Bharatheeyam : ( 08/11/2012. )

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-10. And the other side of the teaching of the epic is that through humanity we reach Divinity. Sometimes, we are told that the ten Avataras – incarnations of Vishnu beginning from the incarnation as Fish, the Matsya Avatara; the incarnation as Tortoise, the Kurma Avatara; the incarnation as Boar, the Varaha Avatara; and so on – represent the process of the evolution of the human consciousness to the perfection of its Realisation. From this point of view of understanding of human nature and its evolution, the stage which was enacted by Rama, God in human form was the penultimate step which Consciousness takes in its attempt at Self-realisation. He showed what human perfection is and how it becomes a stepping-stone to divine perfection. This we can know only when we read the whole of the Ramayana from the beginning to the end, reading also between the lines. Most of us do not know what ...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-9. While Rama himself thinks 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 fulfill the purpose of the epic. Otherwise, there would be no meaning in the play itself. It was not at all given to Rama to proclaim Himself as Narayana. That was not the purpose of the Avatara at all. It was to defeat the purpose of Ravana who had a poor opinion of human beings. Being a demon, he thought that human beings and monkeys were only a morsel of food for him. On account of this, he deliberately omitted men and monkeys from the list of his possible future enemies when he asked for boons from Brahma. "May I not have death from any one – Gods, Kinnaras, Kimpurushas, Daityas, Danavas, all superhuman bein...

Chapter-3. Rama – The Apotheosis of Human Perfection ( Sri Ramanavami ) Part-8. 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 Tulasidas's Ramayana because that has a different approach altogether) for the first time, we have a proclamation of the 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 a human being. The contradiction which Valmiki brings out is that while he puts these words in the mouth of Mandodar...

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  ...