Ravana, king of Lanka

* * *

Lanka at night is the most beautiful thing I have ever made.

I sit in the upper chamber of the palace in the hours before dawn when the city is quiet and the torches have burned low and the gold of the buildings catches what light remains and holds it differently than it holds the daylight. During the day Lanka is magnificent. At night it is something else. The gold becomes deeper. The silence between the towers has a completion that the daytime noise covers. I have ruled this kingdom for a very long time and I have not stopped finding these hours worth sitting in.

Mandodari, my chief queen, is asleep in the inner chamber. I can hear her breathing from here. She is the most beautiful woman in the three worlds and also the most honest person I have ever known, which is a combination that has made our life together both extraordinary and difficult. She tells me things I do not want to hear. She tells them to me with the directness of someone who loves you completely and has therefore nothing to protect by softening what is true. I have not always received what she tells me well. But I have never doubted that she sees clearly.

The kingdom is at its height. I have brought under my dominion what no being before me has brought under dominion. The gods make space for me, and the celestial beings move carefully in my presence. I have reordered the cosmos according to my vision of what the cosmos should be, and the cosmos has accommodated this reordering because it had no choice.

I have everything.

I have thought about this phrase often in the quiet hours, what it means to have everything. The women of the palace, gathered from every part of the three worlds, each one extraordinary in her own way. The musicians who play through the night so that music is always available somewhere in the corridors. The food and wine that the most skilled hands in Lanka prepare each day. The weapons that no one in the three worlds can match. The learning that I carry in my own mind, the Vedas mastered, the sacred texts understood at a depth that most scholars never reach.

And the hours in this upper chamber that no amount of having produces and no amount of losing takes away.

I have thought about this too. There is something in the having that does not satisfy. I understood this early and it did not stop me from wanting more. Perhaps it made me want more. The acquiring was always more interesting than the acquired. The moment of taking Lanka from Kubera was more alive than any morning I have spent in Lanka since. I have been aware of this in myself for a long time. I have not found a way to resolve it.

Mandodari says I am looking for something I have never been willing to name. She says she knows what it is and that Lanka will never contain it. I have not asked her what she means. I am not certain I want to know.

There was a disturbance at the outer gate in the afternoon.

My sister Surpanakha had returned from the Dandaka forest.

I have known Surpanakha my entire life. She is fierce and independent and careless with herself in the way of someone who has never had reason to be careful. She wanders where she wishes and takes what she wants. She has always moved through the world with the freedom of a being who belongs to the most powerful family in the three worlds and knows it.

When she was brought before me I did not recognize her immediately. There was blood, a great deal of it. But what stopped me was her face. Surpanakha has never been diminished, not once in her life that I have witnessed. She has been fierce and loud and sometimes foolish but never diminished. What I saw in front of me was my sister diminished in a way that could not be undone. Her nose and her ears. Gone.

I felt something move in me that does not move often.

I let her speak. She spoke for a long time. The forest. Three people living in a hut at Panchavati. A man she had approached and been refused by, his brother, what the brother had done to her face.

I listened to the part about the man carefully.

She described him the way people describe things that have surprised them, with a wonder she could not quite suppress even in her rage. She said he sat outside the hut in the early morning with a stillness unlike anything she had encountered. She said his power did not announce itself. She said she had grown up in Lanka, in my court, surrounded by genuine power, and this was different from all of it.

I noted this. I set it aside.

Then she told me about the woman.

She described Sita the way a painter describes a subject they have studied from every angle and cannot stop thinking about. Her presence. The stillness, different from the man’s, not the stillness of someone who has conquered an enemy but the stillness of someone who has never needed to conquer anything because she has always been exactly where she is. The way she moved inside that forest hut as if it were the only place she had ever been and the only place she needed to be.

And her beauty. Surpanakha described this last and with the precision of someone who has seen extraordinary beauty and is trying to be accurate rather than merely persuasive. She was telling me what she had seen, no more.

I sat in my court and I listened and something happened that I had not expected.

The description entered me.

I have taken beautiful women from every part of the three worlds. I have looked at beauty the way a collector looks at beautiful things, with the eye of someone who knows value and exercises the right to acquire it. I have never wanted anything I could not reach out and take.

But this was coming to me through a description, through my sister’s words, and through a picture painted in language of a woman I had not seen. And the wanting that arrived was different from any wanting I had felt before. A collector reaches for what he can take. This wanting reached for something that could not be taken at all, even at this distance, even through these second-hand words.

I dismissed the court.

I went to the upper chamber where the gold of Lanka catches the last of the night light. I sat in the dark and I thought about a woman in a forest hut at Panchavati who had never heard my name.

Mandodari found me there before dawn. She looked at my face and she saw something had changed. She asked me what had happened. I told her. She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, this is the one thing Lanka cannot give you. And this is the one thing that will undo everything Lanka is.

I did not answer her.

I was already thinking about how to get to Panchavati.

* * *

The acquiring was always more interesting than the acquired.

He was not describing a personal failing. He was describing a mechanism. What we now know about dopamine, the brain’s reward signal, is that it does not fire when you receive the reward. It fires in anticipation of the reward. The chase is the drug. The having is the comedown. This is why casinos work, why the scroll never ends, and why the next purchase feels more alive in the moment before you make it than in the moment after. This is what centuries of feeding the vices produces. The soul in its original state is content. But feed the vices long enough and the contentment is buried under the seeking.

Ravana had been running on this mechanism for centuries. Every kingdom taken, every beautiful thing acquired, and every limit dissolved by the boons. Each acquisition producing the brief brightness of the dopamine hit and then the settling back into the restlessness that the next acquisition would temporarily lift. He had built the most sophisticated reward system in the three worlds and he was sitting in the upper chamber at night feeling the emptiness that the system inevitably produces.

There was nothing left to chase. Lanka was complete. The three worlds were under his dominion. The dopamine had nowhere to fire.

The wanting that entered him when Surpanakha described Sita was different because it was uncertain. He could not simply reach out and take her. There was no guaranteed path to acquisition. The variable reward was back. The chase was back. For a mind that had been running on the seeking mechanism for centuries, this felt like waking up.

Variable reward scheduling is the most addictive reward structure known. A predictable reward loses its pull quickly. An unpredictable one, a reward that might arrive or might not, that requires continued engagement to discover, is what keeps people pulling the lever. Social media feeds are built on this principle. And so is Ravana’s desire for Sita.

In our tradition we call the faculty that can observe a craving without acting on it the buddhi, the power of discernment. When the buddhi is strong you can feel the wanting rise and choose not to follow it. When it is weak the craving runs the show. Centuries of acquiring whatever he wanted the moment he wanted it had left Ravana with no buddhi at all. The muscle had never been used. There was nothing between the wanting and the moving toward the wanted.

Mandodari was describing what cannot be acquired. The stillness that needs nothing and the completeness that does not depend on having. You cannot take that from someone. You cannot bring it to Lanka. It does not travel that way. And a man whose entire life has been organized around taking things has no way to receive what can only be grown.

He went to Panchavati anyway. Because the wanting was louder.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twenty-fifth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Ravana, king of Lanka

* * *

My father was Vishrava, son of Pulastya, one of the seven great sages born directly from Brahma himself.

My grandfather was a Saptarishi. My father was a brahmin of extraordinary learning and spiritual standing, a man whose tapasya had made him one of the most respected sages of his age. The spiritual inheritance I was born with was among the highest available to any soul in the three worlds. The capacity for learning, for discipline, for the sustained inner work that produces real realization, all of it was in my blood before I had done anything to earn it.

My mother was Kaikesi, daughter of Sumali, king of the rakshasas.

She was not subtle about what she wanted when she went to my father. She had been sent by her own father, who understood that a child born of Vishrava’s lineage would be extraordinary. She arrived at my father’s ashram and she made her intention clear. My father was in his evening prayers when she came. He told her that because she had approached him at an inauspicious hour the children born of their union would carry the nature of the hour. Dark, powerful, and driven by desire rather than dharma.

This is the first thing I understood about myself. I was born into two natures, the brahmin sage and the demon king. The capacity for the highest learning and the appetite of the darkest desire, both fully present and equally available to me from the beginning.

I watched my brothers choose differently. Kubera, my elder half-brother from my father’s first union, became lord of wealth, a being of dharma and prosperity. Vibhishana, my younger brother from my mother, chose the path of righteousness so completely that the tradition would eventually call him the demon who lived like a god. They each made their choice.

I understood my choice from the time I was old enough to know that a choice existed.

The brahmin path required surrender. Surrender of ego, of desire, of the self’s endless hunger for more. My father lived from it. I sat with him and I felt the peace of someone who has placed everything in something larger than himself and found that the placement produced abundance rather than loss. It was real. I could feel it was real.

And I could not want it.

I had my father’s blood. I had his capacity for learning, for tapasya, for the sustained discipline that most souls find impossible. I could have used those gifts the way he used them. I understood this clearly even as a young man.

But my mother’s blood was louder. It spoke in a register that the brahmin path could not answer. The desire for power that has no ceiling. The need to be the largest thing in any room, the hunger of a being who looks at the three worlds and thinks, all of this should recognize what I am.

I chose.

And having chosen I committed completely. This is what people who judge me do not always understand. I did not drift into what I became. I walked toward it with full intention. I used every gift my brahmin inheritance gave me, the learning, the discipline, the knowledge of the sacred texts and the sacred practices, and I placed all of it in service of the other inheritance. The demon king’s hunger directed by the brahmin sage’s capacity.

This is what made me what I became. Both natures, fully developed, pointed in one direction.

The tapasya took thousands of years.

I sat in one place. I did not move, I did not eat, and I did not sleep. The first century is the hardest. The body wants to move and the mind wants to move and you sit through both. By the second century the body has stopped asking. By the third the mind has too. What remains is the heat I had been generating from the beginning, now without the noise of resistance to obscure it. I turned everything I had inward in the way my father had taught me, the way his father had taught him, the ancient technology of self-directed fire that the tradition calls tapasya. It is not a metaphor. The heat is real and what it burns is real. The question is only what you are burning it toward.

What the silence of a thousand years actually sounds like is the question I am asked most often by those who have heard about my tapasya. The answer surprises them. It is not the silence of an empty room. It is the silence that arrives when the mind has stopped turning and the intellect has stopped generating. What remains is one awareness only. I am. That is all. No thought about what I am or where I am or how long I have been sitting. Just the fact of being, held inside itself. And sometimes, in the depth of that stillness, the awareness of Shiva. My Lord, simply there. You are together, and that is all. A man who has sat through a thousand years has known this. I knew it. I sat with Shiva for centuries. And I chose what I chose anyway.

Every thousand years I offered one of my heads to the sacred fire.

The offering itself is something I cannot fully describe even now. There is the deciding, which is its own thing. There is the moment of severance, which is shorter than you would imagine but contains more than any thousand years that preceded it. And then there is the after. The part of you that is gone is gone, and you are sitting in the same posture you were sitting in before, but something has been taken out of the cosmos and given to the fire, and the fire knows it, and Brahma knows it, and you know it. Each time, Brahma restored what had been offered. The heads grew back. But the offering had been made and received and something accumulated in that exchange that I could feel building over the centuries. A debt in the cosmic order that would eventually have to be honored.

Nine heads offered, nine times the fire, and nine times the restoration.

When I reached for the tenth I understood that Brahma would come before I completed the offering. The accumulation had become too large to ignore. The most learned men of the tradition had not performed tapasya of this duration and this intensity. Brahma could not remain absent.

He came.

He appeared above the fire in a form of light so complete that even I, after thousands of years of practice, had to lower my eyes. He asked what I wanted.

I had been thinking about this question for thousands of years. I knew exactly what I wanted.

I asked for immortality. He said this could not be granted. No soul is exempt from the cycle. I accepted this and asked for what I had come for.

I asked for protection from gods and demons and celestial beings, from gandharvas and nagas and yakshas, from every category of powerful being I could name. I wanted to be untouchable by anything in the three worlds that had the power to touch me.

Brahma granted it.

I rose from the tapasya with my ten heads restored. What I had cultivated was not ten separate minds but ten capacities. Each of the five great fires with its two faces. Lust, in its grasping form and its seductive form. Anger, in its explosive form and its cold form. Greed, in its taking form and its hoarding form. Ego, in its aggression and its contempt. Attachment, in its clinging form and its possessive form. All ten present, all ten fully alive, and all ten in service of the same direction I had chosen at the beginning.

I felt what the boons had given me the moment I rose. The sense of a ceiling being removed. Of every limit that had existed on what I could do lifting away.

I walked back into the world.

I had not asked for protection from humans.

They had not occurred to me. They were small and brief and weak. Mortal in the most complete sense, bounded by short lives and small powers. Why would I need protection from them? The thought did not form, could not have formed.

This is the thing I did not see then and see only now, looking back across everything that followed. Every boon contains within it the shape of its own limit. Brahma granted everything I asked for. He granted it completely and without deception. And the thing I did not ask for was the thing that mattered. The opening I left in the armor of my own protection was not left by an enemy. It was left by me. By my arrogance that could not see humans as worthy of being named.

I went to Lanka. My half-brother Kubera held it then, that golden city on its mountain, built by the divine architect Vishwakarma, the most magnificent place in the three worlds. I told Kubera it should be mine. He disagreed. I drove him north. I took what I decided should belong to me.

I brought the three worlds under my dominion.

And somewhere in the mortal world, in a forest I had never thought to visit, the thing I had not protected against was being prepared.

* * *

Ravana is the character in the Ramayana who has kept me awake longest.

Not because he is frightening, but because he is recognizable. He placed every gift in service of himself.

This is what makes him so difficult to put down. The same gifts that drove his destruction could have produced a different life. He chose the other direction not from ignorance but from preference.

The most dangerous blindness is not ignorance, which can be corrected by information. The most dangerous blindness is contempt. The decision, made before the evidence is examined, that certain things are beneath consideration. Ravana did not forget to ask for protection from humans because he made a mistake. He forgot because they were not in his calculations at all. And the opening that would destroy him was one he carved himself, with his own hands, in the moment of his greatest triumph.

We do this too. We leave ourselves unguarded in precisely the places our arrogance tells us we do not need to look.

The Western view of evil places it outside the soul. The devil stands at the door. The soul is innocent and the corruption comes from outside. This is a comforting idea because it locates the problem somewhere other than inside us.

The Brahma Kumaris tradition is harder. Ravana is not at the door but inside the house. The ten heads are not his faces but ours. Each one fully developed. Each vice has a masculine and a feminine expression. Ten heads, two faces on each one. This is the enemy we are dealing with. Not a figure from mythology but the voices inside every human mind that have been building across centuries, fed by every generation that chose desire over dharma.

In the Brahma Kumaris view, the five thousand year cycle places the golden and silver ages in the first half. Two thousand five hundred years of the soul living from its highest nature, with no Ravana, no vices in their full expression. The second half is the age of Ravana’s building. Slowly at first, then with gathering force. Each century adding to what the previous century cultivated. Lust fed, anger refined, greed developed, ego deepened, and attachment strengthened. Twenty-five centuries of tapasya in the wrong direction. And now, at the end of the cycle, Ravana is in his most magnificent form. The ten heads have never been more fully developed in human consciousness than they are in this moment.

This is why the daily practice matters. Not the worship of an external god but the inner confrontation the Ramayana has always been describing. The saying no when lust speaks. The choosing stillness when anger rises. The releasing what greed wants to hold. The stepping back when ego demands recognition. The opening the hand when attachment wants to grip. This is the war. And it is harder than any external battle because the enemy knows you completely.

The Ramayana does not ask us to defeat a monster out there. It asks us to recognize and defeat the one in here. Ravana’s choice is available to every soul. So is Vibhishana’s. Vibhishana was Ravana’s own brother, born of the same two bloods, who chose dharma so completely that the tradition calls him the demon who lived like a god. Which voice we listen to when both are speaking at the same time. That is the whole question.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twenty-fourth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Surpanakha, sister of Ravana

* * *

I have walked through this forest my entire life and I have never felt what I felt when I saw him.

