Four Approaches To Ramayana Illustrated

Let us illustrate the four perspective approach to  the Ramayana by applying it to one of its most significant, trajectory-altering incidents: the poisoning of Kaikeyi’s mind by her maidservant, thereby leading to Rama’s banishment from Ayodhya.

Literal Perspective: Drama And Trauma

If we examine this incident from a literal perspective, it is intriguing in the sense of being filled with intrigues. From a narrative standpoint, the idea of a sudden change in the character of a character is a powerful tool for catching attention. What keeps people engrossed in a book or a movie is plot twists, especially those that make the audience gasp. “I didn’t see that coming.” This incident comprises such a plot twist.

The Ramayana describes how the family of Dasaratha, the king of Ayodhya, was living together not just cordially, but also joyfully. Although Dasaratha had three co-wives, and although his special attraction to his youngest co-wife, Kaikeyi, had altered the normal hierarchy of power in the royal family, with the youngest queen getting far more attention and influence than the seniormost queen. Still, this alteration didn’t lead to disruption. Because Kaushalya had soon come to peace with her lesser influence, and Kaikeyi too did not feel any need to parade or impose her greater influence. But then came the dramatic moment of succession, when the eminently worthy Rama was to be appointed as prince regent so that he would eventually become the next king. In that moment, Kaikeyi comes in like a bulldozer, devastating the bonhomie of the royal family.

Kaikeyi was kind at heart, gentle in speech, judicious in action. Yet she becomes the polar opposite: cruel at heart, harsh in speech, rash in action. And this utter change in her disposition leaves others traumatized. The king who was in jubilant spirits becomes so despondent that he soon loses his will to live and literally passes away. The kingdom that was in a mood of celebration sinks into an ocean of lamentation. The prince who was about to become the wealthiest and mightiest person in the kingdom as the next king — that very prince becomes so poor and powerless that he has to immediately leave the kingdom — and leave with practically nothing, wearing tree bark.

Ethical Perspective: A Monstrous Misjudgment

From an ethical perspective, Kaikeyi made a grievously, even grotesquely, wrong choice that took her down a dark and disastrous trajectory. Her degeneration could be conveyed in three stages, depicted through the acronym HAD — as in the sense, “I have had it with you,” which is what someone would say to us if we acted like Kaikeyi. The three stages are

l Hearing without challenging

l Acting without consulting

l Demanding without clarifying

Hearing Without Challenging:  Kaikeyi’s hunchbacked maidservant, Manthara, wanted to maintain her privileged position in the palace staff as the favorite assistant of the king’s favorite queen. This position had insulated her from the teasing she had been earlier subjected to from others because of her hunchback. As Kaikeyi had become increasingly dear to the king and as her power in the royal household had correspondingly grown, so had the stature of Manthara. And the head maid had used that stature to lord it over other staff members. She feared that she would no longer get the respect to which she had become so habituated if Kaikeyi lost her prime position when the crown passed to her stepson, Rama. To stop the crown from going away from Kaikeyi’s orbit of influence, she decided to incite Kaikeyi. Accordingly, she concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory centered on the idea that Kaikeyi’s rival, Kaushalya, had contrived with Dasaratha to sideline Kaikeyi. How? By having Kaushalya’s son, Rama, appointed as the successor instead of Kaikeyi’s son, Bharata. To make her theory seem more believable, she insisted that the urgency with which the ceremony for succession was taking place was proof that something malicious was a foot.

Though there had been some normal rivalry between the queens, there had never been any malice. Still, Kaikeyi heard Manthara’s narrative submissively and uncritically till she became ready to do whatever it took to protect her son’s interests. And thus, she became ready to go along with Kaikeyi’s scheme to two demands from her husband. First, appoint Bharata as the prince regent and thus the de facto successor king. Second, and much more agonizingly for the king, exile Rama to the forest for fourteen years. Manthara insisted the second demand was essential to actually fulfill the first. If Rama was present in the kingdom, neither the courtiers nor the citizens would accept Bharata as the king.

