Ramayana’s enduring message – Rise from me to we

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
Hare Krishna. On the occasion of Ram Navami, let’s contemplate on the enduring message of Ramayana. There are many messages in this great classic, but one consistent message that permeates all its various messages is rise from V to V, rise from V to V, cultivate selflessness.
That is a message that the Ramayana repeatedly signifies through its various characters and to the extent we understand and internalise this message, to that extent, we will see its eternal relevance. The Ramayana is heard, recited and spoken by many people and it can be relished as a delightful story and many people do relish it as a delightful story. So, these stories can be seen at various levels.
Madhocharya talks that the epics can be understood at the literal, the ethical and the spiritual or metaphorical level. So, at the literal level, these are just stories that happened and just by hearing those stories, because the story is connected with the Lord, they are purifying. At the ethical level, we see what decisions they made, what ethical challenges the characters faced and what they learned from those, how they acted under those situations in the face of those challenges and we can learn from those challenges.
And at the metaphorical level, there are significances such as Sita s Lakshman Rekha signifying the regularity principles of scripture and we will discuss one or two of these significances also. We will focus primarily on the ethical level of understanding scripture. So, scripture acts as a guide for us to learn how to live and the Ramayana especially focusses on the lesson that rise from me to me.
Now, we live in an age that is obsessively individualistic. Individualism means I first and obsessive individualism practically means I only. So, because of this obsessive individualism, we see that which is the foundation of society, family breaking apart.
When people put I first and they are not ready to sacrifice, then families just do not stay together. Of course, it is a complex issue of marital rupture or family disintegration. But one common denominator that underlies such things is the excessive selfishness.
So, we need models and examples of selflessness to counter this tendency which is there in the world of obsessive individualism and the selfishness that comes with it. So, let us look at four examples of selflessness of putting we before me that I demonstrated in the Ramayana. The first example, of course, of Ram himself.
He, at the instruction of his father Dasharatha, gave up the kingdom that was rightfully his and went to the forest on exile for no fault of his. To be exiled is a sentence that is extremely grievous. It is worse than imprisonment and it is only one rung below execution.
So, he was exiled. It was a disastrous thing, a terrible thing and he accepted gracefully. Why? Because it was instruction of the father.
So, today when the parent-children relationship is ruptured because the children often come from entitlement culture where they think everything belongs to me. I am entitled to get it and it is my parents duty to provide things to me. So, the example of Ram of leave alone entitlement, he exemplifies the opposite value of sacrifice.
Not just demanding what is not ours but giving up what is ours for the sake of preserving the honour of his father’s word. It’s a seminal example that can reanimate the children-parent relationship. Similarly, today we have a culture of casual sexuality and casual matrimony.
People have sex premarital, extramarital as if it’s a nonchalant thing and even marriages are broken up sometimes on very flimsy grounds. So, in such a situation, Sita’s example of matrimonial chastity, a. going out with Ram to the forest, enduring all the hardships that her husband had to endure. That is extraordinary example.
In fact, Sita was not exiled by Kaikeyi because Kaikeyi did not consider Sita to be a threat to the kingdom and moreover to threat to Bharat’s getting the kingdom and moreover, Lord Ram also did not want Sita to go. He told her you should stay because Sita, she insisted. No, when my father gave me to you, he said that I should share your joys and your sorrows and it was her diligent duty, dutifulness because of which she accompanied Ram and served him and they lived together as loving partners even in the forest and that comforted the austerity and the troubles of the forest life for each other.
So, many times in marital relationships, when one partner faces sufferings, often the other partner abandons the suffering partner and looks for winner-pastures and such a selfishness-driven rupture of marital relationships is distressing and disastrous and that can be countered if you meditate on the example of Sita’s selfless dutifulness and similarly, there is the example of Lakshman who had no reason to go to the forest and yet he accompanied Ram and served Ram. Now, Ram was sentenced to the forest. So, Lakshman was not.
So, Ram had to go. Lakshman did not have to go and Ram had Sita with him. Lakshman did not have his wife Urmila with him.
So, Lakshman’s sacrifice is enormous and today when siblings often barely meet each other, leave alone care for each other much, leave alone sacrificing anything for each other, the fraternal bond can be enormously strengthened when we see how Lakshman devotes himself to his duty to Ram and similarly, Ram considers Lakshman very dear to him and that’s why at one point when Ravana’s arrow has apparently killed Lakshman, Ram is devastated and he says that today the agony, misery that I’ve suffered is greater than suffering of being separated from Sita and I might get another wife like Sita but I can never get a brother like Lakshman who sacrificed everything for me. Alas, how can I live without him? So, that was the intimate bond which they had among each other and another example of sacrifice is in Bharat whereas Lakshman followed and shared Ram’s suffering. Bharat who had the complete setting made for him to take over the kingdom refused to enroach on what was his brother’s quota.