He was sitting outside the hut at Panchavati in the early morning. The light was still low, coming through the trees at an angle that made everything look like it was lit from inside itself. He was not doing anything. Just sitting. There was something in the way he was sitting that stopped me before I had thought about why.

I am Ravana’s sister. I grew up in Lanka, the most magnificent kingdom in the three worlds, built on a mountain of gold by the divine architect Vishwakarma himself. The streets of Lanka were wide and luminous. The palace rose in towers of gold and precious stone that caught the light at every hour and held it differently. Music was always playing somewhere in the corridors. The gardens were tended with a perfection that made other gardens look like approximations. I grew up surrounded by the finest of everything that exists.

And my brother. My brother Ravana was not simply a king. He was the most powerful being in the three worlds, having performed tapasya of such intensity that Brahma himself had come to grant him boons. He could not be killed by gods or celestial beings or demons. He had mastered the Vedas. He was a devotee of Shiva whose devotion was genuine, the most surprising thing about him to those who know only his reputation. He was a man of extraordinary gifts, every one of them fully developed, every one of them placed in service of his own desire and his own vision of what the world should be. When my brother entered a room the room changed because of what he was. The accumulated weight of a life in which every capacity had been cultivated to its fullest expression and no one had ever said enough to any of it.

I grew up in the presence of this. I know what power looks like. I know what learning looks like. I have watched what happens to a room when someone who has developed everything available to them walks into it.

This was not that.

What I was looking at in that clearing was something I did not have a word for. He was beautiful, there was strength in him, and underneath both of those, something else. He was what he was, all the way through. And the air around him had changed.

My brother’s power announced itself. This man’s power required nothing of the room.

I wanted him.

I knew how to make myself what the moment required. I had come to the clearing in a form I had chosen carefully. Young, beautiful, the kind of beauty that announces itself without effort. This is one of the things I can do that most beings cannot. I can become anything the situation calls for. I had decided, and I had become it.

The wanting arrived before I had given it permission. It occupied me entirely. There was no room left for anything else.

I did not ask whether the wanting was appropriate. I never ask. When I want something I move toward it. The wanting is its own justification.

I went to him.

I told him what I wanted. Directly, the way I always do everything. I am not a creature of subtlety. Subtlety requires that you believe the other person has a right to refuse you, and I have never quite believed this. I told him I wanted him and I told him why and I told him what I could offer in return.

He listened to all of it with that complete attention of his, the attention that I had noticed from across the clearing and that was even more extraordinary up close. He did not dismiss me or mock me. He simply said, gently and without cruelty, that he was not able to give me what I was asking for. That he had a wife and that his dharma was clear. He gestured toward his brother.

I went to the brother. The brother was not gentle.

He told me what he thought of my request in language that left nothing ambiguous. And when I turned back toward the hut, toward Sita, the rage that had been building since the first refusal found its direction. She was the reason. She was what stood between me and what I wanted. If she were gone the calculation would change.

I moved toward her.

What happened next happened very quickly. Lakshmana was between us before I understood he had moved. He drew his blade and cut off my nose and my ears. The pain arrived sudden and absolute.

The form I had taken fell away. I was what I actually am. Large, dark, the face and body that the world calls monstrous. I stood in the clearing in my true form with my face running with blood and nothing left of the beautiful young woman I had walked in as.

The three of them watching me. And the wanting that had occupied me so completely turned, in the space of a moment, into rage equally total.

I ran. The thought repeating with each step. How dare they. How dare they do this to me, to the sister of Ravana of Lanka. They had cut my face and let me bleed and watched the form I had taken fall away. They did not know what they had just done. My brother would make them understand.

I knew where I was going.

I was going to my brother.

* * *

Surpanakha is the hinge of the entire story.

Without her the abduction does not happen, and without the abduction none of what follows is possible. She is not a minor character who sets off a sequence of events and then disappears. She is the character whose desire and whose wound become the mechanism for everything that follows.

And the Ramayana is very precise about what kind of desire hers was.

She saw something real. Rama in the clearing at Panchavati was genuinely extraordinary. Everything that followed from it was broken. The wanting had no inner check. It moved directly into pursuit, and refusal moved directly into rage, and rage found the most destructive instrument available.

Surpanakha grew up in Ravana’s court. She lived among women whose worth had been measured by their beauty from the moment they could be measured. The court of Lanka was full of beautiful women collected from across the three worlds, and Surpanakha had watched her brother acquire them with the same eye he turned on jewels. She learned what every woman in that court learned. Beauty was the currency. The form you showed up in was what you had to spend. There was no other.

She walked into the clearing at Panchavati with the only currency she had ever been told mattered. She used it the way she had watched it used her entire life. And it did not work.

Rama did not refuse her because she was unworthy. He refused her because the question she was asking, in the only language she had been taught to speak in, was not a question he lived inside. Rama was not a man for whom beauty was the conversation. Desire was not steering him. She had never met a man like this before. She did not know such men existed.

Then the currency itself was taken from her.

The face she had entered with was cut away by another man’s blade. In a single moment, the strategy failed, the identity failed, and the world she knew failed with it. What remained was not some hidden self waiting underneath the performance. What remained was a woman who had never been taught that she possessed value beyond the form she carried.

I do not think Surpanakha had ever been still long enough to discover who she was beneath appearance. Lanka did not produce that kind of stillness. In Ravana’s world, beauty was power, beauty was leverage, beauty was selfhood. And when all three collapsed in a single afternoon, there was nothing beneath the collapse sturdy enough to hold her.

There was only humiliation. Only rage.

And a brother powerful enough to turn a wounded woman’s humiliation into a war that would burn kingdoms to the ground.

We have seen this pattern in every age.

We have seen this in our own time. A person with access to enormous power who cannot tolerate being told no. Who takes what they want because they have never had to develop the capacity to stop themselves. Who hands every personal wound to the most powerful instrument available and watches the consequences fall on everyone around them.

The Ramayana saw this long before we had words for it.

Ravana is often described as a monster. The tradition gives him ten heads as an image of what he was, not a literal description but a portrait of a man in whom every form of desire and ego and misdirected power had been fully cultivated. Kama, desire. Krodha, anger. Lobha, greed. Moha, delusion. Mada, arrogance. Matsarya, envy. All of them present, all of them developed, and none of them restrained.

He was not a monster in the simple sense. He was a man of extraordinary gifts. The most dangerous person is the one with extraordinary gifts and nothing inside them that places any limit on how those gifts are used. Surpanakha handed her wound to exactly that kind of person. And he received it with both hands.

And Surpanakha walked toward what she wanted without asking a single question about whether the wanting gave her the right.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twenty-third chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Agastya, sage of the Dandaka forest

* * *

I have been in this forest for a long time.

Longer than most people stay anywhere. Longer than most kingdoms last. I came south into the Dandaka forest deliberately, which people thought was strange. Why would a sage of my standing leave the comfortable ashrams of the north to come to a forest overrun with demons, where the sages lived in fear and the practices were constantly disrupted and the darkness was real and present and not metaphorical?

Because someone had to.

The forest does not protect itself. The sages here are learned and devoted but they are not warriors. They came to this forest to practice, to sit in the silence of deep wilderness and go inward toward what the wilderness makes available. They did not come to fight. And the demons who had moved into the Dandaka forest in growing numbers over the years knew this and used it. The practices were disrupted. The ashrams were threatened. The sages lived with the exhaustion of people who are trying to do their sacred work in the presence of forces that wanted to destroy it.

My presence helped. The accumulated weight of decades of practice produces a stillness that demonic forces find difficult to approach directly. Difficult was enough to give the sages some measure of peace.

But I knew it was not enough. I was one sage. The forest was vast. And what the Dandaka forest needed was not presence but action. Not a sage holding a defensive perimeter but a warrior who understood dharma completely enough to use force in its service without being corrupted by the using.

I had been holding certain things in trust for exactly this person.

The weapons came to me through a long chain of transmission. They were in my care, and I had known for many years that they were meant for one specific person. Not for me. I am a sage, not a warrior. I can hold them. I cannot use them as they are meant to be used. They were waiting for someone whose dharmic clarity was complete enough that the weapons would recognize him as their proper home.

I had been waiting too.

I was not just waiting for a warrior. I was waiting for the one who could destroy Ravana. This was a thing I had understood slowly, the way certain truths arrive not in a moment but in accumulation. Ravana had grown too powerful. His reign over Lanka had become a wound on the three worlds that dharma itself was straining against. He had received boons from Brahma that made him untouchable by gods and demons and celestial beings. He had not asked for protection from humans because he considered humans beneath his notice.

That arrogance was not an accident. That blindness was the opening that dharma was waiting for.

And so a human had to do it. A specific kind of human, prepared deliberately, who had lived without comfort or certainty for long enough that the preparation had gone all the way through, who could receive these weapons and ask the right questions about them.

Something had been changing in the Dandaka forest for months before I saw them. Across the larger forest. The darkness was different. The demons were behaving differently, pulling back from certain areas, becoming cautious in a way they had not been cautious before. The sages were reporting fewer disruptions. Something had entered the Dandaka forest that the darkness could not quite read. I did not know who it was. I knew only that whoever had come into this forest was already doing something simply by being here.

I sat in my ashram and I waited.

Three people came through the trees. A young man in bark cloth who walked with a presence I recognized immediately. A woman beside him whose stillness was of a completely different order than the stillness of someone being careful. And behind them both, alert and watchful, a second young man whose eyes did not stop moving and whose hand never strayed far from his bow.

I rose to receive them.

I had known Dasharatha. I had visited Ayodhya in my travels and sat with the king and understood what kind of man he was. And I had heard, as every sage in this forest had heard, about the exile. The promise and the boon and the night that broke the palace. I knew who was standing at the edge of my ashram.

But knowing about someone and being in their presence are not the same thing.

When Rama entered my ashram I felt what I had not expected to feel. Recognition. Not of the prince of Ayodhya but of something older than that. A soul that has arrived at complete alignment between what it is and what it does. I had met perhaps three people in my entire long life in whom this alignment was fully present. This young man in bark cloth, sitting on the mat I had offered him with the ease of someone who has no preference between a mat and a throne, was one of them.

I understood then why the forest had been changing for months before he reached me.

I understood something else too. The exile was not a punishment. It never had been. It was a preparation. Twelve years of stripping away every comfort and every certainty, of living in complete dharma without the apparatus of kingship, of protecting sages in this very forest and understanding what the darkness looks like when you are inside it rather than governing from a distance. You cannot destroy Ravana from a palace. You can only destroy Ravana as someone the forest has made.

We spoke for a long time. He asked about the forest, about the sages, about what had been happening in the Dandaka and what the demons had done to the practices and the people trying to maintain them. He listened the way he listened to everything, with complete attention, without the part of the mind that is already formulating a response. He received what I said entirely before he said anything back.

And I told him to go to Panchavati. That it was the right place for the three of them. That the forest would give him what the forest had been keeping.

Then I brought out the weapons.

Each one had its own nature and its own weight in the hand and in the spirit.

The Brahmastra, created by Brahma himself, a weapon of such absolute power that it could destroy worlds if improperly used. It could not be recalled once released except by someone of complete dharmic clarity. I had held it for years knowing it was beyond my proper use. Not because I lacked power. Because a weapon of this nature requires not just power but someone who would use it only when dharma absolutely required it and never a moment before.

The bow of Vishnu. A weapon with its own history of service in the protection of dharma across ages I had not personally witnessed but knew through transmission. Heavy in the ordinary sense. Light in the hands of someone it recognized.

And others. Each one with its name and its invocation and the conditions under which it could be called forth and the conditions under which it must be withdrawn.

I placed them before Rama and I explained each one. He listened to everything. He asked the right questions. Not about power or range or what each weapon could destroy. About consequence, the conditions of withdrawal, and what happened to the person who used each one. He wanted to understand not what the weapons could do to the enemy but what using them would do to him.

I had given weapons to warriors before. In a long life you encounter many people who want powerful things. Almost all of them ask about the power first. What can this do. How far can it reach. How many can it destroy.

This was the first person who asked about consequence first.

When I had finished explaining, he received each weapon with both hands, with reverence without drama. Not performing humility but understanding what he was holding and what it meant that it was being given to him.

I watched him and I felt something release in me that I had not known I was holding.

The waiting was over. The weapons were where they belonged.

He bowed to me before he left. Sita bowed to me. Even Lakshmana, who I could see was not someone who bowed easily to anyone, bowed. And then they went into the forest toward Panchavati and I stood at the edge of my ashram and I watched them go.

The Dandaka forest felt different after they left, purposeful, as if it sensed that something had been set in motion that would eventually resolve what the forest had been suffering for years.

I went back inside. I sat down. I picked up the practice I had been maintaining for decades.

For the first time in a very long time, it felt complete.

* * *

The question Rama asked Agastya is the one most people never ask about the powers they hold. Almost everyone, when they receive a capacity, asks what they can do with it. How far it can reach. What it can build or take or change. The dharma question is different. What does using this do to me. What does it require me to become.

Rama could ask this because the exile had stripped him of the apparatus that prevents the question from arising. Twelve years without the palace. Twelve years without the capacity that lets you skip the question. The exile produced the only kind of person who could safely receive what Agastya had been holding.

Every piece was necessary. Remove any one of them and the outcome changes. Kaikeyi had to ask for the boon, Dasharatha had to honor it, Rama had to go, Agastya had to be there with the weapons, and Ravana had to be exactly what he was, blind in precisely the way that dharma needed him to be blind.

The story was already written. Not in the sense that the people in it had no choice. Every one of them chose. Kaikeyi chose, Rama chose, and Agastya chose to come south and hold the weapons in trust. All real choices. But dharma has a direction. When enough souls align with that direction, something shifts that force alone cannot stop.

The instrument that would pass through that opening had just asked the right question.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twenty-second chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Lekhraj, jeweler of Ayodhya

Lekhraj is the jeweler we met in chapter four, the man who walked through Ayodhya at its height with a finished necklace and felt the city around him as a place that knew how to see. Months have passed since Rama left. This is what he saw, sitting at his bench by the Sarayu, in the weeks after.

* * *

I have been a jeweler for forty years. In that time I have learned one thing above all others.

The most dangerous stone is the one that looks like what it is not.

The obvious fake you catch immediately, the wrong weight in the hand, the wrong light in the depth. What fools you is the stone that has almost everything right. The color is close, the clarity is nearly there, and the weight is approximately correct. You have to look very carefully and know exactly what you are looking for before the difference reveals itself. And once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

I have been sitting at my bench near the Sarayu for months thinking about the palace.

I watched the coronation decorations go up. I was one of the craftsmen called to contribute work for the occasion. I was proud of what I made and I was glad to make it and I walked home that evening thinking that this city was as fine as it had ever been, that something was being rightly ordered, that a prince who had been worth waiting for was finally going to be given what he deserved.

And then the morning came and the decorations were still there and Rama was not.

I was on my street when the word spread. The way word spreads in a city, not in a single announcement but in a wave of faces changing, one person telling another, the sound of it moving through the market like a wind moving through standing grain. I stood at the edge of my doorway and I listened and I understood what had happened and then I went inside and I sat at my bench and I did not pick up any tools for a long time.

I did not go to watch them leave. I could not make myself do it. But I heard from my neighbor, who had gone and come back with red eyes, what it looked like. Rama in bark cloth, the bearing of his walk, Sita beside him, Lakshmana behind, and the city lining the streets and parting for them and closing behind them.

In the weeks that followed I watched the palace the way you watch something that has been damaged without knowing yet how badly. The lights were different and the movement of the attendants was different. The feel of a place that is functioning because it must function but has lost the thing that made it worth functioning for.

And then, slowly, as news travels between people who know each other in a city of this size, I began to hear things about the forest, about how Rama was living.

