The Birth of Poetry

A short story about Vālmīki’s composition of the Rāmāyaṇa

Introduction

I wrote this short story many moons ago, but decided to share it on today’s momentous occasion. It attempts to look into the mind of Vālmīki as he was composing the Rāmāyaṇa. Many of its details are drawn from the introductory sargas of the first kāṇḍa of the Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa, while others are poetic embellishments on my part. It also draws extensively from the marvelous Rāmāyaṇa-bhūṣaṇa commentary by Govindarāja on the Rāmāyaṇa, especially on very technical matters. I have attributed Govindarāja’s insights directly to Vālmīki, which may seem anachronistic to some, but which I suspect would have been quite acceptable to Govindarāja himself.

If there is anything at all in this story that is beautiful, it comes from Vālmīki’s poetic genius, and ultimately from Lord Śrī-Rāma Himself. I trust that any and all mistakes and misattributions and misinterpretations in this story are graciously forgiven by Sītā-devī-sameta-Śrī-Rāma Himself, who is described by Śrīman-Nigamânta-Mahādeśikan in his magnificent Raghuvīra-gadya as being, among many other things:

sakṛt-prapanna-jana-saṃrakṣaṇa-dīkṣita! 
सकृत्-प्रपन्न-जन-संरक्षण-दीक्षित !

The one who has promised to forever protect all those folks who have surrendered themselves unto Him, even if just once!

and also as:

sanātana-dharma!
सनातन-धर्म !

The one who is the Eternal Dharma!

Śrī-Sītā-devī-Lakṣmaṇa-Bharata-Śatrughna-Hanūmat-sameta-Śrī-Rāmacandra-parabrahmaṇe namaḥ ||

---

Śrī Rāma Paṭṭābhiṣeka, art print from Innu.in

The Birth of Poetry

Vālmīki was still trembling with delight. It had been a good morning; indeed, it had been an unexpectedly and wonderfully fulfilling morning. Quite serendipitously, he had run into the divine sage Nārada earlier that morning and, after the customary welcoming rituals and enquiries, had managed to ask him the question that he had been mulling over in his mind for a long, long time: who was the foremost human being on earth at that time, who could serve as inspiration and role model for generations to come? Nārada, always waiting for an opportunity to talk about his favorite topic, immediately launched into a brief biography of the king of Ayodhyā, Rāma.

Rāma. Rāma! This was the name that had been running through Vālmīki’s mind for years now. Memories of his misspent youth, long forgotten, long suppressed, surfaced: memories of his time as a brigand, crawling over rotting logs and decaying leaves like a serpent, seeking out unfortunate travelers like a panther, pouncing upon his victims like a bird of prey. Tears welled up in his eyes as he thought of all the times he had inflicted suffering upon his fellow human beings, all for the sake of a few trivial shiny baubles. Who knows how long he might have remained in that condition, more beast than human, had he not had the good fortune to once try to rob the Seven Seers themselves! They had no shiny baubles for him, but since he had asked them to give him everything precious they carried, they obliged: “We’ll reveal to you our most precious jewel, the source of our power and radiance. All you need to do is to repeat the word marā over and over again, without pausing for a break, with full concentration, until you yourself know when to stop.”

Who knows what was unlocked in that brigand’s mind that day, for he actually took up the Seven Seers’ advice instead of laughing them off or attacking them. He sat down under a tree and repeated marā over and over and over in his mind, without break, without pause, in rain and in shine, in heat and in cold, in flood and in fire. So still was he, hardly even moving to breathe, that birds built nests in his hair and ants laid trails over his gaunt mud-caked limbs, until his whole body was encased in a giant anthill. And still he meditated, marā marā marā marā … until one day something shifted.

It might have been something as trivial as an ant accidentally crawling into his nostrils (thinking it to be an especially large tunnel), or it might have been an egg hatching in the nest on his head, or perhaps he just so happened to take a slightly longer breath than usual. Whatever the trigger was, he took just a hair of a pause between the ma and the rā of the mantra—and in that moment, everything changed. What had been marā marā marā marā was suddenly resegmented into rāma rāma rāma rāma. It was like looking at the broken shards of a pot and suddenly having a glimpse of the original whole, unbroken, unmarred. His whole consciousness realigned in that moment: everything was just as it had been before and yet everything had fundamentally changed. In that moment of realization, he awoke for the first time in ages and emerged from the anthill. Thus was born Vālmīki, “the one born from the anthill”, and thus was born his quest to understand who this Rāma was whose name alone had effected such a dramatic rebirth.

