his face. His ancestry already shines in the sky. He is asked only not to become the dark mark on it.
Finery without clothes, a river without a source
Now two likenesses, which say what has been said in a form that stays. “Without Rama’s name, speech has no beauty. Give up pride and delusion, think it over, and see.” Then the first picture, with a pointed title: “Enemy of the gods, a beautiful woman decked in every ornament has no beauty without clothes.” Earlier in the answer, Rama was the one who takes bodies to protect the gods. Ravana is now addressed as their enemy. Every jewel is there, and the lack is exactly where covering was needed. Ravana lacks nothing in splendor, and Hanuman puts his finger on the one thing missing from the middle of it.
The second is about wealth. “The riches and the lordship of one who has turned from Rama go even while they stay. To have gained them is to have gained nothing. Rivers with no spring at their source dry up the moment the rains are over.” Such rivers have only the rains to rely on, the commentary adds. In the rains they look like rivers in full, and Lanka, at this hour, is in the middle of its rains.
Words spoken on a vow
At the end Hanuman sets a vow on his words and leaves the counsel resting on an invitation. “Listen, Ravana. I plant a vow and say it: for one who has turned from Rama there is no protector.” The verb is a farmer’s, the word for planting something in the ground, and what is planted stays where it is put.
He brings back the names he began with. “A thousand Shivas, a thousand Vishnus, a thousand Brahmas cannot save you, who are Rama’s enemy.” At the start those three were working on lent strength. Now the same three, a thousand times over, cannot protect one man. The argument has come full circle.
And the last doha. “Give up this pride, which has delusion for its root, which gives many pains, and which is darkness itself.” Pride born of ignorance, the commentary adds. Then the last half line, pure invitation: “Worship Rama, the ocean of grace.”
The episode stops on that invitation. The counsel has been given, and whether it is taken was never in the giver’s hands. The envoy has put the demand, counted the reasons, shown the road of pardon, recalled the lineage, and ended with an invitation. What happens next will be the listener’s doing, and the next episode opens with the listener laughing.
The gap between a plight and a deed
Hanuman loses no fight in this episode. The keepers lost, the company lost, Prince Aksha fell, Meghanada’s chariot broke and his maya came to nothing. There is one place where Hanuman goes down, and he chose it. Tulsi writes in the doha that he considered and then honored the weapon. What he honored it to save was the glory of Brahma’s weapon. To have your body bound for the sake of someone else’s standing is a decision made in silence, inside a thought. The rest of the episode follows from it.
Then there are the hands. In Ravana’s court the gods and the guardians of the quarters stand with their hands joined, and fear has joined them. And a prisoner, already bound, joins his hands of his own accord and says he makes his plea. In that court one person has joined his hands freely, and he is the one who was carried in tied. Tulsi sets the two pictures two dohas apart and leaves them.
And there is the line anyone can carry away: there is no shame in being bound, because the work is Rama’s. Two things usually treated as one are pulled apart here, a person’s plight and a person’s work. The plight is what is done to us. The work is what we do. A rope reaches only as far as the plight. And in the court where this was said, the one listening had everything in the world except the hearing of it.
The same story, elsewhere: Valmiki’s Ramayana, chapter 22: The Burning of Lanka, and the Return.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Sundarkand, doha 18 to 23, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.