The hut of leaves, the bark cloth, and the simple food. The three of them in a clearing at Chitrakoot that people who had visited described with a wonder in their voices that I recognized immediately. It was the same note I had heard in the voice of the palace official when he looked at my necklace. The recognition of someone who has encountered something genuine and is still slightly surprised by it.

One man who had traveled with Bharata’s party and come back told me that he had expected to find suffering in that clearing. That he had prepared himself for it. And that what he found instead was something he did not have a word for. Peace was too small a word. Completeness was closer. Three people who were exactly where they were, without any part of them elsewhere, without any part of them pulled toward what they had left behind.

I sat with this for a long time.

I am a jeweler. I know how to sit with something and look at it from every angle until I understand what I am seeing.

Here is what I understood.

The palace had everything. The forest had nothing. And the palace was full of grief while the forest was full of something the visitor could not name.

This is not a paradox, not to someone who has spent forty years learning to see the difference between what glitters and what is genuinely precious.

What the palace had lost was not Rama but the thing in itself that Rama’s presence had been a symptom of. A rightness, of things being in their proper place. The grief in the palace was real and I do not diminish it. But the grief was not caused by the absence of a person. It was caused by the collapse of an arrangement of external things that the people inside had built their inner weather upon.

And in the forest, the inner weather had not collapsed, because it was not built on external things.

Sita had left a palace but not herself. Rama had gone into exile carrying his dharma. Lakshmana had given up comfort without giving up his purpose. They carried what mattered into the forest with them and left the rest behind.

I went back to my bench. I picked up the piece I was working on. I held it to the light.

I thought about all the beautiful things I have made and placed in people’s hands over forty years, the way they receive them, and the moment when something I worked on for weeks meets the person it was made for. And then I thought about what happens after. How they come back, weeks or months later, with the same look on their face that was there before the piece arrived. The necklace lands, they feel it for a moment, and then they return to wherever they already were.

The forest is teaching me something I should have understood earlier.

What you carry inside is what you live from. Everything else is the palace you walk through.

* * *

I was recently at someone’s home for the first time. A new house they had built. Thirty thousand square feet. The kind of space that stops you at the door before you have even entered because the scale of it is outside ordinary experience.

The master suite was five thousand square feet, the closets had been designed by Louis Vuitton, and the locks on the doors were made by Ferrari. The master bathroom had twelve-foot glass walls on three sides overlooking a golf course and a lake and the morning light coming through that glass was extraordinary. I stood there and I thought, if I lived here, if this were mine, if I woke up every morning to this view, what would my life feel like?

And I knew the answer immediately. It would feel like whatever my inner weather already is. The view would be extraordinary and I would notice it for a while and then it would become the view from my bathroom. The thirty thousand square feet would be the space I moved through. And the quality of life from the inside would be exactly what it was before I moved in.

There is a name for this, and there is research behind it. Psychologists who studied lottery winners traced what happened to their happiness after the win, and within a year, sometimes less, the winners had returned to their baseline. The same baseline they had before the windfall. The external event was extraordinary. The internal weather was unchanged. What I am calling inner weather, researchers call the hedonic baseline.

And the most important thing any of us can do is protect and slowly improve that baseline. Because nothing on the outside will do it for us.

Three souls living fully inside their dharma produced what no palace could. Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah. Dharma protects those who protect it. The protection is not comfort. The food was simple and the danger was real. The protection was something underneath all of that, the peace of a soul that is not pulling against what is true.

The palace had more than the forest in every measurable way. And the palace was full of grief while the forest held what no visitor had a name for.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twenty-first chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Bharata, Rama’s brother, prince of Ayodhya

Bharata is Rama’s younger brother, son of Kaikeyi. He was at his maternal grandfather’s kingdom when the two boons were called in. This is what he came home to.

* * *

I knew something was wrong before I reached the city gates.

Not from any message or any report. Nobody had sent word to my grandfather’s kingdom. I had been kept uninformed, which I would later understand was deliberate, though by whose deliberateness and for what reason I still cannot say with certainty. What I knew was what the road told me. The silence as we approached Ayodhya. The absence of the sounds a city makes when it is alive and well. The faces of the people we passed on the final stretch, who saw our party coming and did not come forward to meet us the way people come forward when a prince returns from a journey.

They looked away.

I did not know yet what that meant. I knew only that something had happened and that I was arriving into its aftermath without having been present for any of it.

My father was dead. This was the first thing I understood, from Shatrughna’s face when I found him, before he said a word. A brother’s face tells you what words cannot prepare you for. I stood in the corridor of the palace I had grown up in and I felt the ground go out from under me in the way it goes when something is gone that you did not know you needed until it was not there.

Then they told me about Rama.

I listened to all of it without speaking. The two boons. My mother’s request. The exile. Rama walking out of Ayodhya in bark cloth with Sita and Lakshmana. My father lying down and calling for Rama until he had no breath left to call with.

I sat with this for a long time.

Then I went to find my mother.

She was in her chambers. She looked up when I entered and I could see on her face that she had been waiting for this moment and dreading it and was now inside it. Whatever she expected from me, I do not know. Perhaps she thought I would understand. Perhaps she thought that whatever she had done, she had done it for me, and a son who understood that would find a way to receive it.

I did not understand.

I told her what I thought of what she had done. I did not moderate it or find the diplomatic version of it or look for the words that would be firm but still kind. I was twenty-four years old and my father was dead and my brother was in the forest and the city outside despised the woman who had raised me and I told her the full truth of what I felt.

She did not defend herself. That was the thing I had not expected. She sat and she received it and she did not look away and she did not explain. She had been standing in a corridor outside a closed door long enough to understand that there was nothing to say.

I left her chamber. I went to see the throne.

It was exactly as I had always known it. The throne of Ayodhya, the throne my father had sat on, the throne that was now being held for me by the logic of a promise I had not made and a boon I had not asked for. It sat in the empty hall and it waited.

I looked at it for a long time.

I had never wanted it. I want to be clear about this because I think it is important. I had never looked at Rama and felt the sourness that comes from wanting what belongs to someone else. Rama was my elder brother and the crown prince and the best person I knew and the idea of him on that throne had always felt right the way things feel right when they are in their proper place. I had never wanted what was his.

And now it was being offered to me as a gift. The gift my mother had secured with her love and her fear and her two boons and the long night of Manthara’s whispering. A gift that had cost my father his life and my brother his home and the entire kingdom its peace.

I would not sit on it.

I went to prepare for the forest.

The journey to Chitrakoot took several days. I traveled with a large party, ministers and attendants and soldiers, because a prince does not travel alone and because I wanted Rama to understand when he saw us coming that all of Ayodhya was behind this plea. That this was not just a brother’s request. It was a kingdom asking its king to come home.

I had been thinking about what I would say the entire journey. How to make the case. How to find the argument that would reach him. Rama had always listened completely and responded to what was actually true rather than to what was persuasively said, which meant I could not rely on eloquence. I had to rely on truth. And the truth was simple. He belonged on the throne and I did not and everyone knew this and the only reason the situation was otherwise was because of something that should never have happened.

I found him at Chitrakoot.

He was living in a hut of leaves and branches with Sita and Lakshmana, in a clearing in the forest that had a peace about it that I had not expected. I had imagined I would find suffering. What I found was something closer to completeness. Three people who had made their world from what was available to them and were living inside it without complaint or performance. Sita moving with the same presence she had always had in the palace, as if the forest were simply where she was and therefore where she was supposed to be. Lakshmana at the edge of the clearing, alert, watching our party approach with the eyes of someone who has appointed himself guardian of something he will not allow to be disturbed.

And Rama.

He looked the same and entirely different. The bark cloth. The forest light on his face. The absence of everything the palace had surrounded him with. And underneath all of that, the same quality I had felt in him since we were boys. The stillness of someone who is completely where they are. He was in the forest the way he had been in the palace. Without resistance. Without the tension of someone enduring something. Simply present.

I fell at his feet.

I do not know how long I stayed there. Long enough that he reached down and took my hands and raised me up himself. He looked at me with the expression I had seen on his face since childhood, the complete attention, the seeing of what was actually there rather than what was presented.

I told him everything. Not just the argument I had prepared on the road. Everything. What it had been like to arrive home. My father’s absence. My mother’s face. The throne in the empty hall. The way the city looked at me when I walked through it. The weight of what had been done in my name without my knowledge. I told him all of it and I told him that none of it was right and that the only thing that would make any of it right was him coming home.

He listened to all of it. He did not interrupt once. When I finished he was quiet for a long moment, the way he was always quiet when something required consideration rather than a quick response.

Then he said what I had known somewhere underneath all my hoping that he would say.

He said our father’s word had been given. That a promise made on everything sacred cannot be set aside because the circumstances were difficult or because the one who extracted it acted badly. That dharma does not bend for our convenience. That the exile was not a punishment he was enduring. It was a commitment he was honoring. And he would complete it.

I sat in that clearing for a long time after he finished. The forest was quiet around us. Lakshmana had not moved from his position at the edge of the trees. Sita had gone inside the hut with the tact of someone who understands when a conversation requires privacy.

I understood that Rama was not coming back. And I understood, sitting in that clearing, that he was right. That the argument I had made was true and also insufficient. That dharma does not bend even for true arguments. That the promise had been made and the only person who could break it was the person who had made it and that person was dead.

I asked him for one thing.

His sandals.

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved across his face that I could not entirely read. Then he took them off and placed them in my hands. They were simple things. Forest sandals, not the gold-worked ones of the palace. Worn from the road. Still carrying the warmth of his feet.

I held them and I understood what I was holding. Not footwear. A statement. The only form of truth available to me in a situation where every other form had been made impossible by what my mother had done.

I bowed to my brother. I rose. I turned and I began the journey back to Ayodhya.

I placed them on the throne.

Not as ceremony. As fact. Rama’s sandals on the throne of Ayodhya said one thing without ambiguity. The king is Rama. I am here only in his place. I will govern because someone must govern and because Rama asked me to. But I will not be king. I will not take what is not mine. I will not perform the mental operation that would make sitting on that throne feel acceptable.

I moved that evening to a small house outside the city walls. I had a mat laid on the floor. I put on bark cloth the way Rama was wearing bark cloth in the forest. I sat on the mat and I felt the hardness of it and I thought about him, in his hut at Chitrakoot, on a mat like this one, and I felt the distance between us as something with weight.

The ministers came the next morning to discuss the affairs of the kingdom. I received them. I listened. I made the decisions that needed to be made. I governed Ayodhya as it deserved to be governed, carefully, justly, with everything I had. But I returned each evening to this house and this mat and this bark cloth.

Not as performance or to be seen. Because this was the only form of integrity available to me. I could not follow Rama into the forest. I could not undo what had been done. I could not restore what had been taken. But I could refuse every comfort that he was refusing. I could make my daily life a daily statement of what I actually believed.

I lay down on the mat that first night and I looked at the ceiling of the small house and I thought about the throne in the hall with my brother’s sandals on it.

This, I thought, is what I am made of. Now I know.

* * *

Bharata is where the cost of integrity arrives at its most quiet expression.

He is not fighting a demon or on a battlefield. He is in a small house outside a city, sleeping on a mat, governing a kingdom he refuses to call his own. The Ramayana barely pauses on this. It notes that he refused the throne and placed the sandals on it and governed as regent. Then it moves on. As if what he did was simply what any person of good character would have done.

That understatement is the point. Nobility does not ask for recognition. It does not make noise. It simply holds.

Bharata had every justification to sit on the throne. The justification was available and he refused to use it.

The mind has a remarkable capacity to rewrite the story of how we got what we have until we genuinely believe we deserve it. The student who cheated on an exam forgets the cheating and remembers only the score. The feeling of having earned it arrives even when the earning never happened. The mind protects the ego by quietly editing the record. This is not always conscious. It is often completely sincere. The person who benefited from what they should not have taken genuinely believes, over time, that they earned it.

The self-deception simply did not occur to him. Not because he suppressed it, but because his character was clear enough that the story never formed.

The children of privilege who inherit position without inheriting the character that should accompany it move through the world with absolute certainty that what they have been given is what they deserve. Who have never been told no. Whose parents protected them from every consequence of every choice. Who sit on thrones that were arranged for them and feel that they earned the sitting.

The tragedy is not that they are lying. It is that they are not. The self-deception is complete. They have rewritten the story so thoroughly that they cannot see what everyone around them can see. And underneath both, invisible even to themselves, is the absence of the one thing that would have made them truly worthy of what they have. The character to refuse it.

Bharata is what royalty means. Not the title or the position inherited at birth. The capacity to look at something you have every legal and logical right to take, and put it down, because taking it would make you less than who you are.

That is royalty. Not the crown. The conduct.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twentieth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Kaushalya, first queen of Ayodhya and Rama’s mother

Rama has left. The curse Dasharatha received in a dark forest as a young king is ripening. This is what Kaushalya witnessed in the days that followed.

* * *

He had stopped eating three days after Rama left.

I did not realize it at first. The palace was still in the chaos that follows something irreversible. Servants moving without purpose. Ministers arriving and departing with expressions that said they understood nothing of what had happened. The sound of my own grief still raw enough to fill whatever room I was in. I did not notice immediately that Dasharatha had simply stopped.

When I understood what was happening I sat beside him. I did not try to make him eat. I had been married to this man for most of my life. I knew when something had moved past the reach of persuasion.

He was not ill. That is the thing I need you to understand. There was nothing wrong with his body that a physician could name or treat. What was leaving him was something the physicians had no instrument for. The will to be in a world where Rama was in the forest and he had put him there.

I sat beside him and I held his hand and I listened to him call for Rama.

Not constantly or dramatically. In the way a person calls for something when they are moving between sleep and waking and the mind goes to where the heart is. Rama. Just the name. Over and over in the hours before dawn when the palace was quiet and there was nothing between him and what he had done.

There was a sound in the corridor outside the room.

I had been aware of it for days. Someone standing very still in a corridor, not pacing, not moving away, simply present on the other side of a closed door. Kaikeyi. Dasharatha had made clear, in the last coherent hours before the grief took him fully under, that he did not want her in the room. He had not said it with cruelty. He had simply turned his face away when she appeared in the doorway and the attendants had understood.

She stood in the corridor and she could not enter and she could not leave.

I looked at the closed door and I thought about what was happening on the other side of it. A woman who had loved this man. Who had saved his life with her bare hand on a chariot wheel. Who had laughed with him and argued with him and been his joy for decades. Standing in the corridor of her own palace, shut out of the room where he was dying, able to hear him call the name of the son she had sent away.

Her grief had no bottom.

I understood this even from inside the room. Even with everything she had done. There was no one who could enter that grief with her because the grief was made entirely of what she herself had caused. There is no comfort available from that position. No one to blame. No way to put it down. You stand in the corridor and you hear your husband call another woman’s son’s name and you understand, finally and completely, the full weight of the thing you did in the dark.

Shatrughna came and sat with me for part of the night. He knew, like his mother, when silence was the better presence. He sat and he held the space and after a while he took my hand and we waited together.

Dasharatha called for Rama one more time.

And then he was gone.

The corridor outside went silent.

* * *

The curse placed by Shravan Kumar’s blind father finds its form here.

Dasharatha carried it for decades. Through the building of Ayodhya, through the raising of four sons, through every year of the kingdom functioning exactly as it should. The crack was there the whole time, sealed away, invisible. It waited patiently for the moment that would give it its shape.

That moment was Kaikeyi asking for the boons. He could have refused. He could have broken his promise. But he was a man of dharma in the deepest sense, which meant he understood that a promise made on everything sacred cannot be set aside for personal comfort, not even when the promise is being used against you by someone you loved and trusted. He honored the boons. He sent Rama into the forest. And then he lay down.

There was nothing wrong with his body that a physician could name or treat. The suffering was not physical. It was the weight of a karmic account completing itself inside the soul. When that happens, the sorrow is total. The soul feels the full measure of what it has done and there is no medicine for that and no way around it.

