The people of Ayodhya watched their king caress the grass for a long time, stoic and serene as ever, not a teardrop in his eyes. They wanted to fall at his feet and ask his forgiveness. They wanted to hug and comfort him. They had broken his heart and wanted to apologize, but they knew he neither blamed them nor judged them. They were his children, and he, their father, lord of the Raghu clan, ruler of Ayodhya, was Sita’s Ram.
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‘ Nothing will give me greater joy that narrating the story of Sita and her Ram. Much of what I will tell you I experienced myself. Some I have heard from others. Within all these stories is the truth. Who knows it all ? Varuna had but a thousand eyes; Indra, a hundred; and I, only two. ’
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Hanuman is a monkey or vanara. The monkey is also a symbol of the restless human mind. He is the remover of problems( sankat mochan), feared even by death, hence the most popular guardian god of the Hindu pantheon.
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Broadly, the Hindu mythic world has three layers : the sky inhabited by devas, apsaras and gandharvas; the nether regions inhabited by asuras and nagas; the earth inhabited by humans( manavas), rakshasas and yakshas. These are the lokas, or realms : Swarga - loka above, Patal - loka and Naga - loka below, and Bhu - loka – that is, earth – in the middle.
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Hanuman, the celibate monkey, is considered in many traditions to be either a form of Shiva, a son of Shiva, or Shiva himself. The nagas embody fertility, hence they are closely associated with the Goddess.
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Western thought prefers to locate the Ramayana in a historical and geographical context : who wrote it, when, where ? Traditional Indian thought prefers to liberate the Ramayana from the limits imposed by time and space. Ram of academics is bound to a period and place. Ram of devotees is in the human mind, hence timeless. Politicians, of course, have a different agenda.
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Furrows do not exist in nature. Furrows indicate agriculture, the birth of human civilization. Sita then embodies the fruit of nature’s domestication and the rise of human culture.
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In Hindu mythology, fertility of the land is closely linked with the fertility of the people who reside on the land, especially the king. Thus the story connects the failure of the rains with the failure of the king’s ability to father sons.
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