Acting Without Consulting:  Kaikeyi promptly acted as Manthara recommended because she believed two things. First, Manthara’s account of Dasharatha’s motivations was true. Second, Manthara’s scheme was the only way to protect her son’s interests. Even if her natural maternal affection for her son had made her emotionally vulnerable to the conspiracy theory about her husband’s intentions, she could still have been more resourceful in looking for various solutions. She was after all a seasoned kshatrani, a royal lady with adult sons; she had a lifetime of experience, and experience in palace power at that. She could and should have known that there is always more than one way of achieving one’s goal. To that end, she could have sought confirmation and alternative solutions from someone like the royal sage, Vasishtha. He was their dynasty’s priest, whose position didn’t depend on which son became the next king in the dynasty. Therefore, he was unlikely to be prejudiced either for Rama or against Bharat. As an unbiased and wise elder, he could have been a ready resource for Kaikeyi to consult. Unfortunately, Kaikeyi didn’t turn to him or anyone else for any alternative perspective on the issue.

Demanding Without Clarifying:  Kaikeyi placed her demands before Dasaratha when he came to meet her. She could see that while he had come in a jubilant mood due to Rama’s upcoming coronation, her words left him first stunned, then shocked, then shattered. This was the person who had always treated her with such affection. Did she really need to ask from him something that would rip their family apart? Did she want to risk turning a deaf ear when he begged her to relent, at least in her demand that the blameless Rama be exiled — especially when he tearfully spoke the words that were the fear of every queen: that she would become a widow, because he wouldn’t be able to live without Rama? Could she not give him a little benefit of the doubt and ask him to tell his side of the story? Maybe she could directly ask him the reason for the unseemly haste in coronating Rama? If only she had asked, he would have assured her there was no conspiracy. The haste was just because he had suddenly noticed signs of aging in his body, because he felt strongly that he had already delayed the succession for too long, because the astrologers had warned that none of the near future dates were auspicious for the coronation save the immediate future. And her suspicions would have been allayed, and the whole catastrophe could have been averted.

Kaikeyi’s unilateral deeds and uncompromising demands led to broken hearts and ruined relationships. Such a fate can befall us too if we act like Kaikeyi: if when they do something we find objectionable, we don’t give our loved ones even a chance to explain their thinking. Instead, if we act aggressively based on our presumed, and often presumptuous, assumption about their motives, we end up causing them unbearable pain.

How can we protect ourselves from such tragic blunders? Do the opposite of what Kaikeyi did in this situation. We can do the three C’s: Challenge, Consult, Clarify. First, challenge those who ascribe dark motives to our loved ones — probe their motives; consult respectable neutrals about our understanding of the problem and the solution; and clarify before placing any disruptive demands.

Allegorical Perspective: The Inner Wasteland

What happens to and through Kaikeyi can symbolize how misconceptions take root in our heart and misdeeds arise from there. We can compare the kingdom of Ayodhya to our heart, Kaikeyi to us as souls, Manthara to our mind, and Lord Rama to the indwelling Supersoul, who is the manifestation of divinity present in every heart (Bhagavad-gita 15.15). If we are not on guard while dealing with our mind, it can act as our worst enemy (Gita 6.6). And one of its first inimical actions is to alter our conception of the indwelling Lord: instead of viewing him affectionately as our benefactor, we start seeing him antagonistically as an obstructor.

Manthara’s toxic words so totally poisoned Kaikeyi’s mind about Rama that she had him banished from Ayodhya. Similarly, our mind’s toxic inner chatter can make our disposition so non-devotional, even anti-devotional, that we wish to have nothing to do with the Lord, who is actually our greatest well-wisher (Gita 5.29). Unlike Rama leaving Ayodhya, the Lord never leaves our heart. Still, his presence becomes increasingly unperceivable for us as our receptivity to him decreases and our hostility towards him increases. On Rama’s departure, Ayodhya became like a ghost town bereft of beauty, energy, activity. Similarly, our heart becomes like a barren wasteland when we insist on sticking to schemes that require us to neglect or reject our Lord’s presence in our life. Though we may get our way, our heart starts feeling gnawingly cold and empty, as did Kaikeyi’s heart even after she succeeded in her scheme to have Bharata appointed as the successor.