We live in a moment when the people with the most power seem most insulated from the consequences of using it badly. They make decisions that break things and move on. They cause harm at scale and are never required to stand anywhere near the wreckage. The gap between action and consequence has never been wider for those at the top.

Kaikeyi had no such insulation. The consequence lived in her own palace. Slept in the rooms down the corridor from hers. Ate at the same table. She could not delegate the weight of what she had done to someone else to carry. She felt every ounce of it.

That is how consequence actually works when there is no escape from it. Not in a courtroom or a public reckoning. In the ordinary texture of every day. In the face of a son who cannot look at her. In the silence of a palace that used to respond to her presence with warmth. In a corridor outside a closed door, standing in a grief that has no bottom because there is no one to blame and nowhere to put it down.

She was not a monster. She was a woman who loved her son and was worked on by someone who knew exactly where her fear lived. And then she had to become the person who stood in that corridor for the rest of her life.

The Ramayana does not give her an escape from this. It does not offer her a redemption arc that cleans the slate. It gives her the full weight of what she chose and leaves her inside it.

Dasharatha died in a palace that was full of people and empty of the ones he needed. That is the shape of what happens when power is used without accountability. Not always dramatic or visible from the outside. But inescapable from the inside.

He called Rama’s name until he had no more breath.

In the corridor, Kaikeyi heard every word.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the nineteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Sumitra, second queen of Ayodhya and Lakshmana’s mother

Sumitra is Dasharatha’s second queen and the mother of Lakshmana and Shatrughna. This is the morning Rama leaves for the forest.

* * *

The palace sounded different that morning.

Not louder exactly. Grief does not always make things louder. Sometimes it makes things quieter in the wrong way, the way a room goes quiet when someone has said something that cannot be unsaid. I could hear it through the walls. The silence of Kaushalya’s chamber. The sound of Dasharatha’s attendants moving too carefully, too quietly, the way people move around something that is breaking. From the direction of Kaikeyi’s rooms, nothing. Which was its own kind of sound.

I sat in my own chamber and I was still.

Not because I did not feel it. I felt it entirely. Rama was going into the forest for fourteen years. The boy I had watched grow up in this palace, the young man who bowed to me each morning with a sincerity that never felt like ceremony, he was going to walk out of Ayodhya and not come back until he was forty-two years old. I understood what that meant. I was not numb to it.

But I had learned something in all the years of living inside this palace, inside this family, inside the weather of three women loving the same man and raising sons in the same house. I had learned that the steadiness has to come from somewhere. When everything around you is breaking, someone has to remain unbroken. Not because they feel nothing, but because they understand that this is what the moment requires.

Lakshmana would come to me. I knew this without being told. He would come because he was going with Rama, he had already decided this, nothing would stop him, and he would need me to be the one who said yes. Not reluctantly, not with grief that he would have to carry into the forest alongside everything else. He would need me to say yes the way you say yes to something that is completely right even when it costs you.

I sat in my chamber and I prepared myself to say yes.

That is all I was doing. Preparing. Getting quiet enough inside myself that when he came, what he received from me was clarity and not sorrow. This was the only thing I had to give him. I intended to give it completely.

He came.

He did not need to explain. I could see it in his face the way I had always been able to read my sons. The decision already made. The only question being whether I would send him forward or pull him back.

I took his face in my hands. I looked at him for a long moment. And then I told him what I needed him to know before he walked out of this palace.

For you, Rama is your Ayodhya. Sita is your mother. The forest is your home. Serving them is your dharma. Go with your whole heart.

He bowed to me. He left.

I went to the window.

The city had come out. Not in celebration this time. The way a city comes out when it understands that something it loves is leaving and it needs to witness the leaving even though witnessing will not make it easier. The streets were lined. Thousands of people standing in silence or weeping without sound, the way people weep when the grief is too large for noise.

I saw them emerge from the palace gate. Rama first, in bark cloth, carrying nothing, walking with the same presence he had always walked with, as if this forest road were no different from the palace corridor, as if the leaving cost him nothing, as if dharma had made the decision and he was simply the one doing the walking.

Sita beside him. Not behind. Beside. The way she had always been.

Lakshmana behind them both. Not reluctant. Chosen. Every step deliberate.

The crowd parted for them and closed behind them. I watched until they were gone from sight.

Then I turned from the window. There was still a palace to hold.

* * *

Sumitra is the queen the Ramayana barely pauses on. She is mentioned. She is present. She is given her share of the divine payasam and she gives birth to two sons who matter enormously to the story. And then the telling moves on to the larger dramas happening around her, Kaushalya’s grief, Kaikeyi’s act, Dasharatha’s dying.

I think this is one of the most honest things the Ramayana does, though it takes a while to see it that way. Sumitra is overlooked in the telling for exactly the same reason that people like her are overlooked in life. She does not break. She does not create a scene that demands attention. She holds things together quietly and completely and because she does, everyone around her can afford to fall apart.

We do not celebrate this kind of strength. We talk about it, we recognize it in theory, we say things like she was the rock of the family, but we do not give it the weight it deserves because it does not produce the kind of moments that stories are built around. There is no scene where Sumitra collapses and then recovers. There is no moment of her choosing between her comfort and her son’s destiny. She simply seems to have always known what was required and to have always been prepared to give it.

She was the middle queen. The second wife, which in the hierarchy of Dasharatha’s palace meant she was neither the most honored nor the most beloved. Kaushalya had seniority and dignity. Kaikeyi had passion and history and the specific electricity that comes from having saved someone’s life. Sumitra had a different kind of place. She was the one who understood both of the others. The one who could sit with Kaushalya’s quietness and with Kaikeyi’s brightness and feel at home in both. The one who knew when to speak and when to simply be present. She was the connective tissue of that household, the thing that kept three women who could have been rivals from becoming enemies.

She gave the story Lakshmana and Shatrughna. Two sons who would prove to be essential in completely different ways. Shatrughna devoted to Bharata the way Lakshmana was devoted to Rama. The four brothers together forming something complete, a set of relationships built on loyalty so total that none of them could be understood alone.

Lakshmana is the one who matters most to what comes next. He is the one who chooses the forest over the palace without being asked, without hesitation, without drama. He simply cannot imagine being anywhere that Rama is not. That devotion, that completeness of surrender to someone else’s dharma, does not arrive from nowhere.

What she said to him has stayed with me since the first time I read it. She did not say go with my blessing, which would have been generous. She did not say I am proud of you, which would have been true. She gave him something more useful than either. She gave him a frame for understanding what he was about to do and who he was about to become inside the doing of it.

Rama is your Ayodhya. The forest is your home. When you know who you are and where you belong, you cannot be lost. Not really. Not in the way that matters.

That is not a mother releasing a son into sacrifice. That is a mother handing a son his identity.

He went into the forest and he did not look back, the way Rama had not looked back. Both of them had been given, by different mothers in different ways, the gift of leaving without guilt.

Sumitra then had a long time to sit in Ayodhya with one son gone and a husband dying and a palace in pieces around her. The texts do not give us many scenes of this period from inside her experience. Which I think is intentional. She held. That is all that can be said. While everything else was collapsing she sat in the middle of it and held.

There is a kind of person who shows up in almost every family, every community, every institution. They are not the ones who lead dramatically or fail dramatically or transform dramatically. They are the ones who are simply, consistently, quietly there. The ones who know when to say something and when silence is the better gift. The ones who can hold two people who are in conflict with each other and feel no pull toward either side because their loyalty is to something larger than either position. The ones who, when everything around them breaks, do not break.

Sumitra gave Lakshmana none of her grief to carry. She kept it herself and gave him only what he needed. That is a kind of love that requires enormous self-possession. You have to be very clear about what is yours and what is theirs. You have to be willing to feel the loss privately so that they can leave freely.

Not everyone can do this. Most of us cannot, most of the time. We love and we hold and we let our holding show, because we are human and because love makes us want to keep what we love close.

Sumitra could do it. The Ramayana shows us she could do it without making a story of the doing. She simply did it and then continued being who she was in the palace for the fourteen years that followed.

That steadiness, unremarked, uncelebrated, absolutely essential, is its own kind of greatness.

She is the queen nobody talks about. She is also the one whose single conversation in a corridor sent the whole story forward.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the eighteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Rama, age twenty-eight

By morning Kaikeyi had called in her two boons. Bharata would be king. Rama would be exiled for fourteen years. This is Rama receiving the news.

* * *

My father could not look at me.

This was the first thing I noticed when I entered the room. Dasharatha, King of Ayodhya, a man I had never seen show weakness in my presence, was sitting on the floor. Not on his throne or even a chair. On the floor, like a man who has been struck by something he did not see coming and has not yet found the strength to rise.

Kaikeyi was standing. She looked at me when I entered and then looked away. That looking away told me more than anything she could have said.

I understood immediately that something had broken in this room. Not recently. During the night. Whatever had been whole when I went to sleep the evening before was no longer whole. The coronation banners were still hung outside. The city was still decorated. None of that had changed. And yet everything had changed.

I went to my father. I sat beside him. I said, tell me.

He could not speak for a long time. When he finally did, what came out was not a sentence. It was pieces of sentences, broken by grief, interrupted by his own inability to say the words. I listened to all of it. I waited for each piece. And slowly, the shape of it assembled itself.

The two boons. Kaikeyi’s request. Bharata to be crowned in my place. Me to be exiled to the forest for fourteen years.

I sat with this for a moment.

It was not nothing. There was something there that I had to sit with, a feeling that had no clean name, not quite grief and not quite shock but something in the territory between them. The morning had held a coronation. The evening held a forest. That is not a small thing to receive.

But I also knew, in the same moment, what was required of me.

My father had sworn. On everything he held sacred, he had given his word to this woman. A promise given in those terms is not a personal preference. It is a pillar. If I found a way around it, if I argued my way to an exception, if I let my father break his word because the breaking would benefit me, I would be demonstrating exactly what I had understood since I was five years old in a pavilion asking Vasishtha about dharma. That the comfortable choice and the right choice are not always the same thing.

I asked my father one question. Is this your wish?

He could not answer. The silence was its own answer.

I told him I would go.

I touched his feet. I rose. I left the room.

I went to Sita.

I told her everything. I did not soften it or prepare it or find a way to say it that would make it easier to receive. She deserved the truth and she was capable of hearing it. These were two things I had always known about her.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment. Then she said she was coming with me.

I told her not to. I said the forest was dangerous, that the exile was mine, that her place was here in the palace where she would be safe and cared for. I said all of this carefully and I meant every word of it.

She listened to all of it. Then she said what she had to say.

She said a wife’s dharma is to be beside her husband. Not in front of him. Not behind him. Beside him. Wherever that is. She said if I was in the forest then the forest was where she was supposed to be. She said the palace without me was not a home. It was just a building.

I did not argue further. Not because I had no more arguments, but because I recognized something in her voice that I had learned to recognize over twelve years. A decision that has already been made at a level that argument cannot reach.

She was coming.

I looked at her and I felt something I had no clean word for. Not gratitude exactly, though there was that. Something larger. The recognition of a soul who has understood what you are and is choosing you anyway. Choosing you specifically.

Lakshmana was furious.

I had expected this. His fury on my behalf was as natural as breathing and I had learned long ago not to try to stop it before it had finished. You let Lakshmana say everything he had to say. He was almost always right about the facts even when he was wrong about what to do with them.

He said our father was wrong. He said Kaikeyi had broken dharma. He said I had no obligation to honor a promise I had not made. He said the armies of Ayodhya would follow me, that we could simply proceed with the coronation, that anyone who tried to stop us would find out quickly what that meant. He said all of this with the intensity of a man who loves someone completely and is watching them be harmed and cannot accept that there is nothing to be done about it.

I listened to all of it.

Then I said what I had to say. That the promise my father made was sacred and could not be set aside for my convenience. That a son who lets his father become a man who breaks his word is not honoring his father. That dharma does not bend because the cost is high. That it bends for nothing.

Lakshmana went quiet. The fury did not leave his face but something shifted underneath it. He was thinking.

After a while he said he was coming.

Not as a question or a request. As a fact that had already been decided in the same place where Sita had decided. Below the level of argument.

I looked at him and I thought of the archery courtyard when we were boys. I had said come. He had come. The ease of it. The completeness. Some things do not change.

Three yeses. Each different. Each completely itself.

Mine came from dharma. Sita’s came from love. Lakshmana’s came from the fact of what he was.

We went to prepare for the forest.

* * *

Rama asked one question before he acted. Not whether it was fair or whether there was another way. Whether it was his father’s wish. That is the only question that mattered to him in that moment. The clarity to know which question actually needs answering, and to ask only that one, is the whole of what dharma looks like in practice.

Sita’s yes comes from somewhere else entirely. She has spent twelve years building a practice that makes this moment possible. Ananya. Having no other. Total orientation toward one thing. The woman who has been fully present in her happiness knows exactly what she is choosing when she chooses to keep it even at cost. The palace without Rama was not her home. It was just a building.

Lakshmana’s yes is the simplest and the most complete. He had already made this choice long before this room. The day Vishwamitra arrived and he and Rama looked at each other across the court without speaking. A second self does not stay behind. The fury was real and the arguments were right and none of it touched the fundamental fact of what he was.

Three people given an impossible moment. Each yes completely itself. Each one showing you something different about where integrity lives.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the seventeenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Manthara and Kaikeyi, one long night

Manthara has been Kaikeyi’s lifelong companion, brought with her from Kekaya forty years ago. Kaikeyi is Dasharatha’s joy-wife, a warrior’s daughter, a woman who has loved Rama as her own son. This is the night before Rama’s coronation.

* * *

Manthara

I saw it from the window before anyone thought to tell her.

The streets were being decorated. Flowers, oil lamps, fresh fabric on the railings, the kind of preparation that only happens when something large is coming. I had lived in this palace long enough to know what each kind of celebration looked like. I knew a wedding preparation from a festival preparation from a military victory. What I was seeing from that window was none of those. This was a coronation.

I called a servant over and asked. She told me, bright-faced, clearly expecting me to share her excitement. Rama. Tomorrow morning. The king has decided. Rama becomes crown prince at dawn.

I stood at the window for a long time after she left.

I had spent my entire life in service to Kaikeyi. I had carried her as a child, combed her hair, dried her tears, stood beside her when she left her father’s kingdom to marry a man she did not yet know, watched her become a wife and a queen and a mother. Everything I had done for forty years had been done for her. Not for the palace or Dasharatha. For her.

And I was standing at a window watching the city prepare to celebrate the moment her son lost everything.

Bharata was not in Ayodhya. He was at his grandfather’s kingdom, away, convenient, uninvited to this decision that would end his claim before he even knew there was one to lose. Kaikeyi was asleep, unaware, her door not yet knocked upon, her morning not yet arrived. In a few hours she would wake up and the world would tell her that the future she had imagined for her son had been quietly closed.

I did not go to hurt her. I went because I loved her, because I had always loved her. Because I was the only person in that palace who was going to tell her the truth of what this meant, and if I did not tell her, no one would, and she would wake up smiling and by the time she understood what had happened it would be too late.

I went to her chamber. I woke her. I began to talk.

* * *

Kaikeyi

Manthara was by my bed and I knew before she spoke that something was wrong.

I have a warrior’s body. My father gave me to a warrior’s court and trained me with his own sons. I can read a face in low light. I can tell from the set of someone’s shoulders whether they bring good news or bad. Manthara’s face in the oil lamp was wrong. Her shoulders were wrong. The hand she held against her chest was trembling.

I sat up. I said, what.

She told me. The streets being decorated. Rama. Tomorrow. The king has decided. Dawn.

I laughed.

It was an honest laugh. Rama was my son. Not by birth but by something that had always felt more chosen than birth. He had come to my chambers in the mornings for most of his childhood. He had slept in my lap when Kaushalya was tired. He had asked me questions in the evenings when his own mother was occupied with queen mother duties. I loved him completely. I told Manthara she was being foolish. I told her this was the best thing that could happen to our family. I was going to celebrate in the morning like everyone else.

