Rāvaṇa Calls a Council Again

Rāvaṇa summoned his war council, the great lords and warriors and commanders of Lankā, and his brothers, to take counsel on the coming war, and the council reveals, in the sharp contrast between the voices raised in it, the whole moral division of Lankā, and the tragedy of a king who could hear only the counsel that flattered his folly.

The council assembled, and the greater part of it spoke as Rāvaṇa wished to hear. His generals and his champions, proud demon warriors confident in their own might, boasted of their strength and made light of the coming enemy. What is this Rāma, they said in effect, but a mere man, an exile, a wanderer of the forest, with an army of monkeys? What is such a foe to the might of Lankā, that has conquered gods and subdued the three worlds? Let him come; let him try his ocean; we will destroy him and his monkey-host and think nothing of it.

There is no cause for concern, no need for peace or for the return of the woman; the whole matter is beneath our worry; we will crush this human and his beasts and add his defeat to the long roll of Lankā’s victories. So they boasted, one after another, the proud warriors of the demon race, flattering their king’s pride, making light of the danger, urging war and confidence and contempt for the enemy.

And there were among them those who boasted not merely from confidence but from the sycophant’s instinct to tell the king what he wished to hear, and these were the most dangerous of all, for they dressed their flattery as counsel and their cowardice-in-truth as courage-in-war.

They saw that Rāvaṇa wished to keep Sītā and to fight, and so they told him that fighting was wise and keeping her was safe, not because they believed it, some of them, but because it was what the king wanted, and it is the way of a tyrant’s court that the truth is the one thing no one dares to speak.

But not all the voices were of this kind. For there were among the elder and wiser of the demons, and above all among Rāvaṇa’s own kin, those who saw the truth and had the courage, or the desperation, to speak it, and against the chorus of boasting there rose the heavy, solemn counsel of the wise, warning of the doom that the boasters would not see.

Consider first the matter of the enemy they made so light of, one wise voice urged. This Rāma you call a mere man, a mere exile, what has he already done? He destroyed Khara and Dūshaṇa and fourteen thousand of our warriors, alone, in a single battle. And his servant, a single vānara, entered our impregnable city, wrecked the royal garden, slew the prince Aksha, defied the king in his own court, and burned our golden capital to the ground, and leapt away unharmed. Is this the work of a mere man and a host of beasts to be despised?

If one servant could burn Lankā, what will the master and his army do? You boast of our strength, but our strength has already been tested, in the person of that one vānara, and it was not enough even to hold him. Do not make light of this enemy; he is the mightiest we have ever faced; and we have brought him upon ourselves.

And the wisest went further, to the root of the matter, and counselled not merely caution in war but the undoing of the crime that had caused it. The truth, they said, is that this whole calamity springs from a single wrong: the taking of Sītā. She is another man’s wife, taken by force and deceit, and held against her will and against all dharma; and it is for her, and for the wrong of her taking, that this doom now approaches. There is one way, and only one, to avert it: return her.

Give Sītā back to Rāma, with honour and with apology, and the cause of the war is removed, and the war itself may be averted, and Lankā may be saved. To keep her is to keep the crime, and to keep the crime is to keep the doom. Let the king put away his pride and his lust, and return the woman, and save his city and his people from the destruction that her keeping will surely bring. This is the counsel of wisdom: not war, but the undoing of the wrong that has made war inevitable.

So the council divided, and the division was the division of Lankā’s very soul: on one side the boasters and the flatterers, urging war and confidence and the keeping of Sītā; on the other the wise and the righteous, urging the return of the queen and the averting of the doom. And between them sat Rāvaṇa, who had the power to choose, and whose choice would decide the fate of his city and his race.

And here is the tragedy that the council exists to show us, and the tellers weight it heavily: that Rāvaṇa, given the truth plainly and the way of salvation clearly, chose to hear the flatterers and to ignore the wise. His pride could not bear the counsel that required him to admit his error, to give up his prize, to bow to the demands of dharma and return the woman he had stolen.

It was easier, far easier, to hear the boasters who told him he was mighty and the enemy contemptible and the war certain to be won, than to hear the wise who told him he had done wrong and must undo it. And so, as tyrants do, as the proud do, as all of us are tempted to do, Rāvaṇa listened to the counsel that flattered his desire and ignored the counsel that challenged it, and inclined toward war, and toward the keeping of Sītā, and toward the doom that the wise had warned of and the flatterers had denied.

There is a deep and universal lesson in this council, and it is one worth carrying away, for the failing it shows is not the demons’ alone.

It is the failing of every proud heart that surrounds itself with those who echo its desires and shuts out those who speak the unwelcome truth; the failing of every power that mistakes flattery for loyalty and honest warning for disloyalty; the failing of every soul that, given the plain truth and the clear way of salvation, chooses instead the comfortable lie because the truth would cost its pride too much.

Rāvaṇa’s ruin was not forced upon him; it was chosen, in this council, when he turned from the wise to the flatterers, from the truth to the comfortable lie, from the way of salvation to the way of doom. He was given every chance; the truth was spoken plainly in his own hall; and he refused it, because to accept it would have meant humbling his pride, and his pride was dearer to him than his city and his people and his own life.

And so the council, which might have saved Lankā, instead sealed its doom, not because the truth was not spoken, but because the king would not hear it.

But there was one voice in that council not yet fully raised, one brother of Rāvaṇa whose righteousness ran deeper than the rest, who would not be content merely to counsel and be ignored, but would press the truth upon his brother to the very breaking point, and stake everything upon it, and, when the king refused, would make a choice that changed the whole course of the war.

For Vibhīshaṇa, the righteous brother, was about to speak, and to keep speaking, and to force the issue to a crisis that would end in his exile from Lankā and his defection to Rāma.