If Indra got the reaction of brahma-hatya for killing Vritrasura, why didnt Rama, for killing Ravana?

Answer Podcast:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
in talented people like IITians. Thank you. Hare Krishna.
Question. If Indra got a reaction of Brahmahatya for killing Gudrasura, why did not Ram get a similar reaction for killing Ravana? Answer. The two cases are significantly different.
First of all, Ravana was not exactly a Brahmana. That he had descended from a Brahmana, Pulasthi Rishi, does not automatically make him a Brahmana. Genealogy is not the sole determiner of mentality.
Ravana had committed many devious deeds. He had violated many women and plundered many kingdoms, atrociously killed many kings and destroyed many armies. And of course, his most grievous sinful activity was his abduction of Sita and his refusal to come to surrender to her despite good advice from others that compounded his misdeed.
So, it was the cumulative reaction to all his misdeeds because of which he had to be killed. And his Brahmanical genealogy is talked about to drive home the point that genealogy is not the sole determiner of mentality. And that mentality can radically become opposed to genealogy.
So, technically, he, Ravana was a Rakshasa. So, and if you want to just go by the literal genealogical sense, we can say all of us are Brahmanas because all of us have come from ultimately from Brahma, who is originally a Brahmana. All of us have come from the Saptarishis who are also Brahmanas.
So, therefore, the point here is that the genealogy is mentioned to illustrate how his mentality was utterly at odds with the genealogy and that’s how he had become so devious. So, because he had been given adequate warning and because he never accepted that warning, because he acted like, not just like a Kshatriya, but like a monster that he was, so he deserved to be killed. And killing him, he acted like a Atataina, aggressor, and he was killed and he got, there’s no reaction in killing him, killing a person who was so demoniac.
Now, as far as Uttarasura is concerned, there’s a whole constellation of different factors involved. Yes, Uttarasura was also a Rakshasa, but he did not go about doing any devious activities, any wicked activities, apart from attacking the Devatas and attacking Indra, which was the mission for which he had been born, which had been brought into existence by this Rishi Toshta, his father, who had caused Uttarasura to emerge from a fire. So, we could say that he wasn’t attacking Devata the Rakshasa, Rakshasi attitude.
We could say it was, but it was more appropriate to say that he was simply fulfilling the mission for which he had been brought into existence by a Brahmana. So, more importantly, Indra had already committed a sinful activity by killing a Brahmana when he had killed the brother of Uttarasura, the earlier son of Toshta, Vishwaroopa, when he had been his own priest and had been performing sacrifices for him and then apart from that also, when he was fighting Uttarasura, he also performed a sacrifice which he thought would mitigate the sinful reaction of killing a Brahmana and that is the seventh offense against the holy name where on the strength of the holy name we commit sinful activities. So, like that if you do religious activities, specifically with the mentality that these activities will counter the sinful activities which I’m going to do, then that mentality is wrong.
So, the point here is that Uttarasura was not exactly demoniac because he was simply doing the mission for which a Brahmana had created him, had summoned him. On the other hand, we see Indra, he was quite self-centered, he wanted the kingdom for his own gratification and he had already killed one Brahmana out of the insecurity of the desire to protect his kingdom and now he was attacking, he also had decided to kill Uttarasura. So, therefore, the whole constellation of circumstances were different in the case of Uttarasura as compared to Ravana and because of these different circumstances, Indra got a reaction whereas Ravana didn’t.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.