The wheels are on and the flag is up, and still the chariot stands where it was, because wheels carry weight and do no pulling. Pulling belongs to the horses. Everything a chariot does on a battlefield, the sudden rush, the wheel to one side, the drawing back, happens on the strength of its team, and the stronger the horses, the harder they are to hold. Rama turns to them now: first the horses, then the cords that bind them to the chariot.
Strength, discernment, self-command, and the good of others are the four horses of that chariot, and they are yoked to it by the cords of forgiveness, mercy, and evenness of mind. Self-command means the senses held in hand; the good of others means service done for someone besides yourself. Look at the four as a team. Strength is the one that pulls. Discernment is the one that sees good apart from bad, and so knows which way the pulling should go. Self-command is the horse that accepts the bit from inside, the one that does not bolt after its own appetites. And the good of others is the horse that runs for someone else’s sake. Four horses serve a single chariot only when all four keep one pace. Let strength surge ahead while discernment lags, and the chariot loses its line. Let self-command slacken, and strength begins to do as it pleases.
That is why Rama names the cords in the same breath as the horses. The rajju is the rope by which a horse is tied to the yoke and the chariot. However fast a horse may be, once it slips that rope it belongs to the chariot no longer; it belongs to itself, and it runs in its own direction. Rama makes these cords of forgiveness, mercy, and evenness of mind. Strength harnessed by forgiveness does not run at anyone to crush him. Discernment harnessed by mercy does not let its judgment harden into cruelty. And the cord of evenness lies taut across all four alike, so that no jolt of gain or loss, victory or defeat, honor or insult, makes any one of them shy and break from the team. Three ropes keep four horses the chariot’s own.
A war chariot carries two men. One fights, and one drives. The fighter lifts the weapons, and the reins are never in his hands. The reins belong to the charioteer, and the chariot goes wherever the charioteer takes it. Which turn to take, when to give the horses their head and when to check them, where to swing wide of a pit, all of it rests on his judgment. Rama says the skilled charioteer of this chariot is the worship of God, bhajan, an attention that stays turned toward God without a break. A chariot whose reins lie in that attention’s hands will not go into a ravine, however strong its horses. And one thing has been said here without being spoken. The man fighting from this chariot rides it. Someone else is driving.
The same line adds two more parts, and these the fighter does hold in his own hands. Dispassion is his shield, and contentment is his sword. A shield is the leather disc a fighter raises on his left arm to stop a blow coming straight at him. The blow lands, and it does not reach the body. Dispassion is that shield. The world’s blows, of loss, of slander, of things taken away, keep coming, but a man who has loosened his grip on them from inside can be struck and still not be wounded. The sword is the weapon of the closest fighting, the one left in hand when the arrows are spent and the enemy stands within arm’s reach. In that place Rama sets contentment. A man who has found enough in what he has cannot be cut by greed or craving even when they come that near; he is the one who cuts them down. The shield stops the blow that comes from outside, the sword the demand that rises from within, and the same fighter carries both, one in each hand.
Source: Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas, Lankakanda