Ramayana

Open to Desire
by Mark Epstein, M.D.

(Page 5 of 7)

Ravana looked at Sita and he thought - Mine.

Ramayana (p. 176)

The grandest and most vivid portrayal in all of Indian mythology - indeed, in all of the world's mythologies - of the enlightening potential of desire can be found in an ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana. One of India's most popular tales, the Ramayana, 25,000 verses long, is a story about the movement from clinging to pure desire. While it is a Hindu tale, it embodies a universal wisdom, one that is also vividly portrayed in the Buddhist path of desire. The Ramayana describes, in mythic form, the journey that is possible from clinging to non-clinging when desire is acknowledged as a path in its own right. Its main characters, the lovers Sita and Rama, are buffeted back and forth between union and separation throughout the tale, aided in their attempts to reunite by a famous monkey named Hanuman. Like the Buddha's teachings, the Ramayana, written sometime between 220 b.c. and 200 a.d., was carried all over Asia, only recently reaching the West. Its stories adorn the walls of Buddhist temple complexes at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built one thousand years later, and it is still performed in predominantly Muslim Indonesia, where its vitality has survived long after the decline of both the Buddhist and Hindu religions. While it is a Hindu tale, its lessons have been embraced by peoples of many different religions.

I read the Ramayana for the first time on my honeymoon in Bali and Java and was amazed to see its stories acted out in dance, puppet shows and theater while I was grappling, in my own internal way, with the implications of the story for my marriage. It seemed as if, during my month's immersion in the tale, I was living it, reading it and seeing it everywhere. When my wife and I had children, the Ramayana was one of the first long stories that we read to them. When my daughter, at around age four, first entered a synagogue, she whispered to me, as she gazed at the tabernacle where the Torah is stored, "Is that where Hanuman lives?" The universality of the story was not lost on her either.

While the love that connects Sita and Rama is never in doubt throughout the long separation that defines most of the story, it is their desire for each other that keeps them seeking reunion. One way of reading the Ramayana is as a teaching in how to use desire in the service of love: how to use the inevitable expanse that one finds between lover and beloved as a vehicle for greater wisdom and compassion. While the imaginative structure of the Ramayana is completely different from a modern psychodynamic text, its message is one that can be easily translated into the psychological language of our time: The gap between lover and beloved is the space where the most critical emotional and spiritual work takes place.

This is not the conventional interpretation of the story, of course, one of the most popular in all of South and Southeast Asia. For some, it is merely a fantastic adventure story, the tale of a huge battle between the exiled prince Rama and his army of animal helpers on one side; and the demon king Ravana and his force of unrepentant rakshasas, a race of powerful beings living on the island of Lanka who have managed to kidnap Rama's lovely wife, Sita. For some it is primarily a story of devotion centering on the monkey-god Hanuman, who is something of a trickster but who is completely at the service of Rama, saving his life and rescuing his wife from the evil demons. For others, it is a divine romance, a tale of undying love between Sita and Rama, two aspects of one divinity whose separation from each other is purely illusion, acted out for the benefit of their devotees.

While lessons about desire are indeed present in the story, they are not what is commonly attended to, at least not consciously. Sita and Rama are certainly lovers, but Rama (unbeknownst to him) is an incarnation of Vishnu, an aspect of God. It is standard practice, in fact, to see all of the passion in the story as an allegory for the love of God. It is easy, under the spell of the divine, to ignore the teachings about human desire that are implicit in the tale. My old friend and teacher Ram Dass (whose own Hindu name means, "servant of Rama") virtually scoffed at my interpretation when I presented it to him."Rama and Sita are pure people," he reminded me. "Human desire goes in a different category. The ego has many desires; the only desire the soul has is to merge with God."

While there is truth to what Ram Dass told me, I do not entirely agree with him, at least as far as accepting the strict division between what the soul wants and what the ego wants. This splitting apart of the self into lower and higher is one of the unskillful tendencies that the Ramayana story addresses. While it is inevitable to some degree for desire to go astray, the denigration of desire can itself become one of the ways that its wisdom is thwarted. To see desire as limited to the realm of the ego and therefore always potentially dangerous is to miss its true nature. Ultimately, the power of desire can be harnessed for spiritual growth. This is the message of the Ramayana.

There is an amusing story from the Zen Buddhist tradition of Japan about a Zen monk scrawling a poem across the face of an erotic painting of a courtesan. He wrote the following:

Up and down,
Up and down,
I've got a lot of Endurance -
Doesn't anyone notice my true purpose?

The Ramayana is the story of desire's discovery of its true purpose: the overcoming of the clinging or craving that the Buddha described as the origin of suffering. What is remarkable about it is that this overcoming of clinging is accomplished in the context of an ever-deepening and intensifying passion. While the tendency of desire to fragment, to split itself into lower and higher, instinctual and spiritual, or human and divine, is the subtext of the tale, desire's ability to resolve these splits is the story's essence. In the Ramayana, this split and its resolution are acted out literally. Part of the reason for the tale's longevity and popularity, I believe, is that the difficulties faced by its protagonists are our difficulties also. Like Sita and Rama, we all have to learn how to navigate the waters of our most intimate relationships, face the loneliness and separateness that come with love, and confront the demons that keep us from knowing the divinity of our desire.

Copyright © 2006 Dr. Mark Epstein

About the Author

Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City who lectures frequently about the value of Buddhist meditation for psychotherapy. His previous books include Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, and Going on Being. He is a contributing editor to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and has written many articles for Yoga Journal and O: The Oprah Magazine.