Wisdom from the Ramayana

Some Hindu spiritual guidance for these times

The day I arrived in India, our host brought me books. (Genuinely the very best way to start a trip!) One of them was a modern retelling of the Ramayana tales, an epic saga that tells the story of Prince Rama, his beloved wife Sita, and the demon king Ravana. This epic poem, which clocks in at over 24,000 verses, dates back to the 5th century and comprises, along with the Mahabarata, what is known as the Itihasas, narrative stories that impart wisdom and morality.

I began reading it immediately, and each day over breakfast I would tell our hosts, Venkat and Rama (named after the prince, but a name that both men and women use), where I was in the story. They would nod with knowing smiles, aware of exactly what awaited me. They had told me it was a great battle between good and evil, and I told them I was eager to get to the ending.

I would never have guessed the ending I discovered. I won’t ruin it for you, in case you decide to read it for yourself, but I will say this: things did not tie up neatly in the end, with the villain destroyed and the hero triumphant and everything again feeling right with the world. It was…remarkably…human. Real. True to life. Which is to say, disappointing. Heartbreaking. Tragic, even.

I sat on the plane at the final page and had to evaluate how committed I am to a false sense of reality.

I say this as someone who spends her days in the grit of people’s real and often difficult lives, who has logged hours by bedsides and in pastoral conversations and with dear people in the late stages of Alzheimers. Someone who has a whole shelf of fairy tales— not the Disney ones, which have been sanitized, but the original ones where Cinderella’s sisters cut their own toes off to fit into the glass slipper and where Ariel dies at the end. And yet, I felt so very Western, Christian even, on that plane. Here I was, expecting Easter, when Easter itself did not erase all the tragedy that came before.

Cinderella trying on a bloodied slipper. Art by Dagger-Te.

Goodness, how we have sanitized our Western stories and therefore our worldview. And we are, I believe, the lesser for it. (Sanitized imaginations are ripe for charismatic dictators, for one thing.)