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Who is Hanuman?
Steven Rosen
Author, editor, vegetarian, purveyor of spirituality, general no-goodnik
Steven,
I got an email in relation to my response above. I thought to share it because the issues which it addresses have troubled Hindus and others even for centuries. In fact the most popular version of the life of Rama, is the Ram Charita Manas (the Lake of the Adventures of Rama). In that book Rama’s questionable acts are either omitted, changed or refashioned so as to remove any doubts about his being God.
The email was this:
I wonder, then, how you justify the fact that he abandoned his wife while she was pregnant and shot Vali in the back.
My reply is below:
Those two vicious acts proved that Rama was capable and expressed immense cruelty even to his wife. On the surface, he had no right shooting Vali in the back. He did so, it seems at first glance, to facilitate using Sugriva and his army in the quest for locating his wife and defeating his wife’s abductor. From a conventional view point, he was wrong to shoot Vali in that way. Thus there arises a doubt that this person could be God who is supposed to be most righteous.
Rama’s act of abandoning his wife when she was pregnant, ordering his brother to drive her to the edge of civilization and release her into the jungle near where brahmin ascetics lived, is downright unforgiving when we look at it from the point of view of acceptable human conduct. From that perspective it is a hard-hearted cruel act, especially since a motive was to maintain the status of himself and the Raghu dynasty.
Looking at this from another angle, from that of understanding that this person Rama is a divine being. The application of human judgement becomes inappropriate. For him we have to step back and use other priorities, other references from which to act.
We judge that the killing of Vali had to do with the current history in the story which was that Vali mistreated his younger brother and was unforgiving when the Sugriva wrongfully abandoned him and locked him up in a cave. It seems that Rama conveniently did away with Vali so as to facilitate Sugriva’s ascension to the throne at Kishkindhya, so that Rama would have an army to pursue Ravana and retrieve Sita.
However Vali’s death might have little to do with that and may be a result of what Vali did in the past, including his past life. One mistake we make and we will continue to do so because we do not have the insight into past lives, is that we cannot understand the movements of fate because we judge everyone on the basis of the present life and do not apply the fact that whatever opportunities we are presented with in this life, are being manifested because of what happened in the past lives and not because of what we did recently in this life.
The banishment of Sita by Rama because there was criticism of a citizen which suggested that Sita was sexually dishonored by Ravana who abducted her, seems to be unfair to Sita and seems to be a cruel strike by Rama.
This is because there was no hard evidence that Sita was violated. Thus the accusation was whimsical. The man who made it did so privately to insult his wife.
However it may be that the banishment of Sita on that pretext involved other parameters. For instance she was kidnapped because she failed to follow both Rama and Lakshman’s advice. This is not to find fault with Queen Sita but to trace the way the energies of past actions mold the future in an uncontrollable and sometimes very illogical way in terms of what we see and know as the present circumstances.
It was painful for Lakshman to take Sita away from the royal dwellings to the forest huts but Lakshman had a dilemma from before which was that he disobeyed Rama’s instruction about staying with Sita to protect her when Rama left to do away with the magical deer. In the incidence when Lakshman was torn between being accused of lust by Sita, and following Rama’s advice to stay with Sita. Lakshman came under Sita’s influence and acted to please her, thus making Rama’s order secondary. But in the incidence of taking Sita away from Ayodhya to face jungle life, Lakshman did not open himself to Sita’s influence even when she established that she was pregnant for Rama.
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This all means that in analyzing Rama’s actions we must take into account either viewpoints, especially those which might be used by a divine being and also those which take into account past lives and complicated issues from the present life which normally we do not figure in.
Ram Charita Manas portrays a different Rama, one which is not cruel as the one presented by Valmiki. The problem with this substitute Rama is that even though he is better suited to our human construction of God, he (if he exist at all) is not the real God, not the real master of fate. He is an anthropomorphic God. Albeit he is easier to accept and thus is more popular.
Replies (2)
Michael Beloved
author / michaelbeloved.com ~ kundalini yoga - kriya meditation teacher / inselfyoga.com