And now, thanks to Nārada’s generosity and loquacity, he finally knew. The world finally made sense! Rāma, best of men, had saved Vālmīki from his previous life without even coming into contact with him. As Vālmīki walked towards the Tamasā river for his mādhyāhnika mid-day prayers, he felt at peace with the world. And, it appeared, the world was at peace with him. The sun's rays that escaped the dancing leaves of the trees seemed to Vālmīki to offer little stairways of light to ascend to the heavens. The ants, always his friends since his days of meditation, seemed to be tracing the name Rāma into the soil in their scratching. The gurgling of the stream towards which he was walking seemed to be chanting Rāma’s name as well. Rāma! Rāma! The world was at peace with him, and with itself. Flowers seemed to bloom as Vālmīki walked past them; deer darted in and out through the undergrowth, playing with each other; and in the trees two krauñca birds were mating joyously, cooing their delight. Vālmīki paused to admire their bodily splendor and their unbridled passion: each was the other’s universe, each saw the universe in the other, as they united to bring forth a new life into this universe that wove together the beauty of both of their beings.

And at that very moment, at that climax of bliss, the world changed forever.

***

His name is lost to the ruin of time. He may have been unlettered, so that he never carved it into the bark of a tree. He may have been ungoverned, so that he never encountered a tax official who might have written down his name in the state’s ledgers. We do not know if he had a family, if he liked to sing, if he enjoyed swimming in the Tamasā, if he marveled at the shimmering of a peacock’s tail or shuddered in the pouring rain. We do not know what was running through his mind as he saw a male krauñca bird, lost in pleasure, dangerously unaware of its own surroundings. Did he stop to wonder at its beauty as he notched his arrow, painstakingly sharpened, carefully smoothened to streamline its flight path and to silence its deadly approach? Did he pause to think he was going to snuff out its life while he held his breath to steady his aim as he released the bowstring? As the arrow pierced the bird’s body, did he utter a silent prayer for its soul? Or did he simply rejoice that he had finally secured that day’s dinner?

We do not know. We cannot know. We will never know.

***

Even before the arrow penetrated the krauñca bird, Vālmīki knew what was going to happen. Not because he was a seer—though he was one—but because those who have lived and survived by violence know the smell of Death’s presence. And that smell lay dank in the air now that had earlier been perfumed by flowers, just as the bird’s blood spattered over the grass where formerly droplets of water had coalesced like pearls. Vālmīki was no stranger to all of this. But it was the scream of the female krauñcī bird—heart-rending, ear-piercing, all too human—that shattered his stupor and pulled all his senses out of his past and future and into the present, all too horrifying, moment.

Who could have sought to kill such a beautiful bird, and that too in its moment of passion? Who could have so cruelly impaled not just the bird but also its mate’s hopes and dreams for a future? The unspoken answer to Vālmīki’s unasked question emerged from the thicket: a local hunter, niṣāda, his eyes eager for his prize, blind to the quivering fury of the sage nearby.

Sorrow and compassion and shock struggled within Vālmīki, but it was anger that propelled words unbidden from his mouth:

mā niṣāda! pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |
yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam ||

मा निषाद प्रतिष्ठां त्वम् अगमः शाश्वतीः समाः ।
यत् क्रौञ्च-मिथुनाद् एकम् अवधीः काम-मोहितम् ॥

Never, o hunter, shall you find stability for all time,
for of that pair of krauñca birds you slew the male lost in passion!

We are told by our masters these days that our world is being eaten by software. Software is of course written in code, which is nothing other than patterns of human thought captured in artificially designed languages. We no longer find it perplexing that we can use language to change the world, nor are we surprised to hear stories of dumb computers executing the code of a foolish programmer literally with no regard to his intentions. But in the ancient days, when seers looked into the highest heavens and their innermost selves to unlock the deepest secrets of reality, when people understood that the world as men know it is saturated with the word, it was a widely known secret that true sages could reshape the very bones of the universe through their utterances. Not for nothing were they munis, the Silent Ones, for a single unguarded syllable from their mouths could turn things upside down.

Vālmīki was indeed one such sage, and had uttered not one, but thirty-two unguarded syllables soaked in grief. There could be no turning back. The arrow, once released, does not return to the bowstring; the word, once uttered, does not return to the throat. The universe would have to reorder itself to comport with Vālmīki’s words. Not just his intentions, but the words themselves, and all the meaning they bore.