Manthara said yes, but.

She said yes, but what about Bharata. What happens to your son when Rama’s son is born. What happens to your grandchildren born into a court where Rama’s grandchildren are the royal ones. What happens to you when Kaushalya becomes the queen mother.

I said I did not care about these things. I was the daughter of a king. I had not come here for rank.

Manthara said yes, and.

She had been serving me for forty years. She knew how to wait.

She kept talking. Not loudly. Slowly. Returning to the same three or four things. Bharata’s future. His children. The people I loved most being diminished by changes that would seem natural on the surface. She did not say Rama was bad. She never said Rama was bad. She said only that the coronation was coming and certain things would follow and those things would cost me. She described them in detail. The rooms I would no longer enter without announcement. The decisions I would no longer be consulted on. The slow narrowing of a queen’s space inside a palace where a new queen had arrived.

I know threat. I held a chariot axle once through an entire battle because if I had let go my husband would have died. The body that did that is the body I was in that night. It knows before I know.

Somewhere in the hours before dawn it began to know.

Not from Rama. Manthara had been careful. Never from Rama. From the shape of what was coming, which was not Rama’s fault and not anyone’s fault exactly, but which would, if I did nothing, take from my son and from me everything we had been given.

I remembered the two boons.

Dasharatha had given them to me years ago, weeping, on a night after a battle, his hand in mine, unable to stop saying he had almost lost me. Two wishes. For anything. At any time. Name them when you want them. I had smiled and told him I would save them. I had meant it. I had not thought about them in years.

Manthara had not mentioned them. Not once.

I turned to her. I said, the boons.

She looked at me. She nodded.

She had been waiting for me to remember.

I understood this immediately. I am not a stupid woman. Manthara had walked into this room knowing the boons existed. She had never spoken their name. She had only described, hour after hour, the exact shape of a problem that only they could solve. She had let me arrive at them. So that when I used them I would believe I had been the one who thought of them.

I should have been angry.

What I felt instead was relief. The boons were real. They had always been real. And the shape of what was coming, which my body had been reading as threat since the second hour of this conversation, could be stopped by them. I did not have to let the future Manthara had described unfold.

I could end it tonight.

* * *

Dasharatha loved Kaikeyi the way a man loves the person who makes him feel most alive. Not more than his other queens, but differently. Kaushalya was his dignity. Sumitra was his steadiness. Kaikeyi was his joy. The one who could make him laugh. The one who argued with him and meant it.

Manthara did not arrive with a plan fully formed. What she had was genuine alarm on Kaikeyi’s behalf and a lifetime of devotion that had made her alert to any threat to the woman she served. She was not wrong about the facts. When Rama became king, Kaushalya would become the queen mother. Kaikeyi’s position would shift. Bharata’s prospects would narrow. These were real things. What Manthara did was take real things and work them until they became the only things.

Sustained manipulation does not overpower you in one moment. It works slowly, over hours, finding the gap between what you know to be true and what you fear might be true, and it widens that gap patiently until the fear is louder than the knowledge. By the time Kaikeyi’s resistance softened, she was not lying to herself. She was exhausted. She was frightened. She was inside a story Manthara had been building around her all night, and the story felt true because it was made of real things.

She loved Rama. That love was real. And she destroyed his life. That is also real. The Ramayana does not ask us to choose which one is true. It holds both.

We all have a Manthara. Sometimes it is a person who has loved us for so long that we cannot see when their love has curdled into something that serves them more than it serves us. Sometimes it is a voice inside our own head that knows exactly where our tender places are and returns to them in the dark hours when our defenses are lowest. Sometimes it is a feed that has studied us long enough to know which fears to activate and keeps activating them until we cannot remember what we thought before we started scrolling.

The question the Ramayana asks about Kaikeyi is not whether she did a terrible thing. She did. The question is whether she was fully herself when she did it. And the story’s honest answer is that she was not.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the sixteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Sita, age twenty-one

Sita and Rama married soon after the bow broke. She left Mithila for Ayodhya. Four years have passed. This is one morning.

* * *

He wakes before me and I pretend to be asleep. I like to watch him in the first few minutes of the day before he is aware of being watched. There is a version of a person that exists only in that window between waking and the day beginning, before the role settles back into place, before anyone is performing anything. Rama in those minutes is completely himself. He sits on the edge of the bed. He is still for a moment, in the way he is still, which is not the stillness of someone gathering himself but the stillness of someone who is already gathered. Then he rises. He moves to the window. He looks at the sky.

He does this every morning. He has done it every morning for four years. I have watched him do it from beneath closed eyelids on more mornings than I can count and I have never stopped finding it worth watching.

After a while he turns and looks at me and I am always already watching by then and we look at each other and neither of us says anything and something passes between us that has no need of words. This is also every morning. This is also something I have not stopped finding extraordinary.

I grew up in my father’s household understanding that the ordinary is where the sacred lives. My father was a jivanmukta who plowed his own fields and walked through his palace focused on a flame. He taught me, not in words but in the example of his entire life, that nothing is too small to be present for. That the morning, this morning, this quality of light through this window, is worth the full weight of your attention.

I have tried to live this way in Ayodhya. I think I am mostly succeeding.

The palace here is nothing like Mithila. It is larger, louder, more alive with the energy of a kingdom at its height. There are more people in more rooms with more business to conduct and more relationships to navigate. I had to learn it the way you learn a new language, not by translating it but by living inside it until it becomes natural. Four years in, it is natural.

I know the names of every servant in our quarters and the names of their children. I know which of the palace cooks makes the rice the way Rama prefers it and which of the gardeners tends the section of the garden he walks through in the evenings. I know the sound the palace makes at different hours of the day and I can tell from that sound alone what time it is and what is happening in which part of the building.

Last week one of the kitchen women’s youngest had a fever. I brought her broth and sat with her for an hour. The child’s name is Tila. She is four. She fell asleep against my shoulder. I walked back to our quarters in the dark with the smell of kitchen smoke still in my hair.

I know Rama.

I knew him in some essential way the moment I saw him in the swayamvar hall. What the years have given me is the texture of that knowing. The way he holds his shoulders when something is troubling him that he has not yet put into words. His silence when he is working through something difficult versus when he is simply content. The way he asks questions, never to collect information but always to understand. The way he listens, which is still the most complete listening I have ever experienced from any person.

I have thought about this listening often. My father listened the same way. Complete attention, every time, to whoever was in front of him. I grew up thinking this was normal. Coming to Ayodhya I understood it was not. Most people listen with a part of themselves while another part is elsewhere. Rama is present. Every time. To everyone. And being entirely present to is one of the rarest gifts one person can give another.

He is in the garden now. I can hear him speaking with Lakshmana, the cadence of their conversation, which has a rhythm I could identify in the dark. I finish my morning prayers and I stand at the window for a moment looking at the Sarayu in the distance, the river that has been the sound of Ayodhya my entire time here, the constant underneath everything else.

I think, I am happy.

I am not surprised by this life anymore. I am grateful for it in the way you are grateful for something you understand completely.

My father taught me that nothing is permanent. Everything present deserves full attention. I have not forgotten this. I give this life my full attention. Every morning, every small thing. The way he looks at the sky. The sound of his conversation with his brother in the garden below.

I do not know what is coming. None of us do.

I only know that this morning exists and I am in it and it is enough.

* * *

Valmiki gives us almost nothing of these years. He moves quickly from the marriage to the exile. What he cared about was what happiness costs when it is taken. You cannot feel the cost without first feeling the thing itself.

There is one word the tradition reaches for. Ananya. Having no other. Total orientation toward one thing. The way a compass has no other direction but north.

Sita did not construct her happiness. She received what was there and gave it her full attention. The morning. The window. The sound of his voice in the garden below. She wasn’t managing anything. She was just there.

If Sita lived today, what would she be doing? She would have total ananya toward the Supreme Soul. Not a human being but the Supreme Source. That is where her happiness would have come from. When we have ananya toward the purest being there is, that happiness is unbreakable. We cannot get exiled when our source is God. That is what freedom is.

She had watched her father carry a flame through his entire palace without being seized by any of it. She knew, not as a concept but as a lived reality, how to move through a day that way. Not distance from life. Full presence in it.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the fifteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Sita, age sixteen

Sita is sixteen. Her father has set a condition for her marriage. Only the man who can lift and string the bow of Shiva may have her. This is the day the hall filled with kings who had come to try.

* * *

The first king arrived at the bow before the morning was fully light.

I had been seated since before dawn, in the place prepared for me in the swayamvar hall. The hall was large enough to hold the assembled kings of a dozen kingdoms and their retinues, and it was full. I had never seen so many powerful men in one place. Warriors whose names I had grown up hearing. Kings whose lineages stretched back further than anyone could trace. All of them here for the same purpose. All of them here for the bow.

And, I understood, for me.

My father had given me this. Not every daughter of a king got to choose her own husband. He had set the condition of the bow because he knew what I was. He had not made my choice easier. He had made it true. He had ensured that the man I chose would not be merely powerful or merely ambitious or merely willing. He would have to be something the bow recognized. I had thanked him when he told me how it would be done. I thanked him again now, silently, watching the hall fill.

The first king was enormous. Broad across the shoulders, with the bearing of someone who has never doubted his own physical capacity. He walked to the bow with confidence. He wrapped both hands around it. He pulled.

Nothing moved.

He tried again. His face changed. The confidence became effort and then something closer to alarm. He stepped back. He looked at the bow as if it had done something unexpected to him. He returned to his seat.

The hall reacted. A ripple of talk. A moment where every retinue turned to each other. Then it settled again and the next king rose.

The next king came. Also powerful. Also certain. Also unable to move it.

This continued through the morning and into the afternoon. King after king. Some of them famous across the known world for their strength and their skill. Some managed to lift one end slightly before it crashed back down. Some could not move it at all. Some tried multiple times before accepting what the bow was telling them.

I watched all of it. This is what my father had taught me. When a thing is unfolding in front of you, you give it your attention. I watched each king. I watched his approach. I watched the moment the bow told him no. I watched him return to his seat.

My father would not have set this condition without believing someone could meet it. But the day was moving. And no one had.

I watched another king approach the bow and I understood something I had been trying not to understand. The day might end. I might return to my chambers exactly as I had left them.

And then I saw him.

He came in with Vishwamitra. Beside the sage was a young man.

He did not carry what the other kings had carried. No performance of power. He walked the way a person walks when he is thinking about something other than himself.

He was sixteen. I saw this before I saw his face. Younger than anyone who had come to the bow all day. The contrast was striking, this boy among all these men, this lightness among all this weight.

And then he looked at me.

He looked at me the way people look at something they recognize. With the attention of someone who has just found what they were looking for without knowing they were looking.

I looked back.

Something in me that had been waiting through the long day went still. This was the stillness of arrival.

Vishwamitra guided him toward the bow. He walked to it. He stood before it for a moment. And then he looked at me once more, briefly, as if checking something, or perhaps as if offering something, and then he turned back to the bow and reached for it.

I had watched men strain against that bow all day. I had watched the effort of it, the physical struggle, the will applied against an immovable object.

Rama did not strain.

He lifted the bow the way you lift something when you and the thing you are lifting are in agreement. Not force against resistance. A conversation. He strung it. And then he drew it to full tension.

The sound when it broke was not what I expected. I had imagined something violent. What I heard was more like a resolution. A long tension finally releasing. The bow had been waiting, in its own way, the same way I had been waiting. And when the right hands found it, it gave everything it had.

The hall erupted. I could hear voices, movement, the reaction of hundreds of people to something extraordinary. I was not aware of any of it.

I was looking at him.

He had turned back to me. The bow was broken in his hands and he was looking at me with that same recognition, unchanged by what had just happened, as if the breaking of the bow was simply the confirmation of something that had already been decided before either of us walked into this hall.

I rose. I walked toward him. In my hands I carried the garland of flowers. I had been holding it all day without thinking about what it would mean to place it around someone’s neck.

Now I knew.

I placed it around his neck.

He was sixteen. I was sixteen. We were standing in the middle of a hall full of the most powerful men in the known world and none of them were in the room with us.

* * *

A swayamvar was one of the forms of marriage recognized in the ancient world. Svayam means self. Vara means choice. A woman of high birth, given the right to choose her own husband from among assembled suitors. In a world where most marriages were arranged by families for political or economic reasons, this was an act of radical trust in a daughter’s own discernment.

Janaka knew what she was. The condition was not to narrow her choice. It was to ensure that whoever she chose could carry what she was.

Every king who failed at that bow failed for the same reason. Not only because of physical limitation, but because each of them approached it wanting the room to witness what they could do. Arrogance is the desire for recognition. That desire, however small, however unconscious, is a weight the bow could feel. It is the oldest weight there is. The need to be seen performing rather than simply acting.

Rama walked up without that weight. No audience in his mind, no performance. Just the act itself.

Valmiki describes Sita looking at Rama when he enters the hall with the word nirikshamana. Gazing intently. Not glancing. Seeing. What she feels is harsha. The same quality of joy her father felt when he found her in the field.

There is a teaching I return to often. There are three stages of inner knowing. The first is knowing. The second is believing. The third is recognition. Knowing and believing both live in the intellect. Recognition is different. It arrives in the whole self at once, before the intellect has processed anything. That is what Valmiki is naming with those two words. Not attraction or admiration. The third thing.

I have experienced this twice in my life in a way I can point to. The first time I saw Dadi Janki, the great teacher in my tradition, something in me went still before my mind had processed anything. The second time was in the presence of what our tradition calls Avyakt BapDada, communication that continued through a medium from our founder Brahma Baba long after he had left his body. The founder died in 1969. The communication continued until 2017. Sitting in that presence, the same thing happened. Not new. Already known.

And Rama, before he touched the bow, glanced at her. Just once. As if she was the reason. Or the witness. Or both.

Whatever comes next will be considerable.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the fourteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Janaka, King of Mithila

Janaka has found what he was looking for. This is a morning some time after, when the ground under his feet gave him something he had not prepared for.

* * *

I had been plowing since early morning.

This was not ceremony. I know some kings plow a symbolic furrow at the start of the agricultural season, touching the earth with gilded tools and calling it communion with the land. I am not that kind of king. The people of Mithila grow rice and barley and mustard and sugarcane in soil that I govern. I believe a king who governs agricultural land should understand that land from the inside. The weight of the plow. The resistance of the earth. What it takes to open a field.

I had been thinking, as I walked behind the oxen, about what Ashtavakra had said. About being a trustee. The field I was plowing was mine in the sense that I governed it. It was not mine in the sense that anything is truly mine. I was passing through. The field would outlast me the way it had outlasted every king before me. My job was to tend it and return it in better condition than I found it.

There was peace in this work. My hands on the plow, my feet in the earth, the oxen moving at their own steady pace. Nothing was required of me except presence. No court, no petitioners, no decisions about taxes or borders or disputes between ministers. Just the field and the furrow and the morning.

Then the plow struck something.

Not a stone. I have struck stones before and know what that feels like, the hard sudden stop and the jolt through the handle. This was different. Something gave slightly and then stopped. The oxen slowed. I told them to halt and I came around to look.

I began to clear the earth away with my hands.

I do not know how long I knelt there. I was not thinking. I was simply uncovering, carefully, whatever was there. And what emerged from the earth, slowly, as I cleared it, was a child.

A girl. Small and perfect. Eyes still closed the way someone who has just arrived somewhere and has not yet decided to open them. She was lying in the furrow the plow had made, as if she had been placed there by something that knew the plow was coming. As if the earth had been keeping her until I arrived.

I lifted her with both hands.

And something happened in me that I had not expected. I am a man who has learned to hold everything as a trustee. I am a man who walked through his entire palace focused on a candle and felt no pull from the treasures. I am a man who, in a courtyard with one foot in the stirrup and one on the ground, understood liberation.

