Ramayana, Part 2

Open to Desire
by Mark Epstein, M.D.

(Page 6 of 7)

The story

The Ramayana begins with a fierce battle between gods and demons. Much of heaven is laid waste and the demon king, Ravana, extracts a boon from Brahma, the highest of the gods, that he shall be unslayable by every creature of Heaven and of the underworlds. But Ravana, like the human ego he comes to represent, is careless and proud. He neglects to request protection from humans and animals, not thinking that they could ever be a threat. In recognition of his oversight, the great gods Vishnu and Lakshmi are propitiated by the other gods into taking human birth. Vishnu splits himself into four parts and incarnates as four brothers, with Prince Rama of Ayodhya the eldest and strongest. The goddess Lakshmi incarnates as Sita, fated to be Rama's wife. In their human forms, Rama and Sita have no consciousness of their divinity, but they are nevertheless virtuous and honorable as would befit their heavenly lineage. Rama is groomed to take over the kingdom of his father but after the treachery of his stepmother is persuaded to abdicate the throne in favor of his half-brother while accepting a thirteen-year banishment to the forest accompanied by Sita and another half-brother, Lakshmana.

In India, the forest is the equivalent of the unconscious. It is the place outside of the rules and regulations of the home where spiritual seekers have always taken refuge. In the Buddha's story, the forest is where he goes to search for truth after discovering the reality of impermanence and suffering. In the Ramayana, the forest is a place of magic and mystery, populated by all the hybrid characters of Indian mythology. It is in the forest that the fated confrontation between Ravana and Rama unfolds.

It is Ravana's desire that brings him into Rama's orbit and Sita's desire that leads her astray. Ravana spies Sita and is smitten by her. He convinces a wizard friend to change him into an enchanted deer to capture Sita's attention when she is alone at her campsite, waiting for Rama and Lakshmana to return. Against her own better judgment, she follows the deer, and soon she is spirited away in Ravana's golden chariot, south to Lanka, land of the demons. The splitting of conventional desire is established by this kidnapping. Ravana is the king of ego and sensual longing, but Sita, after the deception of the deer is revealed, remains focused on Rama. As if to demonstrate this, at the moment of her abduction she drops her jewels into the waiting arms of two onlooking monkeys, pivotal characters who later in the story assist Rama and serve as his emissaries. The description in the story, which was meant to be sung in the Sanskrit verses of the original, is very beautiful:

Sita reached down her hands and broke the anklets off from her legs and let them fall down on that plain-looking hill. She took off her earrings and dropped them. Sita let all the ornaments of Anasuya fall, and she tied Guha's necklace in her yellow scarf edged with gold and dropped it also. Ravana did not notice. He sped away, and Sita's hair streamed out on the wind, and they left behind the two monkeys.

The two monkeys watched with their yellow-brown eyes never blinking, while Sita's gold and silver bells and bracelets fell ringing down and crying. The yellow scarf flashed down like lightning; the silver ornaments were the Moon and white stars dropping. Sita is suddenly and precipitously reduced to the common human predicament: She is cut off from God and is at the mercy of ignorance and instinct. The thing that makes her, in Ram Dass's words, "pure," is that she remembers her beloved and resists the co-opting of her desire. Sita is not desireless and not asexual, but her desire, after the brief interlude with the deer, is entirely focused on Rama. Although she is tortured by the multiheaded Ravana, emblem of addictive desire, she has no difficulty resisting his utter objectification of her. While Ravana's desire is to possess her completely, he is endlessly rebuffed in his quest. Sita cannot be swayed, although her faith in Rama is not as unwavering as her repulsion of his enemy.

While it is easy to scoff at Ravana's hubris, it would be a mistake to dismiss him too easily. He is not an unsympathetic character. He may be a demon, but in his entreaties to Sita, he can sound remarkably human. Ravana is us, trying to possess the objects of our affection, trying to merge with an objectified and idealized beloved. In his belief in the power of "objects" to satisfy his hunger, he exemplifies the clinging of the Second Noble Truth. He does everything he can to earn Sita's affection. He reminds me of a patient of mine: a big, likeable, energetic, extremely intelligent and sensitive man who often complained that his wife refused to have enough sex with him.

"I pay lots of attention to getting her aroused, to getting her off," he would tell me, as if I thought he was selfish. "Why doesn't she want it as much as I do?" He could hardly wait for his children to go to sleep so that they could "get randy," but she would all too often tell him politely that she was not in the mood.

"What is arousing for her?" I asked him one afternoon, and he became suddenly morose. He scanned his memory for a long time in silence. Then he remembered something that had happened not so long ago. His wife had asked him to help move some boxes that were cluttering up their front hall. If he would move the boxes, she had said, she would be more in the mood. He had been dismissive of her hint; it had not made any sense to him. Yet that was the only clue that came to mind. The story was all the more poignant because of the association that followed:

"My own father never did anything nice for my mother," my patient softly recounted. "But he would come up to her from behind and grope her breasts in front of us."

My patient was like Ravana when he had trouble empathizing with his wife's point of view, when he wanted simply to possess her without taking her desire into account. His failure to have his way with her, however, opened up the possibility, in my office, of newly appreciating her separateness and accepting his own. This was the key to a deeper connection. It was strange to him that the boxes in the hall could have anything to do with their sexual relationship, but this acknowledgment was the prerequisite for a rekindling of desire in their relationship. The Ramayana tells a similar story. Sita and Rama have to find their way back to each other once they are established as separate persons, divided by an ocean and under the siege of the demons. They may be divine, but on earth they have to act out the human predicament.

Rama, incarnation of Vishnu, unsuspecting manifestation of God, is bereft when Sita is taken away. Cut off from her, he seeks help from the monkey Hanuman and a host of other animals. Hanuman, the embodiment of devotion, brings Sita's jewels to Rama and then takes a gold ring back to her as a symbol of Rama's unflagging love, a ring given to him by Sita's father at the time of their marriage. Sita welcomes Hanuman, takes the ring and gives him one more jewel, a pearl mounted on a gold leaf that her father had tied into her hair on the day of her wedding. She refuses Hanuman's offer to fly her back to Rama, insisting that he come to free her himself. Sita demands nothing less than complete reunion, even if it takes an epic battle to accomplish it.

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.