We do not know what happened to the hunter after this. He is wiped from history as thoroughly and completely as Vālmīki’s curse said he would be. But the words themselves lingered on in Vālmīki’s mind and on his tongue. He couldn’t help but roll each word, each line over and over on his tongue  as he continued his walk down to the river for his mādhyāhnika ritual. The verse had a perceptible taste to it, as if it were a tangy fruit, but unlike any fruit he had ever tasted, its taste seemed to change with every new recitation. Sometimes it was a sudden burst of sweetness, as if something miraculous had just been born; sometimes a bitter brew bearing the sorrows of all partings; sometimes a deep, vegetal taste, as if all the herbs of the world had been ground up and distilled into a tincture; sometimes a sweet and sour mélange of wild fruits; sometimes a beautiful, oceanic saltiness; sometimes the distinctly metallic taste of blood; and sometimes the calm, cool fullness of equilibrium. Even as Vālmīki immersed his body in the river, his mind immersed itself in the verse. This was something truly unprecedented, something without a prior exemplar: this was something apūrva.

On the walk back to his āśrama, Vālmīki continued to chew on the verse, this time focusing on its sonic effects. Its thirty-two syllables were neatly divided into two equal halves, and each half-verse could be further split in half to yield four pādas (like the four feet of a quadruped, thought Vālmīki). The first and third pādas both began with a heavy syllable (mā and yat), like a little thunderclap exploding in the listener’s ear and awakening his mind. And they both ended in a light syllable that blended into the double-light-syllable opening of the next pāda, releasing a flood of sound that swept the listener away. And wonder of wonders, the first words of the second and the fourth pādas were both verbs, and both L^uṅ aorists at that: agamaḥ and avadhīḥ. And then both the second and the fourth pādas closed with alternating heavy and light syllables: DUM-duh-DUM-duh-DUM, like the sound of Śiva’s ḍamaru as he danced the destruction of a cosmic cycle. This was something truly unprecedented, something without a prior exemplar: this was something apūrva.

And there was yet another surprise waiting for Vālmīki when he reached his āśrama: Four-Faced Brahmā, creator of this cosmic cycle, grandfather of all sages, father to Nārada himself, was waiting there for him, with a gentle smile on all four faces. This was something truly unprecedented, something without a prior exemplar: this was something apūrva.

Vālmīki prostrated himself before Brahmā and offered Him the customary triple offering of waters: pādya to wash His feet, arghya to wash His hands, and ācamanīya to wash His four mouths. He then offered Brahmā the highest seat in the āśrama and continued to perform the upacāras until Brahmā gently signaled to Vālmīki to sit before Him. But even while his limbs were engaged in the ritual to Brahmā, Vālmīki’s mind was still mulling over the verse, so that when Brahmā asked him how he was, the words that came out of his mouth were still mā niṣāda!

Brahmā smiled His four smiles. “I see that verse has ensnared you! I knew this would happen when I sent my wife Sarasvatī to flow off your tongue today.” These words, spoken simultaneously by Brahmā’s four mouths in all the directions, served to jar Vālmīki awake. Seeing his wide-eyed surprise, Brahmā continued: “Yes, that verse did come from Me to you, although it is still your very own composition. I sent it to you because I would like you to sing the story of Rāma. You heard the outline of his story this morning from my mind-born son, Nārada, and now the gods would like you to compose a kāvya that tells the whole story with all its details.”

Vālmīki was confused. What was a kāvya, and what did it sound like?

Brahmā spoke again, this time with four mischievous smiles: “Generations of scholars to come will debate the definition of a kāvya for all time. I don’t want to take away their delight in arguing by providing a definition of what it means to be a kāvya today! Suffice to say that only a true kāvya can be savored by a connoisseur for both its sound and its meanings the way you have been ruminating on that verse all day today. Out of your śoka, your grief, came this śloka, as all true kāvya must emerge from the true experience of its author.”

More confusion for Vālmiki, followed by a sudden fear: The verse was a curse! How could something as auspicious as the beginning of the story of Rāma or the birth of poetry start with a curse? And then another fear: How was Vālmīki supposed to tell this story? He only knew the barest of sketches of Rāma’s story. How would he lay it out, how would he uncover the details, how would he weave story-patterns into word-patterns in his kāvya?