He refused to grab his brother’s property. Today, when often parents, when a father or the parent dies having a lot of property, succession battles break out between children as soon as the father dies or sometimes even before the parent dies and imagine today what son would actually, what brother would actually offer the platter to his brother and what father, what brother would ask for the slippers of another brother to carry on his head. In fact, if one brother gave his slippers, probably the other brother would take the slippers and smash his brother only on the head and knock him unconscious and take away his property.
So, the selflessness that is demonstrated in Bharat’s example is vital. Today, if that example were followed and so many succession battles could be minimised if not eliminated entirely and so much fraternal harmony, brother to brother love could be preserved. Now, somebody will say all this sounds very good, the idea of sacrifice is good but if we try to sacrifice like this in today’s life, we will be walked over, people will exploit us.
Yes, that is possible and that is why when we look at scripture and example of scripture, we look at them not for imitation but for inspiration. We do not try to literally replicate the practical, the practises of selflessness that they did but rather we try to internalise the principle of selflessness that they embodied and then according to our time, place and circumstance, we decide how best can we apply the principle of selflessness or that sensitivity to time, place and circumstance is also a part of the Ramayan tradition, Desha Kaala Patra and the point is that it is not that we have to be completely selfless and being selfless or being sacrificing doesn’t mean being exploited by others. It means being true to our principles even when it is difficult, even when the temptation to get quick gaze by giving up the principles beckons us, even then we stay true to our principles.
That is the essential lesson that we learn from the Ramayan, not imitation but inspiration. Now additionally, the Ramayan doesn’t offer only examples of selflessness. It also offers examples of the opposite that is selfishness and when it offers examples of selfishness, it offers those examples over a spectrum.
That means it offers total selfishness which is utterly completely insensitive and it offers shades of grey from black. So there is one extreme is the characters who are white. Those are extraordinarily selfless as it is shown over here.
Then there are characters who are black and there are characters who are in between the shades of grey. So let us look at them. We have on the extreme of black, we have Ravana who was a lusty power hungry demon and he wreaked havoc in the universe, plundering kingdoms, killing warriors brutally and then violating and even raping damsels all over the universe.
He would forcibly violate women and then abduct them to carry them and once their reputations were ruined, they had no alternative but to join his harem and he had no concern for others emotions. What I want, I get it now. To hell go considerations of right and wrong.
So here is the Ramayana which demonstrates his selfishness. It also demonstrates the end to which the selfishness comes eventually. When his evil eye extended to Sita, then he was taught a lesson by Lord Ram who sent him to his just destination.
So Ravana exemplifies what is black but in the shade of grey somewhere along the spectrum towards the black is the Vanara king Vali. Now Vali was a virtuous person but due to a hasty and nasty misjudgment, he exiled his own brother and he took away his family. He took Supriya’s wife as his own.
So both Vali and Supriya had once gone for a battle with a demon and that demon hid inside a cave. So Vali told Supriya to guard the cave and Vali went inside. But Vali did not come back for a long time and Supriya only heard the demon’s scream.
So Supriya thought that actually probably Vali has been killed and he came back and after grieving, after a period of mourning as the fact as he was befitting a king, he then ascended throne and then Vali came out and he saw that Sugriva was on the throne. Without asking anything, he immediately attacked Sugriva and drove him out. You wretched person, you drove me away and now later on I won’t go into the full story but the point is because of a misjudgment, he actually became very selfish and he had to be eventually punished when there was a fatricidal confrontation showed on between Vali and Sugriva and Lord Ram eventually punished Vali.
So after being punished by Lord Ram and after being shown the mistake of his ways, Vali did repent and he entrusted his jewel necklace which is the source of his longevity to Sugriva. So there this selfishness expended over several years, decades but eventually he repented. Ravana never repented.
That’s why Vali’s example is of less on the extreme. Then less example of selfishness is that of Kalki. Now she was because of the evil influence of her maid Manthara, obsessed by such insanity that she who was normally kind, gentle and wise, she became cruel, harsh and foolish etc.
and she had Ram exiled and because of that the whole of Ayodhya sank into an ocean of grief and her own husband Ashrath died in agony because of separation from Ram and yet she maintained her selfish zeal to have the kingdom given to Bharath. But when Bharath came and rejected her shenanigans and rejected her in fact, at that time she came out of her maniac selfishness and she sentenced herself to a life of repentance by that momentary madness, not momentary, by that temporary madness. So Kalki was not evil but she acted in an evil way during that time when she became power hungry.