I held this child and felt something I had not felt in years. Love. Immediate, complete, overwhelming love. The kind that does not ask permission and does not wait for understanding and does not calculate anything. It simply arrived the moment she was in my arms.

She opened her eyes.

She looked at me the way certain souls look at you when they already know who you are.

I thought, you are mine. And then I thought, no. I am a trustee. And then I thought, that is exactly right. She has been entrusted to me. The earth, which holds everything in trust for a time and then returns it, has given me this child the way it gives a field its harvest. Not for me to own. For me to tend.

I carried her home. My queen saw my face when I came through the gate and asked no questions. She simply opened her arms.

We named her Sita, for the furrow the plow made. Because that is where she came from. Because she is not of the sky or of the palace or of any human lineage. She is of the earth. She rose from it the way everything worth having rises from it. Slowly, with patience, in the right season, when the right person comes to tend the field.

* * *

Sita did not come from a womb. She came from the earth.

Valmiki could have given her an ordinary birth. He chose not to. She came from the earth the way a seed comes from the earth. Already complete. Already carrying everything she would need.

This is not only Sita’s story. It is the story of every soul. We are intrinsically pure and peaceful. We arrive whole, carrying everything we could ever need. What we call the spiritual journey is not the acquisition of something new. It is the return to what was already there before the world covered it.

The right person to find her was a man who had walked through his entire palace without being moved by any of it. Who thought he understood what love was and what detachment was and what it meant to hold without grasping.

He did not know what he was until he lifted her.

I have heard it said many times that a realized state means the absence of attachment, that a free soul feels less. What Janaka’s moment in that field shows is something different. The love that arrived when he held her was not smaller than ordinary love. It was larger. Immediate, without calculation, without the managing and measuring that attachment produces. He did not hold her and wonder what she would cost him. He simply received what the earth gave him.

This is what the trustee state actually produces. Not the removal of love. The purification of it. When the grasping is gone, love arrives without obstruction.

This is the world that produced Sita. She came complete. She found a man ready to receive something complete without trying to possess it.

That is why she would survive everything that came for her.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the thirteenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Janaka, King of Mithila and Sita’s father

Janaka is the king of Mithila and the father of Sita, whom Rama will meet soon. Before Sita’s story begins, this is her father’s. A long search, and the moment it ended.

* * *

The scholar was speaking about liberation again.

He was a learned man. I do not say this dismissively. He had spent decades with the texts. He could recite entire Upanishads without pause. He could trace every argument through its lineage, tell you who had said what to whom across generations of the tradition, identify the precise point where one interpretation diverged from another. His knowledge was real. I had tested it many times over the years and it held.

And yet.

There was something in the way he spoke about liberation that was slightly off in a way I could not quite name. Not wrong exactly. The words were correct. The framework was impeccable. But there was the delivery, a faint distance between the speaker and the thing being spoken about, that I had come to recognize over years of sitting in rooms like this one. He was describing what he had read about. Not what he had arrived at.

I had announced to my whole kingdom that I would learn from anyone who could give me a practical method for attaining jivanmukti, liberation in life. Not liberation by leaving the world. Liberation while remaining in it. They came from every direction. Scholars, priests, sages, teachers of every lineage. I listened to all of them. I asked questions. I tested what they offered against my own experience and my own practice.

Most of what they gave me was correct as knowledge. None of it landed as lived truth.

I had been seeking for so long that I had begun to wonder whether what I was looking for was something that could be given at all, or whether I had simply not yet found the person who had actually been where I was trying to go.

My horse had been brought to the courtyard. I was preparing to ride after the morning’s session, one foot already in the stirrup, one still on the ground, half mounted and half not, waiting for the scholar to finish what he was saying.

That was when a young man entered the courtyard.

His body was bent in eight places. He moved slowly, almost crawling, making his way toward the gathered sages with an unhurriedness that had nothing to do with his physical limitation. Several of the scholars laughed openly. The laughter of people who have decided what something is before they have looked at it properly.

I did not laugh. I watched his face.

And I felt something I had not felt in all the years of sitting in rooms full of learned men. Recognition. Not of who he was. Of what he was. The demeanor of a person who is not holding anything back and not protecting anything and not needing the room to receive them a certain way. He was simply there. Completely. The way Videha itself, whose name means beyond the body, was named for the state I had been trying to reach for decades.

He looked at the laughing scholars. Then he laughed too. But his laughter was not a response to theirs. It was the laughter of someone who had just seen something funny that the people laughing with him had missed.

He said, I had heard that the king of Videha surrounded himself with wise men. I came expecting those who had gone beyond the surface of things. Instead I find cobblers who can only judge leather.

The courtyard was very quiet.

I was still half mounted on my horse. One foot in the stirrup. One foot on the ground.

He looked at me and asked, oh King, where are you?

The question landed in a way that no philosophical argument had ever landed. Not as a riddle but as a real inquiry. Where was I? I looked at my position on the horse, one foot here and one foot there, neither fully mounted nor fully on the ground, and I answered him honestly.

I am on the horse and on the ground, I said. But not fully on either.

He said, what you have just described is the entire teaching. A conqueror of attachment lives in the world but is not of the world. Present in it. Not trapped by it. In it the way you are in it right now, with one foot in each place, belonging completely to neither.

Something released in me.

The scholars would have expected thunder, or light, or some visible change in my appearance. There was nothing like that. It was quiet. The way a knot releases when you finally find the right place to press.

I had been holding something tightly for a very long time without knowing I was holding it. And in the space of that exchange, standing half-mounted on a horse in my own courtyard, I stopped holding it.

I asked everyone except Ashtavakra to leave.

He taught me through the night and into the following days. Not lectures but exchanges. His teaching left no room for passive receiving. Each thing he said required something from me, a meeting rather than an absorption.

At one point he gave me an instruction that I have never forgotten.

He asked me to take a lit candle and walk through the entire palace without letting it go out. Every room. Every corridor. Every chamber and courtyard and garden. The candle was not to flicker and not to die. And when I had completed the walk I was to come back and tell him what I had seen.

I did it. It took hours. I walked through the palace I had lived in for my entire life, through rooms full of treasures I had accumulated over decades, past art and jewels and silks and everything that constituted the wealth and beauty of Videha, and I focused entirely on the flame.

When I returned Ashtavakra asked me what I had seen.

I said, nothing. I was so focused on keeping the candle alive that the palace simply became the space I was moving through. I did not see the treasures. I did not see the rooms. I was aware of them the way you are aware of the road when you are carrying something precious. They were there. They did not reach me.

He said, that is how you live now. That focused. That present. That undistracted by what surrounds you. You are the trustee of all of it. The custodian. The one who keeps the flame alive and passes through the palace without being possessed by it. None of it is yours. You hold it in trust for a time and then you pass on and someone else holds it. The flame is what matters. Everything else is the palace you walk through.

I stood in my palace holding an extinguished candle and knew that I had arrived at the thing I had been looking for.

Not because something had been added to me. Because I finally saw what I had always been. The witness. The one in whose presence the world arises and passes. The trustee who holds without possessing. The soul that is in the world and not of it, one foot in the stirrup and one on the ground, belonging completely to neither.

* * *

Janaka is one of the most important figures in the Ramayana and one of the most overlooked. He appears as Sita’s father, sets the impossible condition for her marriage, watches Rama lift the bow, and fades into the background.

But who he was is essential to understanding who Sita was. You do not get Sita without Janaka. The woman who would survive Lanka, walk into fire to prove her innocence, be exiled while pregnant, give birth in a forest ashram, raise her sons alone and never once lose herself. That woman came from a household where the king was a jivanmukta, a person liberated in life. Where liberation in life was not a concept discussed in the court. It was the reality the king lived from.

I have sat in versions of Janaka’s court for thirty-two years. The room full of learned men speaking correctly about something they have not experienced. I recognize it completely.

Everyone is a teacher now. One retreat, one awakening experience, one video on enlightenment and the channel is created and the followers accumulate. The experience may be real. But an experience of the truth and a stable establishment in the truth are not the same thing. Janaka’s scholars had knowledge. They did not have experience. None of it had become the ground they lived from.

And then there are the others. The ones who never arrived at all and built an entire architecture of performance around the claim that they had. The gurus whose behavior reveals everything about where they actually live. The sexual deviation, the financial manipulation, the rage when questioned. This is not the behavior of a free person. This is the behavior of someone protecting an image they cannot afford to have examined.

Ashtavakra walked into that court bent in eight places and laughed at the people laughing at him. Not with bitterness but with real amusement. When you have nothing to protect, what other people think of your body is simply not important information.

Janaka found what he was looking for standing half-mounted on a horse in his own courtyard. The whole teaching arrived in the honest answer to a simple question. Not in a decade of study. In that.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the twelfth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Rama, age sixteen, crown prince of Ayodhya

Rama is sixteen. He has just left Ayodhya with Lakshmana and Vishwamitra. This is their first night in the forest.

* * *

The forest at night is not what I expected.

I had read about it. I had been taught about it. Vasishtha had described the nature of the forest with the precision of someone who had spent years inside one, its layers of sound, its different quality of darkness, the way it has its own logic that is not the logic of the palace or the city or the training ground. I had understood this as information. Walking into it was something else entirely.

The air was different first. Thicker, somehow. Carrying more inside it. The smell of earth and water and things growing and things decaying, all at the same time, all without contradiction. In the palace everything was separated into its proper category. Here everything was present simultaneously and none of it apologized for the others.

Then the sounds. The palace at night had its own sounds and I knew all of them. This was different. Layered in a way I had not anticipated. Something moved in the canopy above me. Something else answered it from the far side of the tree line. Underneath all of it, water moving somewhere I could not see.

I was not afraid. Fear is something I understand. I have felt it in training when the stakes were real enough to produce it. What I felt in this forest was the alertness that comes when you are in a place where everything is alive and paying attention and you are part of the conversation whether you intended to be or not.

Lakshmana was beside me. He had simply appeared at my side when we left the palace, the way he always appeared. Vishwamitra had not objected. I think he had expected it.

The sage walked ahead of us with a steadiness that I recognized. It was the same steadiness Vasishtha had. The walk of someone who is not going anywhere in particular because they are already completely where they are. I had spent eleven years watching Vasishtha move through the palace with that quality. Seeing it here, in a forest at night, it looked completely natural. As if stillness was not a practice but a country, and certain people simply lived there.

I thought about what Vasishtha had said to my father before we left. I had not heard the words. I had seen my father’s face receive them. And I had understood, from his acceptance, that Vasishtha had told him something true and difficult and necessary. Something about me. Something that my father, who loved me completely, had not fully seen or had not wanted to see.

I did not know yet what it was. I thought that perhaps the forest would tell me.

Vishwamitra began teaching us that first night.

Not about the forest specifically. About everything. His teaching style was different from Vasishtha’s. Vasishtha taught from stillness. He waited for the question and then answered from a place so deep and so settled that the answer often felt less like information and more like something being uncovered that was already there. Vishwamitra taught from fire. He moved through knowledge the way he had moved through tapasya, with the intensity of someone who had burned for something and knew its cost.

He gave us weapons. Not the training weapons of the palace courtyard. Divine weapons, astras, each one with its own nature and its own invocation and its own consequences if misused. He taught us how to call them and how to release them and equally how to withdraw them, because a weapon you cannot withdraw is not a weapon. It is a catastrophe waiting for its moment.

I received each one with the same attention I had always given to learning. Not collecting them the way a person collects things to have them, but understanding them. There is a difference between knowing the name of a thing and knowing its nature. I wanted to know the nature. I asked questions until I did.

Vishwamitra watched me ask questions the way Vasishtha had watched me, with that expression that I had learned to recognize. Not the expression of a teacher pleased that a student is engaged. The expression of someone who has been looking for a thing for a long time and has finally found it exactly where they expected it to be.

I did not ask him about this expression. There are things you understand without asking and things that asking would diminish. This was the second kind.

On the second day, he told us about Tataka.

She had not always been what she was.

This was the first thing Vishwamitra told us. A warrior who goes into combat knowing only that his enemy is monstrous fights differently from a warrior who knows how the monster came to be. The first sees a thing to be destroyed. The second sees a story that has arrived at a terrible place.

Tataka had been a yakshini, a nature spirit of the forest. Powerful, beautiful, capable of taking many forms. She had loved her husband and her son completely. Something happened. A sage’s curse fell on the family. Her husband died. She went mad with grief. Rage was where the grief went when it had nowhere else. The rage transformed her. The body followed the interior. What she had become was a consequence of what she had suffered, and what she had suffered was real.

I sat with this for a long time after Vishwamitra finished speaking.

He told me she had to be destroyed. That she had become too dangerous, too consuming, that the forest around her had been made uninhabitable and the sages who performed their practices there had no peace. That the harm she was causing was real and ongoing and my dharma in this situation was clear.

I said, she is a woman.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, yes. And your dharma is still clear.

I did not argue. I was not performing. I needed to think.

Everything I had been taught said that the taking of a life required justification beyond capability. I was capable. That was not the question. The question was what the moment required.

I asked Vishwamitra three questions. About the harm she had caused. About whether there was another way. About what would happen if nothing was done.

He answered all three without impatience. He had spent most of his own life inside questions like these.

When the answers were complete I understood what was required. Not what I wanted. What was required.

I went into that part of the forest with Lakshmana beside me.

She announced herself before she appeared. The forest changed around her arrival the way the air changes before a storm. The sounds went still. The quality of the darkness shifted. Something enormous was moving toward us and it was not moving quietly because it had no reason to.

I had trained for this. Eleven years of preparation, the weapons Vishwamitra had given me, and something else that I did not have a name for but that Vasishtha had been building in me since I was five years old. A clarity about what I was and what I was here for. Not pride or courage in the chest-filling sense. Something quieter and more absolute. The knowledge of what this moment required and the willingness to meet it without anything unnecessary in between.

She was enormous. She was terrifying. Underneath what she had become, I could still see what she had been. The yakshini. The mother. The creature that had loved and been broken and turned outward onto everything around her.

I released the arrow.

Lakshmana stood beside me through all of it. He did not speak. Neither did I. Afterward, when the forest was quiet again, we walked back to Vishwamitra’s camp. The sage looked at us when we arrived and said nothing for a long moment.

Then he said, now the yajna can proceed.

I thought about Tataka that night as the fire burned and the sages began their ritual. About the grief that had started everything. About what it means when something that began in love arrives, through enough suffering and enough time and enough misdirected rage, at a place where it can only be met with force. About the distance between a mother who loved her son and the creature I had faced in the forest.

I thought about my own father’s face. The weight in it that I had been trying to understand since I was five years old.

Lakshmana sat beside me at the fire. He had not spoken since the clearing. He was not going to. He was simply there.

* * *

Rama asked three questions before he raised his bow. About the harm. About whether another way existed. About what would happen if nothing was done.

Capability was not the justification. He did not move until he understood what the moment required.

What he faced in that forest had begun as love. A mother. A son. A grief with no container. When grief has nowhere to go it moves outward. When it moves outward long enough it damages everything around it and the person inside it no longer feels like someone in grief. They feel like something else entirely. The original wound is still there, unchanged, underneath everything the wound has produced.

I have sat with people in that place. Where the grief has been running so long it no longer recognizes itself. What started as love for someone lost has become a fire that everyone nearby is learning to avoid. The person inside it is not evil. They are unreachable.

Tataka is the Ramayana’s first portrait of what happens when peacelessness is given enough time and enough isolation. Her story does not begin as a cautionary tale. It begins as a love story. That is the point.

Rama walked away from that clearing thinking. Not triumphant or at peace with what the moment had required. Thinking. About the distance between a mother who loved her son and the creature he had faced in the forest. About what that distance cost.

The question he asked at five years old is beginning to answer itself. Why does following dharma sometimes make the people who follow it sad? Because the right thing and the comfortable thing are not always the same.

