Why Rama Surpasses Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva

Tulsi Ramayana 92 · Balakanda, from Doha 217 · Swami Jyotirmayananda A bow is standing in King Janaka’s court, and whoever can break it will marry his daughter. Read as a story, that is a contest with a prize. Swamiji spends the first quarter of this class making sure nobody reads it that way. The bow is bhava chapa. The word bhava names Lord Shiva, and the same word names the world process, and Swamiji lets both meanings stand at once, because whatever is in the world came from God in the first place. So the bow is the magnetic pull that keeps drawing a soul back into birth and death. That pull has a name, pravritti, and it has two stages. The first is the ordinary one: enough money, a good house, a garden around it, good relationships, and then we will live happily ever after. Swamiji’s answer to that is four words long. It is a childish dream. Look behind, in the pages of history. Has anyone attained it? Will anybody? The second stage is subtler and it catches the religious mind rather than the worldly one. Because a mind cannot picture joy stripped of the world, it does not give the world up. It relocates it. It invents a heaven where everyone lives a million years and the food has no consequences, and it chases that instead. Swamiji puts heaven and hell on the same line of algebra, plus and minus of one equation, both experienced without a body, both intense, and both still inside the bow. Breaking the bow weds the soul to Sita, who is viveka buddhi, the intuitive intellect. And here Swamiji refuses the ending everyone expects. Marrying Sita is not the finish. It is the point at which a steady, progressive movement toward liberation actually begins. The rest of the class is a walk. Rama and Lakshmana ask permission to see Janakapuri, the city empties into the streets to look at them, and Tulsidas describes the two brothers head to foot. Swamiji reads that description as a manual: what a purified mind looks like, what it radiates, and what it does to whoever meets it. Which brings him, at the end, to a comparison that sounds like a joke and is a doctrine.

Passage index

The bow is not an object, it is a direction

Swamiji sets the allegory out plainly before touching the narrative. The soul within a person is Rama, Rama in potential. Lakshmana is the yoga of meditation, dhyana. Put another way, the two brothers are jnana and dhyana, two movements of one soul, and they exist to bring that soul into union with viveka buddhi, which is Sita. The bow they are walking toward is the pull in the opposite direction. A mind that still holds a fascination for finding perfect settlement in the world of time and space is a mind in pravritti, and Swamiji is careful that this is not a moral failing. It is a design. As long as the mind is led by ego rather than enlightenment, it will look for completion inside time and space, because it has no other imagination available to it. That is why the heaven stage is not an improvement on the worldly stage. It is the same movement with better scenery. Swamiji notes that the soul that tries to reach heaven often manufactures the opposite along the way, since the same mind that builds an illusion also builds the karmas that follow from it. Heaven and hell are both mental, both intense, and neither requires a physical body. So when the bow breaks, what ends is not the world. What ends is the world’s authority to pull. Whatever then develops in a life carries the soul toward the removal of ignorance. Everything after the bow is a different kind of story, and Swamiji says so in one line. “Marry Sītā, then the real Rāmāyaṇa begins.”

Rise in love

There is a sentence in this class that has been quoted out of it for years, and it is worth seeing where it actually sits. Swamiji has just described Rama entering the mystical land of shubha vasanas, the subtle impressions in a mind that have turned sattvika, and encountering Sita there. Then he says: “In modern language, they fall in love. But they don’t fall. Rise in love.” The correction is not decorative. Falling describes what the world’s pull does to a person. Rising describes what happens when the soul is drawn to the intuitive intellect instead. Swamiji calls it a highly mystical concept meant for mature aspirants, and frames the question that follows from it: how do you allow your soul to fall in love with viveka buddhi? Once that state develops, he says, the repeated cycle of birth and death loses its influence.

