The roar of the field has not dropped by a single note, yet one sentence has lodged in Vibhishana’s hearing and will not move: the chariot by which victory comes is another chariot altogether. Rama now begins to build it. A chariot-maker lifts the axle and the wheels before anything else, because the whole frame that comes afterward will rest on them, and Rama follows the same order. The first part he names is the one that touches the ground and carries the full weight.
Valor and fortitude are the wheels of that chariot. Truth and good conduct are its flag and its banner, and both of them hold firm. That is the whole of the line, and inside it the chariot has already been drawn from the ground to its highest point. At the bottom, the wheels. At the top, the flag. Everything still to come will be fitted between the two.
Take the wheels first. The entire weight of a chariot rides on them: the fighter, the driver, the weapons, the armor, all of it. They alone touch the earth, and they alone carry the chariot forward. There are two of them, and they must be of one measure. Let one run smaller than the other and the chariot leans, drags on that side, and travels crooked even on a straight road. On these two wheels Rama sets valor and fortitude. Valor is the strength that moves forward, that turns its face toward the enemy and goes. Fortitude is the strength that stays, that takes the blow and does not shift from its place. A battle calls for each in its turn, now the advance, now the holding of ground, and a fighter who owns one without the other is left turning in circles on a single wheel.
Something else draws the eye here. A few moments ago Vibhishana had come unsteadied. Tulsidas chose that very word for him, adhira, the man whose fortitude has slipped. Now Rama is building a chariot, and one of its two wheels is named dhairya, fortitude, the thing that has just gone out of Vibhishana’s grasp. Rama offers no reproach and never names the lapse. The first part of the chariot simply carries the quality Vibhishana needs most in this moment, and he is left to recognize it for himself.
Then the flag and the banner. A chariot carries a mast, and on the mast flies the standard, the warrior’s sign, the thing by which his own army knows from a distance where their champion is and by which his enemy knows which way to press. Beside it stream the pennants, long and loose in the wind. In dust thick enough to hide the sun, no one can see who sits inside a chariot. What can be seen is the flag. So Rama says that the flag of this chariot is truth and its banner good conduct, and that both hold firm, so that no gust of wind and no storm of arrows can bend them or tear them down. A person, too, is known from far off by exactly these two things, whether his word can be trusted and how he carries himself, and they hang high enough to stay in view even through the dust.
This is the first outline of the frame: the wheels that move the chariot and the flag by which it is known. A chariot does not roll on its wheels by itself. It needs something to pull it, and the pulling needs a hand to govern it. Rama’s next line turns to both.
Source: Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas, Lankakanda