Brahmā again, with His words rippling out across space and time: “It is not the verse that is a curse. Yes, you used one interpretation of its words to curse the hunter. But there are many, many more hidden layers to this verse. As you meditate on them, you will unlock the patterns that will guide your weaving of Rāma’s story. For now, ponder upon just this: the opening syllable mā isn’t just the prohibitive particle mā^ṅ that you might think it is if you interpret the verse as a curse. Mā is also Mother, the Mother of the Cosmos, Mahālakṣmī Herself. What could be more auspicious than that? Ponder upon this most auspicious of beginnings as you compose the story of Rāma, and I bless you that every word you weave in this epic will be true for eternity. The grand palaces of men will turn into tombs and then into rubble, but your intangible masterpiece will endure so long as stars burn in the night sky.”

His hand held in the boon-bestowing gesture, Brahmā was enveloped by white light so bright that Vālmīki had to shield his gaze. By the time his vision returned, the Creator of the Cosmos had vanished. Brahmā’s instructions lingered on in Vālmīki’s mind, though. He realized that he would have to meditate seriously on the verse in order to unlock its multiple levels of meaning and to correlate each level with Nārada’s sketch of Rāma’s story.

Sitting facing east on a mat of sacred darbha grass, Vālmīki touched the water in his kamaṇḍalu to purify himself, and after murmuring a prayer to the gods dove deep into contemplation. He murmured the verse over and over, lips scarcely moving, vocal cords scarcely vibrating, letting the sounds and the meanings of words wash over his mind. Brahmā’s hint, to interpret the first syllable to mean Mahālakṣmī, provided a tenuous pinch-hold to get started. This was just like the ma-rā—rā-ma transformation, just on a bigger scale. The key, then, would be to resegment words to uncover new meanings, and then to reinterpret other parts of the verse to see if they could be put together into a coherent whole.

First to take shape was an overall structure for the story. If mā meant Lakṣmī, then mā-niṣāda would have to mean Viṣṇu who is Her dwelling-place. So the first section of the tale would have to cover Rāma’s childhood and his adventures leading up to him becoming Sītā’s “dwelling-place”, her husband. This then allowed the second phrase (pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ) to be understood positively, as a declaration that Rāma finds renown. What better incident to display this than his unhesitating acceptance of his father’s commands? The palace intrigues leading up to Rāma’s exile were thus the natural second section of Rāma’s tale. Rāma and Sītā’s forest adventures, culminating in her abduction by Rāvaṇa, were indicated by the next phrase śāśvatīḥ samāḥ, “for all eternity”. After all, this is when the seeds were sown for Rāma’s world-changing deed of dealing death to Rāvaṇa.

Vālmīki smiled ever so gently: all the pieces of the story were nicely falling into place. Krauñca didn’t just refer to the specific species of birds, but to all the animals—monkeys and vultures and bears and more—who played such a defining role in supporting Rāma. Mithuna could, with some creativity, refer to Hanumān’s awe-inspiring solo effort to bring Rāma and Sītā together as a couple. And then avadhīḥ would perfectly describe the slaying of Rāvaṇa! That would bring everything up to the present moment. But what could the final word, kāma-mohitam, refer to?

Deep breath.

If everything up to the present moment had already been encapsulated by the verse up to this point, then kāma-mohitam could only be a reference to the future, to incidents that Nārada had not yet sung about.

A frisson ran all the way up Vālmīki’s back: He would be writing the future in his story. And with Brahmā’s blessing that he could only write the truth, this implied that whatever he wrote would in fact become real. Brahmā had effectively granted him Brahmā’s own power as Creator, at least within the contours of this story.

Faint strains of birdsong drifted into Vālmīki’s awareness—the first indication that it was dawn and that a whole day had already elapsed. Deep breath. Could the same verse also provide hints into the story of each chapter? The effort required to squeeze so many layers of meaning out of this same verse would be nigh-superhuman, but the temptation was far too great. It was worth a shot at least for the first section of the tale.

If, for instance, he took the first two syllables, mā-ni, as one word māni(n), that would mean “the arrogant ones” or “the prideful ones”. Stacking on the next syllable, yielding mā-ni-ṣa, he could interpret the word māni-ṣa as being “foremost among the prideful ones”. In the context of the early part of the story, this was clearly a reference to Paraśurāma, whose pride and whose bow were subdued by Rāma! With this reference point fixed, the other parts of the verse fell into place to reveal a meaning applicable to the first section of the text:

O subduer of Paraśurāma, foremost of the prideful!
You will attain fame for all time, for
        simply by walking amidst the huddles 
        of crooked kings at Janaka’s bow-sacrifice,
You slew their delusions of grandeur!