So in this way, through these examples we can also learn to be cautious. Now we certainly few of us would want to act like Ravana being so lecherous, so malevolent, so monstrous but we can also succumb to misjudgments and become selfish like Vali or we can also succumb to the hunger for power and prestige like had happened to Kalki. So by by remembering such examples of selfishness and its consequences we can check those selfish tendencies within us and now this way relationships are at the heart of the Ramayana and if this example of selflessness in relationships is all that Ramayana had taught then that itself would be a valuable contribution of the Ramayana in today’s world where relationships are increasingly becoming strained and disrupted by selfishness but the Ramayana’s contribution goes more than just offering an example for our human relationships because the Ramayana centres on Ram and Ram is not ordinary human being.
He is a supreme being. He is God descended to this world as an avatar playing the role of a human being. So the relationships he has with those around him are examples not just of a human-human relationship but of a human divine relationship.
So now the human divine relationship is the only enduring relationship. We all need relationships. We all long to love and yet love is not what our human-human relationships cannot satisfy our longing for lasting love because even if they are fulfilling while they last eventually they become distressing even devastating when they are terminated by death.
This does not mean that our relation our longing for love and relationship has to be frustrated. It simply means that our longing has to be properly redirected. Redirected from redirected towards the supreme lord when we understand our relationship with the supreme lord as spiritual that means the relationship between us who are eternal souls and the lord who is the eternal supreme being then this relationship also becomes eternal and it is an eternally fulfilling relationship.
Why eternally fulfilling? Because the lord is all-attracting. The lord is all strength, all fame, all wealth, all power, all knowledge, all renunciation. These are attributes that attract people in this world and when people are attracted in this world so we like somebody who is very powerful somebody who is a big bodybuilder or somebody is very intelligent somebody is very good looking such people attract others so we are also attracted by such people and although these people have beauty strength or wisdom only fractionally for some time but even what is present temporarily is very attractive as long as it is present but when it is present eternally in someone then how much more attractive to me and actually when it is present in some people in this world it is also present fractionally because they have only a little bit of beauty but the whole reservoir of beauty the whole reservoir of wisdom whole reservoir of knowledge that is present in the supreme lord in the bhagavad-gita it is stated in 10.41 yath yath bhūti mat sattvaṁ śrīma dūrjitaṁ eva vā tattva devā bhagacchatvaṁ mamate jo amca sambhava that yath yath bhūti mat sattvaṁ whatever is attractive whatever is beautiful whatever is beautiful whatever is splendorous in this world its attractiveness comes from a spark of krishna splendour so when we understand this principle that everything attractive comes from krishna and we try to redirect our love from this world to krishna then we attain lasting happiness we attain everlasting happiness because krishna is eternal we are eternal in our lasting our relationship can be eternal and it can be eternally fulfilling in fact the lord descends to the world to help us attain this eternally such eternally fulfilling relationships he descends to give us an opportunity to learn to become attracted to him when we when we behold his beautiful pastimes and we see the loving reciprocations that are the heart of those pastimes in the bhagavad-gita krishna says janma karma chame devyam evam yo vetti tattvatah tattva deham punar janma naiti mameti so arjuna janma karma chame devyam janma karma krishna my appearance and my activity is devyam the divine the transcendental evam yo vetti tattvatah one who understand them in truth tattva deham punar janma such a person will not take birth again in this world naiti mameti so arjuna but that person will attain my eternal abode so we can all attain krishna’s abode by becoming attracted to his wonderful pastimes and understanding his pastimes as spiritual reciprocations of eternal love between him and his devotees so the ramayan demonstrates not just human-human relationship but human-divine relationship because lord ram is the supreme lord and when we serve him when we love him when we serve him then our love attains everlasting fulfilment and that spiritual love is the heart’s supreme aspiration from this perspective the relationships demonstrate the examples in the ramayan demonstrate selflessness in the human-divine relationship selflessness and devotional service to the lord today the word spiritual is quite common but spirituality is often reduced to a feel-good sentimentality wherever whatever feels good people do it and if it stops feeling good people stop doing it so this is very shallow or even shadow spirituality and even people who go to temples and are religious often their religiosity is ritualistic where they do something just because it’s a tradition or the culture not because they are seeking a transformation of the heart by doing it and that’s why the ramayan’s example is important even for spiritual relationships even for substantial spirituality which is actually a transformation when we want to love krishna love the lord love lord ram lord krishna lord vishnu love the supreme lord we have to have the