Kaikeyi came to her senses only when Bharata returned to Ayodhya and reproached her severely for her hard-hearted and heinous actions. She had been deafened and deadened to any criticism of her actions by anyone else because she had convinced herself, “I am doing all this only for my son’s sake. Even if no one understands my noble and selfless intentions, he will.” But then that very son criticized her, nay, condemned her. That’s when her bubble of self-righteous illusion burst; and the gravity, insanity and perversity of her actions sank into her, leaving her aghast and remorseful. But by then it was too late. Her husband had died of heartbreak and Rama, sentenced to exile.

How can we ensure that we aren’t similarly and sinisterly seduced by our mind? We can’t, by ourselves — especially on those occasions when the mind’s spell captivates and converts our intelligence, leading us to rationalize our actions. The more we believe that our intentions are selfless, the less we care when the world condemns our actions as shameless. For surviving those dangerous and treacherous contingencies, we need someone like Bharata to shake us out of our mind’s spell: to challenge and counter and crush its self-serving narrative.

To have a Bharata in our life, we need to, in advance, invest in creating a deep and strong relationship with someone trustworthy. The more the trust in that relationship, the more the likelihood it can empower us to distrust our mind, specifically our mind’s version of suspicious-seeming things. Normally, we look at everything and everyone through the filter of our mind. Whenever anyone doesn’t see things the way our mind prompts and persuades us to see them, we tend to devalue and dismiss them as uninformed or misguided or biased. But if we have even one person in our life, who we trust as much as our mind, or better still, more than our mind, then we won’t look at that person’s words through the filter of our mind. Rather, we will look at that person’s explanation of things, separate from our mind’s version of things, and then evaluate which account is more aligned with reality: which makes more sense objectively and which is more likely to work constructively. The less we have such close relationships, the more we are likely to be troubled and tormented by our mind. In fact, this inverse correlation between relationships and mental health is evident in contemporary sociological and psychological findings: people who are lonely are far more vulnerable to mental health problems than are people who are embedded in a network of rich relationships.

Ultimately, the most trustworthy friend that we can have is God himself. He never abandons us; he never misunderstands us or our situations; he never fails in guiding us from within to correct our misunderstandings. However, unless we are very spiritually evolved, we can’t clearly hear God’s voice in our own hearts. That’s why we need to build strong relationships with good and godly individuals who can serve as instruments for conveying God’s guidance, thereby equipping us to resist and reject our mind’s false narratives.

Transcendental Perspective: Helpful Antagonists 

Herein, we see everything that happens within this pastime, including even the actions of Kaikeyi, as ultimately an arrangement of the Lord for furthering his own plans, which culminate in manifesting loving exchanges between him and his devotees. The love in such exchanges may not be initially evident, but as the narrative progresses towards its denouement, then the love becomes not just evident, but also triumphant.

At this level, we see all characters, even those who seem to be acting against the Lord’s interests, as also ultimately serving the Lord; they are playing a necessary antagonistic role for making his pastimes more exciting. That some characters play less favorable roles, or even inimical roles, doesn’t detract from the fact that they still have the fortune to participate in his pastimes and are therefore special characters. Kaikeyi is one such special character, and she, when seen from this perspective, acts inimically so that the Lord will leave the safe precincts of Ayodhya and venture into the forests where sages are being persecuted by demons. Thus, he will fulfill the dual purposes of his descent mentioned in the Gita (4.8): protecting the virtuous and neutralizing the vicious. Even if the actions of characters like Kaikeyi seem unloving, we need to see beyond such lower visions of reality to the highest truth within all of existence: reality: divine love. With that superlative vision, we see that God’s love for all living beings, including us, reigns as the supreme reality (Gita 4.9). And it inspires us to make our reciprocal love for him as our supreme reality for directing our life, our decisions, and even our desires (Gita 4.10).

Chaitanya Charana Dasa is the associate-editor of Back to Godhead (US and Indian editions). To read his daily Bhagavad-gita reflections, please subscribe to Gitadaily on his website, thespiritualscientist.com.