Bharatheeyam : ( 08/11/2012. )

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-7. Hence, even the elite and the intelligentsia 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 the 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 elem...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-6. 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. In the Srimad Bhagavatam, 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 Bhagavatam. 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...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-5. 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 any more. They vanished in 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 ...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-4. These two parallel movements of epic stories, known as the Ramayanam and the Mahabharatam, 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 towards 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 masterstrokes of genius given to us by Valmiki Maharishi  and Vyasa  Maharishi, in the form of the Ramayanam and the Mahabharatam, give us the religion of India. Swami Krishnananda To be continued  ...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-3. In the majestic words of Valmiki with which the epic commences, we are given a description of what this perfection of humanity is, as an answer given by Sage Narada to a question put by Sage Valmiki as to who is the ideal of human nature. "Who do you think, O Sage, is the perfect embodiment of humanity in this world, and can you give me an example of such perfection?" was the question put by Valmiki to Narada. And then, Narada commences a dignified description of a personality whom today we know and adore as Sri Rama. That majestic feature of bodily personality, the ideal perfection of physiological structure, the profundity and beauty of understanding, dignity of behaviour, exemplary nature of conduct – to put it in one word, 'perfection' as conceived or as conceivable by the human understanding – this is what comes forth as an answer from the great Sage Narada. We...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-2. Surprising though it may appear, this master poet who composed the Ramayana was an illiterate brute in his earlier life, but suddenly transformed into a Master whose genius is today regarded as incomparable in the history of Sanskrit literature. This total transformation by a magical touch, as it were, was given to Valmiki by another genius, Sage Narada. One genius created another genius, and this genius has written an epic, stirring the soul of man, on a genius of human perfection, Sri Rama Himself. And so, even today a contemplation on these aspects of holiness and perfection brings us into contact with a unique feature, namely humanity as it ought to be properly understood and brought to bear on practical life. The whole of the Ramayana is an epic of humanity. Humanity does not mean mankind, but that which particularly characterises human nature. It is in this sense that Sri ...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-1. Let us observe this auspicious occasion of Sri Ramanavami as a moment of contemplation on a special spark of Divinity that made its advent on the earth. Popularly speaking, in ancient historical times, to emphasise the historical advent of this great Divinity on earth has been the exoteric side of the epics as people generally understand it. This popular emphasis on the incarnations of God on earth has taken the form of epics like the Ramayana. We are told in the Ramayana of Sage Valmiki, in the earliest of these documents, that it was a history par excellence, a history of a chronological procession of divine exploits which is what we generally mean by a divine epic. It is believed that the earliest record of the history of Rama, the Ramayana of Valmiki, was written during the lifetime of Rama Himself. It was not a biography written later on, after several years. It was compose...