Five-minute digest
The Ramayana
Summary
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale. Book I tells how King Dasaratha of Ayodhya, long childless, holds a great sacrifice and is granted four sons: Rama by Queen Kausalya, Bharat by Kaikeyi, and the twins Lakshman and Satrughna by Sumitra. The gods, oppressed by Ravan, the ten-headed king of the Rakshases of Lanka, ask Vishnu to be born as a man to destroy him. The sage Visvamitra takes the boys Rama and Lakshman to guard his sacrifice, and at Mithila Rama bends and breaks the great bow of Siva and wins King Janak's daughter Sita. In Book II, on the eve of Rama's consecration as heir, the hunchbacked maid Manthara stirs Kaikeyi to claim two boons the king once promised her: Bharat's succession and Rama's exile to the forest for fourteen years. Rama accepts at once to keep his father's word; Sita insists on sharing his exile and Lakshman follows. Dasaratha dies of grief. Bharat, returning, refuses the throne, seeks Rama in the forest, and when Rama will not return carries home his brother's sandals, ruling in their name from the village of Nandigram. Book III follows the exiles through the Dandak forest. Ravan's sister Surpanakha is spurned and maimed by Lakshman; the demon Maricha, disguised as a golden deer, lures both brothers away, and Ravan carries Sita off through the air, killing the vulture-king Jatayus who tries to stop him. In Book IV Rama allies with Sugriva, the exiled king of the Vanars, kills his brother Bali, and sends search parties out. Book V belongs to Hanuman, Sugriva's minister, who leaps the sea to Lanka, finds Sita captive in the Asoka grove refusing Ravan, gives her Rama's ring, and sets the city ablaze with his burning tail. In Book VI Ravan's brother Vibhishan defects to Rama, the Vanar Nala builds a bridge across the ocean, and a long war follows; Hanuman carries a mountain of healing herbs from the Himalaya, and Rama finally kills Ravan. Sita proves her purity in a trial by fire, the couple return to Ayodhya in the aerial car Pushpak, and Rama is consecrated king. The library text is the verse translation by Ralph T. H. Griffith, principal of Benares College, published in five volumes in 1870-1874; it gives Books I-VI in rhymed octosyllabic couplets and summarizes the seventh book, the Uttarakanda, in a prose appendix.
Top Lessons
A promise kept at great cost
Rama gives up a kingdom on the morning of his consecration because his father's word, rashly given to Kaikeyi, must not be broken. When Bharat begs him to return, Rama answers that the moon and the ocean may change before he does. The epic treats faithfulness to one's given word as a pillar of the ordered world.
Faithfulness in marriage and family
Sita argues her way into exile, claiming that a wife's place is beside her husband, and as Ravan's captive she rejects wealth and threats alike. Lakshman and Bharat show the same loyalty as brothers. The poem holds up these bonds as the true wealth of a royal house.
Help from unexpected allies
Rama recovers Sita with the aid of a vulture, a race of forest Vanars and a defector from Ravan's own family. His vow to protect any suppliant, even one who might be Ravan himself, turns Vibhishan from an enemy's brother into a loyal friend.
Grief and the birth of poetry
The poem places its own origin in compassion: Valmiki, grieving for a curlew shot by a fowler, speaks in measured lines and finds he has made the sloka. Sorrow runs through the epic, from Dasaratha's death to Rama's laments for Sita, and the frame suggests that great poetry grows from pity.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“With equal lines of even feet, With rhythm and time and tone complete, The measured form of words I spoke In shock of grief be termed a śloke.”
“So would a thousand seasons flee Like one sweet day, if spent with thee.”
Frequently cited
“The moon his beauty may forgo, The cold forsake the Hills of Snow, And Ocean o’er his banks may sweep, But I my father’s word will keep.”
“Dream not that wealth and power can sway My heart from duty’s path to stray. Linked like the Day-God and his shine, I am my lord’s and he is mine.”
“The suppliant will I ne’er forsake, Nor my protecting aid refuse When one in name of friendship sues. Though faults and folly blot his fame, Pity and help he still may claim.”
“Then the great bridge of wondrous strength Was built, a hundred leagues in length.”
“Four plants, of sovereign powers possessed, Spring from the soil, and flashing there Shed radiance through the neighbouring air. One draws the shaft: one brings again The breath of life to warm the slain; One heals each wound; one gives anew To faded cheeks their wonted hue.”
Medical Lens
The Ramayana is not a medical text, but several episodes interest a historian of medicine and mind. Dasaratha's death is told as death from grief: after Rama leaves, the king recalls how he once killed a hermit's son by accident and was cursed to die mourning a son, and he sinks and dies in the night. The epic thus links remorse, a curse and bereavement in a single decline, which belongs to the poem's moral world rather than to any physiological account. In the war of Book VI the herbs of the Himalayan mountain draw out arrows, heal wounds and restore the dead and dying, a mythic picture of the healing plants prized in the Indian tradition later systematized in Ayurveda; it should be read as myth, not as evidence of battlefield practice. Kumbhakarna's monstrous sleep, from which he must be roused by force, and Bharat's ominous dream before he learns of his father's death, show the poem's use of sleep and dreams as signs. Retrospective medical readings of these scenes would be interpretive.
- Book II, Cantos LXIII-LXIV
Dasaratha tells Kausalya of the hermit's son he once shot by mistake and the parents' curse, then dies of grief for the exiled Rama.
- Book II, Canto LXIX (Bharat's Dream)
Bharat, far away in his grandfather's kingdom, is troubled by an evil dream on the night the messengers arrive.
- Book VI, Cantos LX-LXVII
Kumbhakarna, Ravan's giant brother, is roused with great effort from his long sleep to fight and is killed by Rama.
- Book VI, Canto LXXIV (The Medicinal Herbs)
Jambavan describes four healing plants on a Himalayan peak; Hanuman carries the whole mountaintop back and the wounded army revives.