A person who acts only when acting costs nothing is not acting from dharma. They are acting from convenience.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the eleventh chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Lakshmana, Rama’s brother, age sixteen

Lakshmana is Rama’s younger brother, born to Queen Sumitra. The four princes of Ayodhya have grown up together. Lakshmana and Rama in one orbit, Bharata and Shatrughna in another. This is the day that orbit was asked to leave the palace.

* * *

Where Rama was, I was.

This was true even when he did not know. There was a boy in our training who had a habit of speaking about Rama in a tone I did not like. Not disrespectful exactly, but familiar in a way that felt presumptuous. As if because he trained beside us every day he had earned the right to offer opinions about my brother’s decisions, my brother’s methods, my brother’s way of doing things. He had not earned this right. He had simply been present for long enough to mistake proximity for understanding.

One afternoon he said something. I do not remember the exact words. Something about how Rama held back because he did not have the stomach for what the work really required. This was said in the way people say things they have been thinking for a while and have finally decided to say out loud, testing the air to see if anyone agrees.

I set down my bow.

I told him what I thought of his opinion. I was not measured about things that mattered to me and I am not sure I wanted to be. I told him that what he was calling carefulness was precision, and that what he was calling a lack of fire was the ability to direct force exactly where it was needed without wasting any of it, and that he would understand the difference when he was good enough at something to see the distinction between control and restraint.

He did not say anything else.

I may have been harder on him than the moment required. I was not sorry.

Rama was at the far end of the range when this happened. He had heard none of it. When he walked back I said nothing about what had occurred. Rama did not need to know that someone had spoken about him carelessly and been corrected. He would not have wanted the correction in the first place. He would have found a way to see something redeemable in the boy’s opinion and addressed it gently and left the boy feeling better about himself than the situation merited.

That was Rama. That was not me.

* * *

I have been watching Rama for as long as I can remember.

What I noticed first, before I noticed anything else about him, was that he never said a thing that was not true. I do not mean he was careful with truth the way people are careful with it when they have learned that lying has consequences. Falsehood simply was not available to him. He never considered it. It never occurred to him. When he spoke, what came out was what was. Most people I had met did not live like this.

There was an afternoon at the range. An older boy from one of the visiting delegations was watching us shoot. Rama missed a mark, not by much. The older boy said something under his breath to the boy next to him. I did not catch the words. I caught the other boy’s face — the uncomfortable laugh that stopped too quickly. Rama had heard it. I knew because I had been watching his shoulder. A small tightening that lasted half a breath. Then nothing.

He picked up his next arrow. Placed it. Drew. Hit the mark clean. Then he looked across at the older boy, who had been standing alone at the edge of the range, and asked if he wanted to shoot with us.

The older boy did not know what to do with the invitation. He had come to the range expecting to be the older boy. Rama had not noticed that at all. Rama had seen a boy standing alone.

I stood there with the thing Rama had felt and let go of. He had not looked at me. He did not need to. I was the only one who knew he had felt it at all.

I could not do this. I have never been able to do this.

When I was delighted it showed. When I was troubled it showed. When someone disrespected Rama, my body showed it first. Then my voice. Usually in that order.

Rama found this useful and occasionally inconvenient.

He never asked me to be different. This was one of the things I was most grateful to him for, though I never said so directly. He understood that my fire on his behalf was not a flaw in need of correction. It was simply who I was.

Rama was preparing for something. Something larger than battle or governance or the ordinary demands of kingship. I could feel something was coming. I did not know what. Sometimes I caught Vasishtha watching Rama when he thought no one was looking. The watching told me I was right.

This was not a decision I made. It was the fact of how I moved through my days. Where Rama was, I was. Not because I was told to be. Because I could not imagine being anywhere else. If something was coming for him, it would arrive into my presence first. This seemed right to me.

* * *

We were at the training grounds when word came that a great sage had arrived at the palace.

The name reached us a moment later. Vishwamitra.

I had grown up hearing that name. Everyone in Ayodhya had. The king who had performed tapasya of such ferocity and such duration that the story still spoke of it as something unprecedented. The man who had gone to war with Vasishtha and lost everything and then spent what felt like a very long time burning himself into something the universe was forced to recognize. A brahmarishi earned through will rather than birth. There was no one alive whose spiritual authority was the equal of Vasishtha’s except Vishwamitra. And Vishwamitra was at the palace.

I looked at Rama.

Something had moved across his face when the name arrived. A kind of settling. As if a question he had been holding loosely had just found its shape.

I felt the hair on my arms rise.

We were summoned to the court.

Vishwamitra was not what I expected. I had imagined someone whose presence filled a room the way a fire fills a room, with heat and light and the sense that everything nearby might ignite. He was not that. He was present. The way Vasishtha was present. The way people are present who have burned away everything in them that is not essential.

He stated his request without preamble. He was performing a yajna, a sacred ritual, in the forest. Demons were disrupting it. He needed protection. He needed Rama.

Not an army. Not soldiers. Rama.

I watched my father’s face dissolve.

His panic made sense to me. Rama was sixteen. The crown prince. Dasharatha’s eldest and most beloved son. To send him into a forest with demons, with only a sage for company, went against every instinct a father possessed. I felt the panic too. Rama was my brother. The thought of him in danger was not a small thought.

But I also watched Vasishtha move to the edge of the room and speak quietly into my father’s ear. I could not hear the words. I only saw my father’s face as he received them. The panic in it gave way slowly, reluctantly, to something else. Acceptance. The particular kind that comes when the person you trust most tells you something you cannot argue with even though every part of you wants to.

I looked at Rama.

He was completely still. Present with what was happening the way he was present with everything. Fully and without resistance.

He looked back at me.

We did not speak. The important things between us had never required speech.

I knew that wherever he was going, I was going. I did not choose this. I had never needed to choose it.

* * *

Lakshmana is one of the most misread characters in the Ramayana.

The reading that won’t leave him alone is the loyal sidekick. The devoted younger brother who provides the fire Rama is too restrained to display. But Lakshmana understood himself differently. He was fulfilling his own dharma. The direction his dharma pointed happened to be toward Rama. A soul who has found the thing it is here to do and is doing it completely. Not subordination. Purpose.

Valmiki calls him Rama’s second self. Not his servant or his shadow. His other self. Two souls who together formed something neither was alone.

Lakshmana did not sample devotion. He did not take a little from here and a little from there, committing partially while keeping his options open. He gave everything to one direction and kept giving everything to that direction through the forest and the war and the fire and every impossible moment that followed.

People come to spiritual life the way they come to a buffet. A meditation retreat here, a yoga class there, a different teacher next month, a new practice the month after. All of it genuine in its own place. None of it producing the transformation they are looking for. Because transformation requires the one thing people are most reluctant to give. Total commitment to one path long enough for it to do something to them.

I have watched people come to our center for years, picking it up and putting it down, taking what feels good and leaving what feels difficult, and wondering why nothing changes. Depth requires a different kind of giving than most people have tried.

When Vishwamitra asked for Rama and Rama’s face settled into that stillness, Lakshmana’s choice was already made. A decision so old and so complete it had become simply the fact of who he was. The quiet, total, unglamorous fact of it. Present every day. The day does not have to be inspiring. The direction does not change.

In the forest that is coming, when everything becomes difficult in ways none of them could have anticipated, it will be Lakshmana who holds certain things together. His strength is part of it. The choosing is more. Having chosen completely, he never needed to choose again.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the tenth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Rama, age five

Rama is Dasharatha’s eldest son, born to Queen Kaushalya. He is five years old. This is one morning in the palace of Ayodhya, told in his own voice.

* * *

I woke before the birds.

It was still dark. I lay in my bed listening. The palace had its own sounds at that hour. A guard walking somewhere far away. The floorboards in the corridor making the small creaking noises they made. The Sarayu. I had never seen the river at night. I could hear it from my bed. I thought it must be very beautiful.

I got dressed by myself. I had been doing this since I was four. I liked being dressed before my attendants came in because then I had already started the day before anyone said I could.

The corridor outside was mostly dark. The lamps at the far end were lit and I could see a servant moving at the edge of the light. She was beginning the morning work. She saw me and bowed.

I bowed back.

She had been awake before me. She had lit those lamps. She had started the things that made the palace work, and the rest of us were still in bed. I wanted her to know I had seen her doing it.

I went to find Lakshmana.

He was already awake. He was sitting on the edge of his bed with the face he always had in the morning, which was the face of someone who had been waiting for something without knowing what. When he saw me at the door his face changed. It always changed when he saw me. I liked this about him.

Come, I said.

He came.

We went to the courtyard where we were allowed to play before lessons. The sky was turning the color I loved, the deep blue before the light came. The night flowers in the garden still had their smell. They would lose it by the middle of the morning. I knew this because I had checked many times. I knew the names of all the flowers in that garden. Vasishtha had told me that a prince who governs should know what the land produces and what it needs. I had decided that meant flowers too.

Lakshmana wanted to practice with the wooden swords. There was a turn of the wrist he kept getting wrong. It needed a kind of looseness in the arm. Lakshmana was strong. He was stronger than me for most things. This move needed loose instead of strong, and loose was harder for him. I could do it. We practiced it together until the garden was fully light.

Bharata came out into the courtyard rubbing his eyes. Shatrughna was behind him. Shatrughna was always behind Bharata. I liked this about them too.

We sat down together in the garden and ate what the kitchen had sent out. Rice. Fruit. The warm milk that came in vessels of beaten gold. Bharata told us about a dream he had had the night before. Something about an elephant and three merchants arguing about a mango. It was a long dream and most of it was funny. Lakshmana laughed so hard he spilled his milk. Shatrughna cleaned it up without Bharata asking.

I watched them.

I watched them a lot. I watched everything. Whatever was in front of me, I paid attention to it. That was just how I was.

The feeling came while I was watching them. A warm feeling that was also a little bit sore. I did not know why it was sore. I had it a lot lately.

I sat with it and ate my rice.

We walked to the pavilion where Vasishtha taught us. It was in the gardens, a building made for lessons the way a building for lessons should be made. Stone pillars on the sides. A floor of polished white marble that stayed cool even in the hot part of the day. Silk hangings at the open sides that moved in the wind and let the light through in pieces. In the middle were cushions in a circle so everyone faced everyone. I liked this about the pavilion. There was no back of the room.

On the way we passed the place where the horses were exercised. There was a grey horse there that the stable master said was too difficult to ride. He said the grey horse got spooked by small things and that no one could handle him. I had been watching this horse for weeks. I did not think the stable master was right.

The grey horse was paying attention. That was all. He was paying attention to everything, because everything was interesting to him. No one had given him one interesting thing to look at, so he looked at everything, and then everyone thought he was spooked.

I stopped at the fence. The grey horse looked at me. I looked at him.

Lakshmana pulled my arm. He did not want us to be late.

We were not late. Vasishtha was already seated when we came in, the way he was always already seated, as if he had been sitting there for a long time and would be sitting there for a long time more. The other children were settling in. Sons of ministers and generals who came for the lessons too. I liked some of them. Some of them were harder to like. I tried to give all of them the same attention because that seemed like the right thing to do.

There was one boy who came in last the way he always did. He sat at the edge. He did not speak much. When he did speak he was usually right. I had told him so once, just said it out loud when it happened, and he had looked at me like he was surprised. I thought about him sometimes. I thought about what it was like to be right about things and have no one notice.

Vasishtha waited for everyone to be still.

Then he began.

He was teaching about dharma. He had been teaching about dharma for several days and I had been listening hard. I thought dharma was the most important thing I was going to learn. I did not want to miss any of it.

Dharma, Vasishtha said, is the law that holds everything in its right place. It is not a rule that somebody made. It is a truth that somebody found. Water flows downward because that is what water does with the earth. No one decided that. It is simply how they are with each other. Dharma is like that. When everything is in its right place, the world works. When something moves out of its right place, everything around it feels the disturbance.

I had been noticing the way things went together for as long as I could remember. The horses in the stable had an order among themselves. When the order got mixed up, all of them got restless. The servants in the palace had their rhythm, and if one of them was off, everyone else moved different. My brothers had a shape to the way they were with each other, and if the shape got bumped, even a little, we all felt it.

So dharma I already knew. I had just not had a word for it.

I looked at my father sometimes and there was a thing on his face. It came and went fast. He was not meaning to show it. It was the face he made when he was carrying something. Most people did not see it because it was only there for a moment at a time and then gone.

And my father was good. I knew this the way I knew the names of the flowers in the garden. It was a fact. He was good. He was fair. He kept his promises. I had never heard him say a single thing that was not true.

And still there was that thing on his face sometimes that looked like it was costing him.

I raised my hand.

Vasishtha looked at me.

I asked my question. I just asked it.

If dharma is how things are supposed to be, why does following it make people sad sometimes?

The pavilion went quiet. It was a bigger quiet than the usual quiet.

Vasishtha looked at me. It was a different look than he gave when I asked regular questions. That look was the look of someone already reaching for the answer. This one was slower. He looked at me the way I looked at the grey horse. Like he was taking his time with something he had not expected.

He was quiet long enough that one of the boys shifted on his cushion. Lakshmana went very still beside me. Lakshmana had a way of going still when something important was happening.

Then Vasishtha spoke. He said, that is the question that holds all the other questions inside it. He said, every soul that walks the path of dharma has to sit with this question, and what we are here to learn is the answer.

He did not answer it that morning. He said we would come back to it. He said some questions needed to be lived with before they could be answered, and this was one of them.

I walked home through the garden thinking about it. I stopped at the fence where the grey horse was. Someone had given him a new patch of grass at the far side of his pen. He was not looking up. He did not even see me.

I thought about my father’s face. About the thing on it that looked like weight.

I thought, I am going to find out why.

* * *

If dharma is the right relationship of all things, why does following it sometimes make the people who follow it sad?

Rama was five years old when he asked this.

He had been watching his father’s face for as long as he could remember. Not the public face but the other one, the expression that appeared briefly when Dasharatha thought no one was looking. Something weighted, something that looked like cost.

Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah. Dharma protects those who protect it. This is one of the deepest truths this tradition carries. But protection is not the same as ease. Following dharma and being comfortable while following it are not always the same thing. A man can do everything he is supposed to do and the doing of it can still cost him something. The right path sometimes runs through difficult terrain.

Rama had noticed this before he had words for it. Goodness has a price. Righteousness does not come free. And he was already asking why.

Vasishtha did not answer it that morning because it cannot be answered in a morning. It has to be lived. Rama would live the answer for the rest of his life. The exile. The war. The agnipariksha, the trial by fire. Every impossible choice he would be asked to make was the answer to the question he asked at five years old in a pavilion of marble and silk in the palace gardens of Ayodhya.

Vasishtha sat in that pavilion and looked at a five-year-old boy who had just asked the right question and understood that this child was going to live it completely.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the ninth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Kaushalya, Queen of Ayodhya and Rama’s mother

Kaushalya is the first wife of King Dasharatha and the mother of Rama. She had waited many years for a child. This is what she remembers of the beginning.

* * *

He was born in the middle of the night and I did not sleep again.

I could not stop looking at him. I had waited so long. There had been years, so many years, when I had understood in the part of myself I did not speak aloud that this might simply not happen. That the palace would stay the way it was. That Dasharatha would love me and I would love him and the kingdom would continue and there would be no child, and I would have to find a way to make peace with that.

And then the yajna. And then the sacred fire. And then the payasam, the sacred rice pudding, distributed to the three of us with such ceremony and such hope. And then the waiting again, a different kind of waiting, with something real inside it this time.

And then this. This child in my arms in the middle of the night.

I had thought it would feel like joy. It felt like recognition. As if I had always known this particular weight, this particular warmth, and had simply been waiting for it to arrive.

He looked at me. Not the way newborns look. Directly. As if he knew exactly where he was and had something to say about it that he was not yet equipped to say.

I held him closer. I thought, you are mine. You are finally here and you are mine.

* * *

The first years were a kind of grace I had not expected.