Darshana is not done with the eyes

Vishvamitra sends the brothers into the city so the people can have their darshana, and so their eyes can experience success. Swamiji stops on that phrase. Eyes flutter day and night looking for something, and no matter what they see there is always something further waiting. The urge to see has an absolute fulfillment, and that fulfillment is darshana of God. Then he removes the picture that word usually produces. Darshana does not mean the use of eyes. God does not arrive so that you can look at him. It is an inward experience, an intuitive revelation, and Swamiji notes that mystical experience is always presented in ordinary sensory language for the masses because that is the only language available. The illustration is the strongest thing in this section. A blind man’s sight is restored by surgery during the night. Fascinated, he opens his eyes and sees a glow around him and takes it for the sun. He sees candle flames and takes those for the sun. He looks up, sees the moon, and says that is the sun. Then the real sun rises, and he is simply in ecstasy. Swamiji applies it without softening it. Sometimes a person becomes joyous and concludes this must be God-realization. The mind becomes peaceful, simmering with joy, and again the conclusion arrives. All of that is real as far as it goes. But of the thing itself: “You will not have anything to say about it.”

Childlike, not childish

The brothers enter and the children come first. Crowds of them, boys and girls, drawn to Rama, and Swamiji says Rama attracts children as a matter of nature. The easy reading is sentimental. The real one is diagnostic. He brings in the Gospel’s blessing on those with a childlike mind, and Shiva’s epithet Bholenath, from bhola, meaning simple and childlike. Then he draws the line the whole passage exists to draw. “But shouldn’t make the mistake between being childish and being childlike.” A childish person is not bhola, he says, but bhalu — a bear, hibernating. The difference is impurity. When impurities move away and a human being becomes childlike, that person is drawn to Rama. Childishness is not innocence that survived; it is a mind that went to sleep and stayed there.

The body as a manual

The longest stretch of the class is a decoding of how Rama and Lakshmana look, and none of it is ornamental. The yellow garment is golden yellow, and gold is hiranyagarbha, the Cosmic Mind, the color of a highly purified mind that communes with it. The quiver at the waist holds arrows, and the arrows are powerful thoughts and powerful insights, carried the way anyone carries small change. Rama is blue because purity of nature opens onto cosmic expansion, expansion is allegorically the sky, and the sky is blue. Lakshmana is snowy white because white is shuddha sattva, purity of an advanced nature. The same pairing runs through the other two brothers: Bharata is bhakti and shares Rama’s complexion, Shatrughna is the destroyer of impurities and shares Lakshmana’s. Sandalwood paste on their bodies sends fragrance ahead of them as they walk, and Swamiji makes the transfer explicit: “You waft the fragrance of those virtues around you.” He cites the line about the sage who moves through the world for its welfare as spring moves through a forest — not doing anything to the trees, and the whole forest thrilled. Then the details get physiological. The neck is a lion’s neck, which means a neck that does not shake. A mind without the strength of the soul behind it wavers constantly, and that is a pigeon’s neck. Swamiji adds, almost in passing, that this is literally true as well, because health shows in the neck. The chest carries a mala of pearls said to come from elephants, and elephants were how strength was measured before horsepower — here, spiritual strength drawn out in a magical state. The eyes are red lotuses, and red is the mystical color of divine love, the red in the sun’s surrounding hue, the red of Holi, the red inside the word lali. Swamiji points at the ordinary Indian endearment: a mother calls her child mere lal, my red one. The face is the moon, and the moon cools the three fevers — the misery that comes from one’s own body and mind, the misery that comes from other beings, and the misery that arrives as storm and flood. The world can be hot; once the moon rises there is coolness everywhere. Golden flowers in the ears are ears prepared to hear things of golden value, as opposed to the great volume of what a person hears in a day. Black curly hair negates the world of practical detail with its distraction and its restlessness, and curls mean the approach is never a straight line — you go through a spiral.