principle of selflessness in our bhakti also without its principle of selflessness without being willing to give up those things that are enjoyable to us if those enjoyments are detrimental to our bhakti but detrimental to our spiritual growth unless we give those enjoyments we cannot actually advance in bhakti and unless we’re ready to take up sacrifices for the service of the lord take up risks in the service of the lord we won’t our devotion must be sentimental it will not become substantial and transformational it won’t become everlastingly fulfilling it won’t ever it will elevate us to the eternal abode when we are ready to sacrifice everything of this world for the sake of the lord of the world and such example of sacrificing human divine relationship can also be seen in the ramayan when we have the example of Sita who when she was abducted by Ravana, Ravana offered her the position of his chief queen he actually took her all around in his palace showed her the whole palace and he said this is all this will all be yours and although she was offered such temptation that would have been that would have been very difficult to resist for most women if their suitors were so fabulously wealthy but Sita unflinchingly unhesitatingly accepted it all and Ravana even went to the other extreme and he said if you don’t accept my proposition then i will have my cooks cook you and i will eat you as breakfast so and he gave her a grace period of one year one year you have to submit to me or i will i will enjoy you either as a sex object or as a food object even the threat of death Sita did not give up her principles she did not give up her devotion to the lord so and now we also in our social circles are sometimes threatened sometimes pressurised you know example people may say why don’t you drink a little bit why don’t you smoke a little bit why don’t you eat some meat why don’t you gamble why don’t you have illicit sex but we can take inspiration from Sita’s example and she was able to she resisted such great temptations what are these small small temptations surely we can resist them and although some people will pressurise us nobody practically hardly ever anyone threatens our life so life has not been threatened why should we succumb to such temptations and similarly the example of taking risks in the service of the lord that is embodied in the example of Jatayu and Hanuman both.
Jatayu he fought in his old age to try to stop Ravana from abducting Sita and although Jatayu knew in his heart that he would he was not strong enough to stop Ravana and he would die if he fought and Sita also knew this and she told Jatayu don’t try to stop Ravana just inform Ram. Jatayu thought how can I just stand passively by and let Sita be abducted I’m not able to live with myself better let me fight do my very best to stop even if I die so he was ready to lay down his life and lord Ram rewarded his sacrifice by personally performing his last rites as if he were his father as if Jatayu were his father just like a son performs the last rites of father lord Ram performed the last rites of Jatayu and Jatayu attained an eternal blessing in Shiva. Now if we see further the example of Hanuman.
Hanuman risked doing something which no other Vanara had done ever before jumping all the way to Lanka going hundred yojanas and then entering into Ravana’s impenetrable kingdom searching all over the kingdom finding Sita delivering a message giving a stern warning to Ravana overcoming most of his forces burning half of the kingdom and then returning back victoriously to Ram took such phenomenal risks and emerged successful. Now you may say all these examples of selflessness and bhakti are wonderful but they are not practical in today’s world actually they are practical and we have a living example of Srila Prabhupada who was a saint just as Hanuman crossed the ocean to go to Lanka to try to reunite Sita with Ram similarly Srila Prabhupada went across the oceans to Srila Prabhupada went across the ocean to get Sita like souls who had been abducted by the Ravana like materialism that is pervading society today materialism is coming in more and more in today’s society and today and today’s culture is aggressively materialistic through the advertisements through the media through the billboards through the internet and it drags people away from from spirituality from bhakti so those souls who have been dragged away abducted away Srila Prabhupada travelled all over the world way across various oceans to get those souls back in the devotional service of the lord and Prabhupada’s task was as imposing as impossible as was Jatayu’s task. Prabhupada was old as a Jatayu and the materialistic and materialism that is prevalent in his culture was as unstoppable as was Ravana but by Krishna by the lord’s incredible mercy by the lord’s extraordinary mercy Prabhupada was incredibly empowered and he was actually able to check the advance of materialism at least for a substantial number of people and he gave us Krishna he gave us Ram he gave us Bharti so certainly we may not have to do this kind we don’t have to face such herculean tasks in our bhakti but we can also apply the principle of selflessness in our bhakti in whatever way is required and is practical for us by meditating on these examples of these gallant characters in the Ramayana and the gallant examples of modern day Vaishnavas, modern day devotees who sacrifice themselves to the lord we can see that the Ramayana is eternally relevant and we can move from me to be both in our horizontal relationships with others in this world and in our vertical relationship with the supreme lord and thus we can attain fulfilment in our relationship in this world and have attain also attain eternal fulfilment in our relationship with the lord thank you