RAMA - THE APOTHEOSIS OF HUMAN PERFECTION -2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, June 12, 2022. 06:00. AM.

Post-2.

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We have two Epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These two parallel movements of Epic stories, known as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, give us a complete picture of the process of the advancement of the human soul towards its Perfection. It is not to be taken as a surprise that the culture of Bharatavarsha is a culture of the Spirit, so that anything that is said and done or believed in, is directly or indirectly connected with the march of the Spirit to the recognition of its Perfection. We have no other culture here except the culture of the Spirit. A connecting of the visible phenomena with what underlies the phenomena, is the significance of the Epics. And these two master-strokes of genius given to us by Valmiki and Vyasa, in the form of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, give us the religion of India.

There were some over-enthusiastic orientalists in the West particularly, and sometimes in the East also, who began to believe that the culture of India is in the Vedas and the Upanishads. But, if we bestow a little thought on the actual situation, it will become clear that if the Vedas and the Upanishads were the sole basis of the culture of India, the Indian culture would have been wiped out like the cultures of Egypt, Greece or Rome. These cultures are only names to us now. They do not actually exist now. They vanished from the process of time on account of their inflexibility, their rigidity of character and their emphasis on a particular aspect of human life. If, as people often believe, the dicta of the Vedas and Upanishads alone were to be taken as the foundation of Indian culture, there would have been no Indian culture today. It would have gone to the winds, because what we have in the Vedas and the Upanishads are 'principles', like theorems of geometry or algebra, which are wonderful enough, which are the basis of all scientific approaches and discoveries. Nevertheless, they are principles, and the masses do not live on principles. When we talk or when we move about in the streets, we do not think of the principles behind speaking and walking. We work with the peculiar manifestation of our personality which is spontaneous in its nature. Principles somehow have the aroma of fixity and rigidity. They cannot be changed. But, emotion seeks a spontaneous expression of itself and this feature, this peculiarity of human nature was taken notice of by the sages of the Vedic times themselves.

In the Srimad-Bhagavata, one among the eighteen Puranas, at the very commencement itself, we are told that Vyasa felt the necessity of composing the Mahabharata and the Srimad-Bhagavata. And for a similar reason, was the Ramayana composed. We believe what we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we perceive with the other organs, and what we feel from our hearts. We are incapable of believing anything else. Pure principles, though they may be eternal facts, are incapable of evoking the emotion of man. Hence, even the elite and the intelligentia of mankind today think of God in the Epic parlance, and not in the Upanishadic parlance. When you and I think of God, we think of the Epic God only and not the Upanishadic God or Vedic God. The meaning is that we think of a humanised relationship between ourselves and the Creator. When we dehumanise the Creator or take Him above what the human mind is capable of conceiving, the relationship between man and God gets snapped, and the vast majority amongst us, excepting perhaps the very few spiritual heroes, fall down to a level lower than that of the human being. So the need was felt to bring home to the mind of man, that concept of Perfection and Divinity, which can be contained in the human mind, in the form of human perfection, animated by the force of that which is superhuman. Such was the personality of Sri Rama, the superhuman element infusing a personality of a human being. It is difficult to understand this peculiar blend, just as it is difficult to understand Masters, Sages and adepts in Yoga and even spiritual life. This is because they are a blend of what we see and what we cannot see. What we see is the form of their lives and what we cannot see is the essence, the meaning and the significance of what they live.

In the Ramayana, we have such a contradictory picture of the personality of Rama, presented by Valmiki, where we are asked sometimes to look upon him as the perfected man and sometimes as a Perfection of divinity itself manifest. It is in the Yuddha Kanda of Valmiki's Ramayana, (I am not talking of the Tulasidas Ramayana because that has a different approach altogether) for the first time, we have a proclamation divinity of Rama, where Mandodari in deep sorrow over the death of Ravana, her husband, exclaims that it is Narayana that has come as Nara which fact is unknown to Ravana and due to his ignorance, he has mistaken Rama for human being. The contradiction which Valmiki brings out is that while he puts these words in the mouth of Mandodari, he puts a different type of statement in the mouth of Rama himself. When the whole theme is over, the drama has been played, Brahma comes and speaks to Rama, "Thou art Lord Narayana, Thy play in this world is over, and we seek Thy entry back into Vaikuntha." And Rama says in reply: "What are you speaking? I do not know anything. Am I Narayana! I think I am only a man--Atmanam Manusham Manye. Whatever you may think or speak about me, I think I am a man, I am a human being." These are the words of Rama himself. While Rama himself is thinking that he is only a man, Brahma speaks of Him as Narayana and wants Him to go back to His Abode, as His drama in this world is over. These interesting dramatic contradictions are brought into play by the genius of Valmiki, deliberately to fulfil the purpose of the Epic. Otherwise, there would be no meaning in the play itself.

To be continued ......

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