The thief and the robber

Then comes the line the class turns on. “wherever Rāma looks at anybody, He steals away the entire mind” — people arrive full of ideas and thoughts and leave empty, because Rama has taken them. Swamiji builds two figures out of this and they are the most useful thing in the lecture. Rama plays the thief. Shiva plays the robber. They do the same work by different means. The thief works smoothly and you hardly know it; this is the bhakti movement, illumination that arrives inside you while your attention is elsewhere, and the negativity is gone before it is missed. God has cheated you, is how he puts it. The robber is the other route. When bhakti reaches a climax the Shiva movement enters, and there is a shocking revelation — darkness driven off with none of the gradualness of a dawn, the way the sun bursts through a black cloud in the middle of the day. The city behaves accordingly. Word spreads, and people drop whatever they were doing and run, and nobody asks for five more minutes. Swamiji reads that as a description of how higher experience actually arrives: “Spiritual experience doesn’t follow time precision.” It overpowers the mind wherever you happen to be, and the small concerns get left for later. The image he gives it is a royal treasury thrown open to the very poor, with permission to take anything.

Beyond Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva

The class ends on a comparison that Swamiji himself calls spiritual humor, and he does not want the humor taken for the whole of it. Tulsidas says the beauty of these two brothers surpasses Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva. Vishnu has four arms, and you cannot shake hands with him. Brahma has four heads, and you would not know which one to address. Shiva has five faces. The reasoning underneath is doctrinal. Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva are conceived at the saguna sakara level: God envisioned with form and with qualities. A God held inside form is a God with a limit. Rama, though the storyline presents him as an avatara of Vishnu, is being identified with something else entirely. “Rāma is not to be identified with saguṇa level, but identified with the Absolute.” If the mind turns to Rama, all three are already implied. Having raised the subject, Swamiji opens each one. Vishnu’s four arms carry conch, discus, mace and lotus, and those are the four yogas: karma yoga in the discus, bhakti yoga in the lotus, dhyana yoga in the mace, and jnana in the awakening the conch announces. Brahma’s four faces are the four Vedas. Shiva’s five faces get the fullest treatment. Ishana is Lord of all. Aghora is the face that finds nothing terrible — where ghora means the impurity and turmoil of the world, Aghora is the vision in which mud and flower are the same, all of it brahmamayam. Swamiji pauses here to separate that vision from the misunderstanding of it, noting the practitioners who dramatize sameness by refusing any distinction between good food and filth, and mostly create confusion. The real content is the dream analogy: in a dream there is a beautiful lake, and beside it a place where everything foul is dumped, and swans and cockroaches alike are your own consciousness. “From Divine vision, all is one.” Tatpurusha is the face of wisdom, the one that teaches tat tvam asi, thou art That. Vamadeva is beauty itself, the source of every joyous emanation. Sadyojata means newly born, and it is the face that brings a new vision into a personality. Then Swamiji stops the class deliberately, mid-scene, with Shiva’s bow still unbroken and Sita not yet met, and says he will leave us in suspense.

Terms

bhava chapa — Shiva’s bow, and simultaneously the pull of the world process; bhava carries both meanings at once
pravritti — the outward movement of the soul into the world of time and space, in its worldly and its heavenly stages
viveka buddhi — the intuitive intellect, represented by Sita; what the soul is wedded to when the bow breaks
shubha vasanas — the auspicious subtle impressions in a mind that has turned sattvika, the land Rama walks into
darshana — not the use of the eyes but an intuitive revelation, described in sensory language for the masses
hiranyagarbha — the Cosmic Mind, the golden yellow of the brothers’ garments
shuddha sattva — purity of an advanced nature, Lakshmana’s snowy white complexion
tapatraya — the three fevers: misery from one’s own body and mind, from other beings, and from what arrives as storm and flood
saguna sakara — God conceived with form and with quality, and therefore with a limit
Aghora — the face of Shiva that finds nothing terrible, the vision in which all is brahmamayam

Questions for reflection

Which stage of pravritti is currently running in your life: the belief that the right arrangement of circumstances will settle you, or a relocated version of the same hope?
Swamiji distinguishes the mind that has become childlike from the mind that merely went to sleep; which of the two has your simplicity been?
Has the thief been at work in you, quietly, in ways you noticed only afterwards, or have you been waiting for the robber?

Tulsi Ramayana (Sri Ramcharitmanas of Goswami Tulsidas), Balakanda, from Doha 217. Lecture 92 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation. The complete archive of Swamiji’s teachings is free to listen to.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.