This was truly a miracle! Not only were individual phrases within the verse able to hint at the overall structure of the story, but the verse itself could support multiple interpretations that provided the plot of different sections. Vālmīki’s heart was racing with excitement, though no outside observer would have noticed any sign, except perhaps a slight elevation in his breathing rate. If he could do this for one kāṇḍa of the text, then he could do it for all the others too. (And maybe even for that seventh kāṇḍa, which was supposed to foretell the future.)

He threw himself into further meditation on the verse, not pausing to eat or sleep or perform any of his daily rituals. For was not meditation itself the highest sacrifice, in which words were soundlessly poured into the altar of the mind to be consumed by the internal fire of insight in order to reach the innermost self that lay beyond words and thought?

An interpretation appropriate to the second kāṇḍa emerged once he split the first four syllables mā-ni-ṣā-da into ma-ā-niṣāda:

O banisher of the doubts of King Daśaratha!
O bestower of delight upon the sages of the forest
        clustered together like krauñca birds
simply by walking among them!

You will attain fame for all time, since
You slew your father’s wish-driven delusion.

To get the third kāṇḍa’s intepretation he found out he had to split the three syllables of śāśvatīḥ into three words: śa, āśu, and atīḥ. For the fourth kāṇḍa, he had to reanalyze the beginning of the verse as māniṣa! āda-pratiṣṭhām and then beyond. The fifth kāṇḍa was tricky: he decided to treat krauñca as a standalone word and instead to combine māniṣāda and pratiṣṭhām into a single compound—who could have ever predicted that? The sixth kāṇḍa’s interpretation was even harder to extract, for he had to pull the extremely rare ^ci^ṇ passive form of the aorist verb āni out of the syllables mā-ni-ṣā-da to get what he wanted.

Extracting these meanings left Vālmīki utterly drained. The process was exhausting: it took a tremendous amount of work to try to pry words apart at seams that might not have existed at all. Even the slightest trace of a previous meaning was enough to bias the mind towards one particular segmentation. Vālmīki had to recite and re-recite the verse over and over each time until all association between sound and sense had vanished, until it was just a stream of sounds in his mental ear, before he could attempt to uncover a new layer of meaning. And he had done all of this at least six times already!

But there was still one more layer to discover: the seventh kāṇḍa, the one that would have to describe the future.

By this point, Vālmīki had accumulated enough alternative resegmentations to get going. He had to repeat the śa-āśu-atīḥ split for śāśvatīḥ, but this time he would also need to break up the last phrase as two words: kāmam ohitam. And there was yet another playful move he could make, by parsing the first four syllables mā-ni-ṣā-da as ma-a-ā-āniṣāda. With this, the seventh kāṇḍa’s interpretation finally surfaced:

O bestower of eternal auspiciousness upon all the denizens of Ayodhyā,
        from its birds all the way through 
        to its most accomplished sages!

Slaying their doubts 
        about whether they will achieve their most cherished desire,

You swiftly bear all of them over to that eternally stable realm:
        the transcendent Ayodhyā
                where even Śiva, Viṣṇu, and Brahmā dwell!

With that glimpse into the future, Vālmīki’s contemplation came to a sudden end. The outline of his text was clear; the topics it would touch upon were transparent; the flow of the story from past to present to the undetermined future was also was unimpeded. He recited a prayer of gratitude to Brahmā once again for having prodded him to dig into the first śloka so deeply. Then, after eating his first meal in more than a week (he was ravenous!), he set to work composing the ādi-kāvya, the first great work of literature: the Rāmāyaṇa.

Stanzas poured out of Vālmīki like the gushing torrents of Sarasvatī after the life-giving monsoon rain. He knew what he had to say, and his long meditation had carved clear pathways in his mind for his words to flow through. The regular rhythm of the śloka verse-form made it easy to fill out a line of poetry whenever needed by picking just the right adjective: an akliṣṭa-karmaṇaḥ here and a Kausalyā-’’nanda-vardhanaḥ there. Rāma’s childhood story, and his prowess against the demoness Tāṭakā, and the blossoming of his love with Sītā were easy enough to narrate. The palace intrigues that led to his exile, the abrupt change of scenery from cities and palaces to forests and hermitages, all came naturally to Vālmīki, given his own love for nature. The march deeper into wilderness, the slow but steady heating-up of the conflict with the rākṣasas, culminating in Sītā’s abduction and Rāma’s lovelorn desperation, was more challenging to narrate, not least because Vālmīki found himself weeping over Sītā’s sufferings. In comparison, Rāma’s encounter with Hanumān and Sugrīva and the subsequent quest to find Sītā was much more uplifting. And nothing was quite as exhilarating to write about as Hanumān’s accomplishment of the impossible in finding and meeting Sītā in Laṅkā. (Perhaps he was the real hero of the story!) The joy and thrill of Hanumān’s story was matched only by Vālmīki’s delight in experimenting with the story—so many meters, so many beautiful alaṅkāras to beautify the sound and the meaning of the text, so much lush description: a masterpiece of a poem within a masterpiece of a poem! This brought Vālmīki to the 7-day–long war, with elaborate descriptions of combat. Rāma and Rāvaṇa’s one-on-one battle, in particular, was unique both in its actual intensity and in the way Vālmīki gave life to it in words; there truly was no other yardstick to measure it by. Sītā’s liberation and reunion with Rāma, her trial by fire (in which Agni himself was scorched by her chastity), their triumphant return to Ayodhyā, and Rāma’s coronation brought Vālmīki up to the present moment.