I had imagined motherhood many times during the years I was waiting for it. I had imagined what it would feel like to have a child in the palace, the sounds of it, the love I had read about in other women’s faces. What I had not imagined was this. The way a small child reorganizes the entire meaning of a room simply by being in it. The way Rama, even as an infant, produced in everyone around him an attention I had never seen a baby produce before.

He was a quiet child. Quiet in a way I had not seen in another baby. Not still, not withdrawn. He was there, and the being-there had a weight to it. He watched everything. His eyes moved through a room the way a person’s eyes move who is looking for something and expects to find it.

His brothers were born. Bharata to Kaikeyi, bright and beloved, with his mother’s directness and his father’s warmth. Lakshmana and Shatrughna to Sumitra, the twins who arrived together and seemed to remain together in some interior way even when physically apart. The palace became what it had not been before. Full. Loud with the noise that four boys make when they are finding the edges of the world.

And in the middle of all of that, Rama.

He loved his brothers completely and they loved him back with a devotion that was almost uncomfortable to witness because of its totality. Lakshmana especially. From the time he could walk, wherever Rama was, Lakshmana was. It had the quality of something already decided.

I watched all four of them and I felt the satisfaction of a woman who has been given more than she asked for. I had asked for a child. I had been given four sons.

His attention was the first thing I noticed. Most children listen selectively, with one ear on whatever they want to do next. Rama listened with all of himself. Whatever you brought him, he received it completely before he responded.

The servants loved him. Servants see everything and feel everything and they are rarely wrong about character because they have no reason to perform approval. The women who washed his clothes and the men who kept his rooms and the gardeners who tended the courtyard where he played, all of them would find reasons to be nearby when he was there. To be in the same space.

I began to watch him the way you watch something you love and also do not understand. When I called his name, he turned to me with his whole attention. Other children turned partway. He turned completely. The room settled around him when he came into it.

There was a night when Lakshmana was crying about something small. A broken toy. A game he had lost. I was walking to his room to comfort him and I heard Rama speaking to him first. The crying stopped. I stood in the doorway and I did not go in. My four-year-old had done what a mother does. I felt a small grief I did not have words for. Something had already begun that no one had told me was beginning.

When he was about five, he began sitting with Vasishtha.

Vasishtha had been the family’s guide for as long as anyone could remember. A brahmarishi of extraordinary standing, who moved through the palace with the unhurried certainty of a man who has seen more than most souls see in many lifetimes. He had agreed to teach the princes. And from the first session, something happened between him and Rama that I saw from across the courtyard without being able to hear a word of what was said.

Vasishtha paused.

The sage who had taught every question a young mind could produce paused. He sat with something Rama had just said. He looked at the child across from him, and there was an expression on his face I had never seen there before. A kind of recognition.

I did not know what Rama had asked. I only knew what I saw. The oldest and most learned man in our kingdom looking at my five-year-old son as if he had encountered something he had not expected to encounter so soon.

I stood in the courtyard and I felt something shift in me. A kind of opening.

He is not only mine, I thought. He has never been only mine.

* * *

Kaushalya is the queen the Ramayana treats with the most consistent dignity. She never makes a wrong choice. She never betrays anyone or says a cruel word or acts from anything other than love and righteousness.

And she loses everything anyway.

We are accustomed, in the stories we tell now, to the idea that goodness is rewarded and wrongdoing is punished. Kaushalya is the refutation of that. She loved her son with a completeness that left nothing out. She was a good queen, a faithful wife, a devoted mother. And none of it protected her from the grief of watching the person she loved most walk away from her toward a destiny she could not follow him into.

Sometimes the person you love most needs something your love, however complete, cannot provide. And the only thing left for you is to let them go and send everything you have after them.

I have been thinking about this since I came back from a funeral. A young woman, nineteen years old, had taken her own life. She had been surrounded by love, real love, from parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles who adored her. The room was full of the people who had loved her. Five hundred of them. And still. What she needed was not more love. It was peace. Whatever was happening inside her, the turmoil, the conflict, the peacelessness that must have been so loud it drowned out everything else, love could not reach it. Love stayed on the outside while she suffered somewhere it could not get to.

What she needed was a different kind of help. The kind that understands what peacelessness is from the inside and knows how to meet it. Those helpers exist. They were not in that room when she needed them.

I held her mother and kept saying the same words. Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. And I thought about Kaushalya.

She had everything a mother could offer. A kingdom. A lifetime of devotion. And what he needed was something else. Something larger than her. It would take him away from her eventually, she already felt this standing in that courtyard watching Vasishtha pause, even if she did not yet know its shape.

Kaushalya did not know yet what was coming. None of us do, when we are standing in the early years of something beautiful. She loved him anyway. The way you love something you know you are not keeping.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the eighth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Vishwamitra, king and seeker

* * *

I am a king who has never been refused.

I have wanted many things in my life. Kingdoms. Victories. The loyalty of my armies. The fear of my enemies. I have had all of these things and I have taken them seriously because a king who does not take what he possesses seriously does not possess it for long.

But when I saw her I understood what it meant to want something so completely that everything else rearranged itself into background.

She was standing at the edge of the stream near Vasishtha’s ashram. An unremarkable cow to look at. But she stood in a stillness I had never seen in any animal. The stillness of something that wanted nothing. Kamadhenu. The wish-fulfilling cow. She moved through that ashram the way abundance moves through a place that has made room for it.

I stood at the edge of the ashram and I felt something I had never felt before. It disorganized me. What I was feeling was the distance between what I was and what I wanted to be. And I did not know how to close that distance.

I am a king. I know how to close distances. You march toward them. You bring force. You bring resources. You bring the accumulated weight of everything you have built and you apply it to the problem until the problem gives way. This is what I know. This is what I am.

I went to Vasishtha and I asked for her. I offered him wealth that would have satisfied any other man. Thousands of cattle. Gold. Land. The resources of a great kingdom placed at the feet of a sage who lived in a simple ashram. It was, I thought, more than generous. It was, I was certain, more than enough.

He said no.

He was patient about it. He explained, with a gentleness that I found more enraging than anger would have been, that Kamadhenu was not something he could give. That she was present in his ashram because of what his ashram was. That you could not separate her from the conditions that allowed her to exist. That taking her would be like trying to take the light from a lamp by removing the lamp from its flame.

I did not believe him. I have spent my entire life not believing people who told me something could not be done.

I sent my armies.

What happened next I will not describe in detail. The description would miss the point. What matters is not what Vasishtha’s staff produced. What matters is what I understood when it was over.

My armies were gone. My sons were dead. Every son of mine, one hundred of them, who had come with me because they believed in what their father believed, which was that sufficient force applied with sufficient will produces sufficient result. They were wrong because I was wrong. And they paid for my wrongness with their lives.

I stood in the field where all of this had happened and I felt the ground under my feet and I looked at the ashram and I looked at Vasishtha standing exactly where he had been standing before any of it started, his staff in his hand, as unmoved as if nothing had occurred at all, and I understood, standing there, what I had never understood before.

There is a kind of force that my kind of force cannot touch.

I had spent my life believing that force was the answer to everything if you applied enough of it in the right direction. And I was standing in the ruins of my army and my sons and my certainty and I was looking at a man who had not moved and I understood that what he had was not a different quantity of the same thing I had. It was a different thing entirely. Something my armies had no framework for engaging. Something my wealth could not purchase. And therefore could not be overcome by opposition.

He had not even tried to defeat me. He had simply remained what he was.

I stood in that field for a long time.

And then something shifted in me. Something I did not have words for. I had been pushing against a door for a long time. When it opened inward, I fell through it. And on the other side of the falling there was only one thought.

I am going to become what he is.

Not by taking it. By becoming the kind of person in whose presence Kamadhenu could exist.

I did not know how long it would take. I did not know what it would cost. I turned away from the ashram and I sat down under a tree and I began.

The first years were the easiest. This surprises people when I say it but it is true. In the first years I still had my warrior’s discipline and my king’s will and the fresh memory of the field to drive me. I sat. I did not move. I focused my entire being on the burning away of everything that was not what I was trying to become. The heat of it was real. The tradition calls it tapasya for a reason. It is fire. It burns.

But fire is not simple. It does not only burn what you want it to burn. It burns everything it touches. And as the years passed, the things that began to burn were not the things I had expected.

My pride burned first. Good. I had known it was in the way. The pride of a great king who had never lost anything is a specific and heavy thing and it had been sitting on my chest for years without my knowing it was there. When it burned I felt lighter. I thought I was making progress.

Then my anger began to burn and that was harder. My anger had served me well. It had won me battles. It had made men afraid of me, which had kept them from doing things that would have required me to fight them. My anger was part of how I had survived and I was not certain who I was without it. When it burned I felt exposed. Raw. Like skin after a wound has healed but before it has toughened.

And then the failures began.

A woman came to the forest where I was sitting. She was extraordinary. Her beauty was the kind that moves through the body like sound moves through water. I will not say I did not know she had been sent to break my tapasya. I knew. And I broke anyway. The years of accumulated practice, the burning, the discipline, all of it set aside in a moment because something in me was still a king who took what he wanted.

I had to begin again.

There were other failures. A moment of rage so consuming that it undid years of practice in an instant. A confrontation where I used the powers I had accumulated through tapasya to curse a man who insulted me. I had the power. The realization behind it was not yet complete.

I had to begin again.

And again.

The years became decades. The decades accumulated past counting. The kings who had known me as a contemporary aged and died and were succeeded by their sons and their sons’ sons. The world I had come from when I first sat down was gone. I was no longer a king who was doing tapasya. I was a man for whom tapasya had become the only life he knew.

Something was happening in those years that I could not have described while it was happening. The burning was no longer mine. It was happening to me. The distinction matters. When you act, you are still the agent. You are still the king applying force in a direction. When it happens to you, the king has disappeared and what remains is the process.

I do not know when exactly I stopped being Vishwamitra the king who was performing tapasya and became something that the tapasya was producing. There was no moment. There was a long imperceptible becoming.

And then one day the gods came.

They told me I had earned the title of brahmarishi.

I sat with this for a long time. I felt the truth of it. I knew what I had become in a way that did not require external confirmation, the way you know when a fever has broken or when a wound has finally closed. There is an inner knowing that precedes and does not require the outer naming.

But there was one thing I needed that the gods could not give me.

I needed Vasishtha to say it.

I did not doubt what I had become. But he was the only witness whose word could complete the circle. He had been there at the beginning. He had stood in the ashram while my armies broke against his stillness. He had watched me leave with nothing. He was the only person alive who had seen me at my worst and could therefore be the only person whose recognition of what I had become meant what I needed it to mean.

I went to him.

We stood facing each other. Two men who had been enemies across more time than most stories last. I looked at him and I felt none of the rage that had once nearly consumed me when I saw his face. I felt something I had no previous experience of feeling toward this man.

I felt gratitude.

Because without him I would still be a king. A great king, perhaps. A king with armies and victories and wealth and all the apparatus of worldly power. But I would not be what I was standing there in that moment. His refusal had been the first thing in my life that my force could not overcome. And that refusal had been the beginning of everything.

He looked at me for a long time without speaking.

And then he embraced me.

You are a brahmarishi, he said. I recognize what you have become.

I stood there and I felt those words pass through me the way the first rain passes through dry earth. Every layer of me receiving what it had been waiting for without knowing it was waiting.

It was done.

* * *

Of all the things the story could have ended with, it ended with this.

Gratitude toward the person who refused you, toward the limit your force could not overcome. The one that turned out to be the door.

We do not have a good relationship with our limits. We treat them as problems to be solved or enemies to be defeated or evidence of our own inadequacy. We do not usually stand in front of them and feel grateful. But Vishwamitra, after everything, understood that Vasishtha’s refusal was the most important thing that ever happened to him. Not any victory or any kingdom. The refusal. The one thing his ordinary tools could not handle.

His story is not what we usually call an inspiration story. He did not try hard and succeed. He tried completely in the wrong direction first, catastrophically, and found the right way only by exhausting every wrong way available to him.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle of that. Still applying force to something that requires a completely different approach. Still certain that if we just push harder or smarter or longer, the door will open. The door opened for him when he stopped pushing.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the seventh chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

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Vasishtha, great sage

* * *

My sons were dead.

All one hundred of them. The battle had not lasted long. Vishwamitra had come with his armies and his weapons and his fury at having been refused what he wanted, and what came from my staff in response had consumed everything he sent against it. But in the course of that, in the collision of forces, my sons had been killed. Every one of them.

I sat in the ashram in the silence that followed and I held that.

I was not calm. Realization had not made the grief smaller. My sons were dead. The grief of that was complete. It did not leave space for anything else.

I did not act from inside it.

Vishwamitra was still alive. He was outside the ashram, standing in the ruins of his army, everything he had brought destroyed, every son of his own also dead, his certainty shattered. I could feel him there. I could feel it in him. The man who has just had the foundation of his understanding removed entirely. And I could feel, beneath my own grief, the absolute clarity of what I was able to do in that moment.

I was able to end him. Completely. The force was there. It had always been there. It simply waited, the way power waits, for the moment it was needed.

And I understood, sitting in the grief of my hundred dead sons, that this was not that moment.

Not because I forgave him. Not yet. I felt everything that had been done to me and to them. But because I understood something the grief could not change. The moment I used what I carried to destroy rather than to protect, I would become something other than what I was. And what I was mattered more to me than what I had lost. Even this. Even them.

I sat in the ashram. I let him leave.

And then I sat with my grief for as long as it needed.

* * *

Vasishtha is the only figure in the Ramayana who has everything and wants nothing.

The story is full of powerful figures. Sages of enormous realization, kings of extraordinary ability, warriors who could alter the course of worlds. Almost all of them want something. Recognition. Victory. The resolution of an old wound. Even the most realized figures in the story are in motion toward something.

Vasishtha is simply present. He was born a brahmarishi, the highest spiritual designation the story recognizes. He did not have to earn it in this lifetime through effort or years of burning away. He arrived with it. And he carried it with a lightness I find almost incomprehensible when I try to imagine it. No drama about what he was, no need for anyone to acknowledge it. Just the fact of it, worn as lightly as ordinary clothing.

That lightness is itself a kind of power. The person who has nothing to prove is the most difficult person in the world to manipulate, to threaten, to destabilize. Vishwamitra came with armies and the full force of a great king’s fury and Vasishtha met all of it with a staff and a stillness that did not waver. Because there was nothing in him that the attack could grip. Nothing that needed defending. Nothing that could be taken.

I have thought about what he did not do for a long time. Not the restraint itself but what it reveals about what Vasishtha understood about power.

Most people who possess great power and choose not to use it are holding something back. There is effort in it. The ongoing management of the impulse. I do not think that is what Vasishtha was doing. He simply knew what the moment required and what it did not. His dharma was clear to him. Not as a rule imposed from outside, but as a fact about what he was. The moment you use what you carry to destroy rather than to protect, you step outside yourself. You become something other than what you are.

He came to Ayodhya as the guide of the Ikshvaku dynasty carrying all of this. The ease of having arrived with what others give everything to reach. He was not there to perform rituals and bless occasions and make the king feel that the gods approved of his decisions. He was there to tell the truth. Even when the truth was not what the king wanted to hear. Even when the truth required the king to do something that caused him enormous pain.

Dasharatha trusted him completely and sometimes wished he did not. That is the mark of a real guide. The one who loves you enough to tell you what is true rather than what is comfortable.

Vasishtha’s power had no relationship to threat. It simply was, the way a mountain is, and when Vishwamitra’s armies came against it they encountered something they had no framework for understanding. You cannot threaten something that does not need to protect itself. The staff held not because it was stronger than the armies but because what stood behind it was outside the logic the armies were operating in.

Vasishtha lost his hundred sons. He did not lose himself.

* * *

Shireen Chada has practiced and taught Rajyoga meditation for thirty-two years. She directs a Brahma Kumaris center in the United States and writes at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern life.

This is the sixth chapter in a series on the Ramayana. A new chapter publishes every Thursday and Sunday. If this found you, share it with someone it might find too.

Subscribe now

Next Chapter

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