End of Rāvaṇa

Rāvaṇa came out for the last time, in his full and final power, in the uttermost of his might and his despair, to meet Rāma in the last combat, and the death of Rāvaṇa is the climax of the whole war and of the whole story’s long movement toward the destruction of evil, and the tellers give it all the weight and splendour it deserves.

He came in a fury and a grandeur that surpassed anything he had shown before, for now he had nothing left to lose and everything to avenge, his brother and his sons and his champions all fallen, his kingdom crumbling, his doom upon him, and he poured into this last battle the whole of his terrible strength and his whole armoury of celestial weapons, resolved to destroy Rāma or to die.

The final combat between Rāma and Rāvaṇa was a thing beyond all the combats that had gone before, a battle of such magnitude that the tellers say the gods themselves gathered to watch it, the very cosmos holding its breath as the champion of dharma and the lord of the demons met at last in the combat that would decide everything.

And it was long, and it was terrible, and it was not easily won, for Rāvaṇa in his final desperation was a foe of tremendous power, and the two of them contended with a fury that shook the worlds, hurling their celestial weapons against one another, the whole sky ablaze with the terrible astras they loosed, the earth trembling beneath the violence of their contention.

And Rāma, though the mightier, found the demon king hard to bring down, for Rāvaṇa fought with the strength of despair and the whole accumulated power of his boons and his sorceries, and the combat raged on and on without decision, the two of them matched in a struggle that seemed as if it might never end.

And there was a wonder in the fighting that made Rāvaṇa seem almost undefeatable, for when Rāma struck off one of Rāvaṇa’s ten heads, another grew in its place; and when he struck off another, it too regrew; so that however many of the demon’s heads Rāma severed, they grew back as fast as they were cut, and Rāvaṇa could not be killed by the striking-off of his heads, for they were endlessly renewed.

This was the fruit of an old boon or an old power, and it made the demon king seem proof against death, for the very means of killing him, the severing of his heads, availed nothing against their endless regrowth, and Rāma, cutting off head after head only to see them regrow, could not by that means bring his enemy down.

And there came a point in the long combat when even Rāma grew weary, when the endless struggle against the seemingly undefeatable demon wore upon him, when the battle seemed as if it might exhaust even the champion of dharma.

And in that hour of weariness, help came, and it came in the form of wisdom and of a sacred hymn, for the sage Agastya, who was present among the watchers, came to Rāma and taught him a great and sacred prayer, the Āditya Hṛdayam, the Hymn to the Heart of the Sun, a hymn of praise to Sūrya the sun-god, the source of all light and life and strength.

Recite this hymn, Agastya counselled Rāma, and worship the sun, the source of all energy, and your strength will be renewed and your victory assured, for in this hymn is the power to overcome even the mightiest foe. And Rāma, receiving the hymn, recited it, and worshipped the sun, and his weariness fell away and his strength was renewed and his whole being was filled with a fresh and radiant power, and he turned back to the combat renewed, ready now to accomplish the doom that his weariness had delayed.

Renewed by the Āditya Hṛdayam, Rāma understood now, too, the secret of Rāvaṇa’s seeming invincibility, for the endless regrowth of the heads meant that Rāvaṇa could not be killed by the severing of his heads, and another means was needed.

The secret was this: that within Rāvaṇa, in his body, there was a vessel or a store of amrita, the nectar of immortality, and it was this that renewed his heads and sustained his life, and while it remained he could not be slain; but if it could be destroyed, if the shaft could be aimed not at his heads but at the seat of the nectar in his body, then the source of his renewal would be destroyed and the demon king could die.

And Vibhīshaṇa, or the counsel Rāma had received, made this known, and Rāma fitted to his bow the mightiest of all weapons, the Brahmāstra, the supreme celestial shaft, and he aimed it not at Rāvaṇa’s heads but at his heart, at the seat of the nectar of immortality within him.

And Rāma loosed the Brahmāstra, and it flew true, and it struck Rāvaṇa in the heart, and it pierced the vessel of the nectar and destroyed it, and dried up the source of the demon king’s renewal, and with the nectar destroyed the heads no longer regrew and the life could no longer be sustained, and Rāvaṇa, the ten-headed lord of the demons, the conqueror of the gods, the terror of the three worlds, was slain at last, brought down by the supreme weapon in the hand of the champion of dharma, falling in his full might and his full pride to the earth, dead, his long reign of terror ended, the evil he embodied destroyed, the doom that the wise had foretold and the demons had come to dread accomplished at the last.

And the tellers give us a moment at the demon king’s death that lifts it above mere triumph into something graver and more just, for as Rāvaṇa lay dying, his chief queen Mandodarī came and lamented over him, and in her lament she spoke the truth of his fall, that Rāma was no mere man but the Supreme Lord himself, Vishṇu descended into the world, and that Rāvaṇa had brought about his own destruction through his own sinful desire, that the whole doom had been the fruit of his own lust and pride, that he had warred against God and destroyed himself in the warring.

It was the final confirmation of the suspicion that had been dawning among the demons: that they had fought Nārāyaṇa himself, and that Rāvaṇa’s ruin was self-inflicted, the harvest of his own crime.

And there is a strange grace even here, for the tellers note that Rāvaṇa, mighty and learned and in many ways great, fallen through his one ungoverned passion, was granted in his death by Rāma’s hand a kind of liberation, released from his evil existence by the very Lord he had opposed, so that even the destruction of the great enemy was, at its deepest level, a deliverance.

So Rāvaṇa fell, and the war was won, and the evil that had darkened the three worlds was destroyed, and the long labour of the road and the alliance and the crossing and the war was accomplished at last.

And the tellers pause to draw the meaning of Rāvaṇa’s whole tragic greatness and terrible fall, for he was not a small villain but a mighty one, gifted and learned and powerful beyond almost any being of his age, and all of it was poured down the drain of a single ungoverned appetite, a single refusal to master his own desire, a single crime that he would not undo.

His fall is the story’s deepest warning about the ruin that lies in wait for the great, that the mightiest strength avails nothing against the enemy within, that a being who conquers gods may be destroyed by his own lust, that the failure to govern the self is the failure that undoes all other greatness. Rāvaṇa had everything, and lost everything, for the sake of a woman he could not have and would not release, and his end is the end of all who set their ungoverned wanting above the law of dharma and their own pride above the counsel of wisdom.