Son of the wind

Rama is able to free Sita only by securing the help of Hanuman. Hanuman, the monkey-god, son of the wind, is the bridge between the two lovers, the vehicle that helps them overcome the obstacle of possessive ego that has come between them. Both the wind and the monkey, in Indian thought, stand for the mind. As the son of the wind, Hanuman's crucial role in the story suggests how important the training of the mind is for overcoming the gap that desire leaves in its wake. Hanuman's role is to bridge the gap that ego creates: to break down the tendency to objectify the beloved and open up an appreciation of the subjective, and ungraspable, aspect of another's experience. Hanuman taps the creative potential of the human imagination. He fills the intermediate space between lover and beloved, the space that must be trained in meditation in order that desire not fall victim to frustration and disappointment. Hanuman represents the inner life that the confrontation with dukkha opens up. But his job is to help differentiate pure desire from the clinging that tends to obscure it.

Hanuman's exploits fill the central part of the Ramayana. It is he who discovers where Sita is being held captive and he who journeys to furtively meet with her. In one famous leap, he straddles the ocean between India and Lanka, and after confronting Ravana he sets the entire city on fire with his burning tail. Returning to Rama, he recruits an army of talking animals to build a massive bridge across the ocean to set the scene for the final climactic battle in which Rama can finally rescue Sita and bring her home. It is only at this point that Rama discovers his divine origins.

In the Ramayana, Sita and Rama's physical separation is a metaphor for the separation of subject and object or lover and beloved. Sita's rescue depends on a third force that can bridge the distance between them. Embodied by the monkey Hanuman, son of the wind, this liminal character is the key to the resolution of one of desire's most persistent dilemmas. For in a certain way, desire does not know quite what to do with itself. It seeks union, possession or complete satisfaction, but never completely achieves it. As the Buddha recognized in his First Noble Truth and as Freud agreed many centuries later, there is a residual dissatisfaction in even the most satisfying experience. The object always disappoints.

Hanuman's character demonstrates the way through this problem, the most crucial aspect of the path of desire. In creating a bridge to Lanka, helped by an animal army recruited to the cause of reuniting the separated lovers, Hanuman shows that it is possible to break down the tendency to objectify both the self and the beloved. In confronting the tendency toward objectification, Hanuman and his helpers function the way the transitional object aids a young child in a psychodynamic model: A bridge between self and other is created that makes an appreciation of their fluid natures possible. For instance, when a young child plays imaginatively with a favorite stuffed animal, one of the things that happens is that his or her inner life is deepened. The "transitional" function of this play is to help the child tolerate a separateness that would otherwise feel overwhelming. Play helps a child not take separation too seriously. In helping Sita and Rama reunite, Hanuman shows them how deepening their intimacy depends on how they understand the gap between them.

Desire is central to the story of Rama and Sita. It rips them apart but ultimately brings them together again. As symbolized by their jewels, which they pass back and forth through the intermediary of the monkey, their desire eventually fuels their reunion. When Sita casts her ornaments down, she lights up the sky with her desire. Like shooting stars, they burn brightly and then fall into the care of the monkeys, pivotal characters who symbolize the ability to harness desire's fiery energy. Part of Sita and Rama's spiritual work is to figure out what to do with their desire: how to manage it and how to use it in the service of their love. Their struggle is our struggle. How can we prevent desire from being hijacked by the divisive force of clinging? How can we use desire to help us know the divine?

Something lacking

Desire can be a stubborn problem, one that can seem interminable. At the very close of Freud's life, in one of his final notes found scrawled on a single page of paper, we can see him still wrestling with his version of the problem:

The ultimate ground of all intellectual inhibitions and all inhibitions of work seems to be the inhibition of masturbation in childhood. But perhaps it goes deeper; perhaps it is not inhibition by external influences but its unsatisfying nature in itself. There is always something lacking for complete discharge and satisfaction - en attendant toujours quelquechose qui ne venait point. . . .

Freud's French phrase is his definition of desire: "always waiting for something which never came." In this phrase, Freud rubs up directly against the First Noble Truth of discontent while unknowingly referencing Sita's plight in Lanka. Nothing seems quite right. Even pleasure disappoints. There is always a residual sense of something lacking. But the Ramayana affirms something else, just as the Buddha did. While one aspect of desire's nature is certainly the gap between satisfaction and fulfillment, desire's ultimate goal is to free us from clinging. Sita's lover does come to her. To counter Freud's pessimism, we must travel the path outlined by the Ramayana. It is our own clinging, the cause of this "something lacking," that the yoga of desire seeks to help us with.

Desire, in its most fundamental form, recognizes the sense of incompleteness that is endemic to the human condition. It seeks a freedom from this incompleteness in any form it can imagine: physical, sensual, emotional, intellectual or spiritual. But like Sita entranced by the golden deer, we chase phenomena we can never truly possess. Yet as Sita learned through her various misfortunes, desire can be freed from the tendency to cling. As this happens, the sense of "self" and "other" becomes transformed as well.

These are the discoveries that Sita makes, imprisoned in the sinsapa grove by the demon king, wondering if her lover has forsaken her. First, Hanuman comes to her, bringing with him the promise of a bridge to her own separateness. Then, Rama arrives. A new kind of union becomes possible: one in which she becomes more than the object of another's desire; where her own voice, separate though it may be, is answered. Only then can her true oneness with Rama be appreciated.

As the Ramayana makes clear, desire has a vision that is paradoxical, a vision that can both confuse and enlighten us. It can make us feel ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. We can be as pure as Sita, as demonic as Ravana, as devoted as Hanuman, or as skeptical as Freud. Whatever our stance, we cannot escape its importance in our lives. Perhaps this is why the Buddha was careful to hold desire so lightly in his teachings. For desire, in its paradoxical nature, in its ability to simultaneously breach and maintain the space between lovers, in the way it both connects and separates, and in the manner in which it forces us to reconcile love and hate, is often as close as we come to liberation in our regular lives. Like the animal-headed goddesses who guard the entrances to some ancient Indian temples, desire summons, ties, binds and maddens, even as it ushers us toward innermost bliss. It is desire, after all, that makes us seek liberation in the first place.

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Copyright © 2006 Dr. Mark Epstein

Tags: Buddhism

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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. More