From that point on, Vālmīki’s pace of composition slowed down dramatically. He tried not to get too far ahead of matters, preferring to let them unfold by their own internal logic. The day he sang about Sītā’s abandonment in the forest was the day his disciples found her, pregnant and exhausted, lying in a clearing. Brought to the sage’s āśrama, she recuperated there and gave birth to twin boys, heroic like their father and compassionate like their mother. To them, Lava and Kuśa by name, Vālmīki decided to teach the whole Rāmāyaṇa: who deserves better to know his father’s tale than a son who has never seen him? They sang the whole epic verse by verse better than anyone else, for this was the story of their becoming.

Karuṇā: pity, compassion, pathos. Was this to be the dominant theme of the evening of Rāma’s life? Sītā, alone in the forest, separated from her love once again, separated by her love of him that blinded her from seeing his love for duty? Rāma, alone in the city, separated from his love once again, separated by his desire to be the perfect king that overrode his love for her? Rāma, alone, once again bereft of direction, unable to see his true divine nature?

Grief brought tears to Vālmīki’s eyes as he thought of his hero’s condition. And yet … he still had the ability to mend things. He couldn’t fix everything, of course. Even a wholly made-up story has its own momentum once it gets going, like a rock rolling down a hillside, and cannot be diverted from its course without destroying the listener’s participation and thus its own nature as a story. This was even more true of a story that told the life of real people with real emotions and real choices. But even if that rolling rock cannot be stopped, its course might at least be diverted by a strategically placed log.

Besides, Vālmīki felt an obligation to Rāma. This was the same figure whose name alone had shattered his old complacency, his old way of life, and given birth to Vālmīki himself. Was there some way he could repay the favor and help Rāma return to being Rāma?

Thus Vālmīki sang of Lava and Kuśa’s visit to Rāma’s court, of their singing the Rāmāyaṇa there, of their father being drawn out of his depression and into the epic, of his duty-driven delusion gradually being dispelled, of his recognition of his two sons as being his sons, and of his recognition of himself as Himself. Reconciled though not reunited with Sītā (there are some things even an author cannot change), he ruled with his sons by his side until they came of age, at which point Rāma returned to his heavenly abode along with all the denizens of Ayodhyā—just as Vālmīki had foreseen in his final interpretation of the First Verse.

Resegmentation, reinterpretation, recognition: not just at the level of a word, or even at the level of a verse, but at the level of a life. Such is the power of the name Rāma: it turned a highwayman into a sage and a poet; it resulted in the composition of the first work of poetry; it lit the lamp of Divine self-recognition in the Divine incarnation itself. No wonder, then, that Śiva declares it the greatest of the Thousand Names of Mahāviṣṇu:

« Śrīrāma! Rāma! Rāmê! » ’ti rame Rāme mano-rame(!) |
sahasra-nāma tat-tulyaṃ Rāma-nāma(-)varânane! ||

श्रीराम ! राम ! रामे ! ऽति रमे रामे मनो-रमे ।
सहस्र-नाम तत्तुल्यं राम-नाम(-)वराऽऽनने! ॥

O delightful one! I take delight
        in the delightful Rāma, 
saying
“Śrīrāma”, “Rāma”, “Rāma” 
over and over again:

For all of the Thousand Names taken together
are but equal to the name “Rāma”,

        o beautiful-faced one!

maṅgalaṃ Kosalêndrāya mahanīya-guṇâbdhaye |
cakravarti-tanūjāya sārvabhaumāya maṅgalam ||

āsādya nagarīṃ divyām abhiṣiktāya Sītayā |
Rājâdhirāja-rājaya Rāma-bhadrāya maṅgalam ||