Rāvaṇa’s Defeat

The failure of even Indrajit’s sorcery to destroy the princes brought Rāvaṇa himself, at last, onto the battlefield, for the demon king could no longer leave the war to his champions when his mightiest son’s deadliest weapon had been undone, and he mounted his great chariot and rode out to meet Rāma in person, and the first combat between them is the subject of this chapter, and it ends in a defeat and a mercy that reveal the whole difference between the two.

Rāvaṇa came forth in all his terrible majesty, the ten-headed king, mounted in his war-chariot, arrayed for battle, mightier than any warrior yet seen upon the field, and his coming was like the coming of a storm, and the vānaras quailed before him, for here was the conqueror of the gods himself, the master of Lankā, come in his full power to the battle.

And he met Rāma, and the two of them, the champion of dharma and the lord of the demons, the descent of Vishṇu and the terror of the worlds, clashed at last upon the field, and their combat was a thing of tremendous and terrible splendour, the greatest single combat the war had yet seen.

They fought, and the fighting was ferocious, the two mightiest beings upon the field contending with all their power, and for a while the issue hung in the balance, for Rāvaṇa was no mean foe but the mightiest of the demon race, and his strength and his skill and his terrible weapons were formidable beyond anything the vānaras could match. But Rāma was Rāma, and slowly the combat turned, and Rāma began to master the demon king.

He broke Rāvaṇa’s weapons; he shattered his bow; he destroyed his chariot; he beat down the demon king’s whole array of might, until Rāvaṇa stood at last disarmed, weaponless, his chariot wrecked, his bow broken, his crowns struck from his heads, humbled and helpless before Rāma, wholly at his mercy, defeated utterly in this first great combat between them.

And here Rāma did a thing that has been remembered and honoured ever since, a thing that reveals the whole nobility of his nature and the whole code of righteous warfare that governed him. He had Rāvaṇa at his mercy, disarmed and helpless; he could have killed him then, ended the war in that moment, struck down the defenceless demon king and finished the whole matter. And he did not. Instead, Rāma looked upon his humbled and weaponless enemy, and he spoke to him, and he sent him home.

You have fought well today, Rāma told the disarmed demon king, but you are weary now, and your weapons are broken, and you stand defenceless before me. I will not strike down a foe who cannot defend himself; it is not the way of righteous combat to kill the disarmed and the helpless. Go, therefore. Return to your city. Rest tonight, and recover yourself, and repair your arms, and come again tomorrow with your weapons and your strength restored, and we will finish what we have begun in fair combat, foe against armed foe.

I will not take your life today by striking the defenceless; go home, and return tomorrow ready to fight, and let the battle be decided as a battle should be, in fair contention, not in the slaughter of the helpless. And so Rāma sent his greatest enemy home alive, unharmed, defeated but spared, to fight again another day.

Let us dwell on this extraordinary mercy, for it is one of the defining moments of Rāma’s character and one of the deepest expressions of the code of dharma that governs him, and it reveals the whole difference between Rāma and Rāvaṇa. Consider what Rāma refused. He refused to kill his defenceless enemy, the author of all the wrong, the stealer of his wife, the cause of the whole war, when he had him helpless and could have ended everything in a stroke.

Every consideration of advantage argued for killing Rāvaṇa then: it would have ended the war, saved countless lives, freed Sītā, accomplished the whole purpose of the campaign. And Rāma refused it, because to kill a disarmed and helpless foe, even so guilty a one, even at so great an advantage, was against the code of righteous warfare, was a thing beneath the dignity of dharma, was the kind of act that Rāma would not commit whatever it cost him.

He would defeat Rāvaṇa; but he would defeat him fairly, in armed combat, foe against foe, not by the slaughter of the helpless; and so he sent his enemy home to arm himself and return, choosing the harder and nobler course over the easier and baser one, even at the cost of prolonging the war and the danger.

This is the code of the righteous warrior carried to its highest and most demanding point, and the tellers hold it up for our admiration and our reflection. In war, the temptation is always to seize every advantage, to strike the enemy however one can, to count victory the only good and the means to it indifferent.

And against this Rāma sets a different standard: that even in war, even against the guiltiest enemy, there are things that must not be done, that the manner of victory matters as much as the fact of it, that to win basely is to lose something more important than the battle. He would rather fight on, at greater cost and greater risk, than win by a base act; he would rather spare his enemy and prolong his own danger than stain his victory with the slaughter of the helpless.

It is a standard almost impossibly high, and it is exactly the standard that makes Rāma what he is, the very measure of dharma, one who holds to the right not only when it is easy but precisely when it is hard, not only when it costs nothing but precisely when it costs everything.

And the mercy reveals, by contrast, the whole difference between Rāma and Rāvaṇa, between dharma and its enemy. Rāvaṇa had taken another man’s wife by cowardly deceit; he had refused every chance to undo his wrong; he had fought by sorcery and from concealment; he had stooped to torment a helpless captive with lies. And Rāma, having this same Rāvaṇa defenceless before him, spared him, out of honour, out of the code of righteous combat, out of a nobility that Rāvaṇa could not even comprehend.

The one who did wrong by every base means; the one who, having his enemy helpless, would not strike him basely. In that single contrast, the mercy of Rāma set beside the cruelty of Rāvaṇa, the whole moral meaning of the war is made plain: that this was not merely a contest of strength between two mighty beings, but a contest between two ways of being, the way of dharma and the way of its abandonment, and that Rāma’s greatness lay not only in his power to defeat Rāvaṇa but in his refusal, even in defeating him, to become anything like him.

So Rāvaṇa went home that night, defeated, humbled, spared by the mercy of the enemy he had wronged, and we may imagine that the mercy stung worse than any wound, for to be spared by the one you have wronged, out of a nobility you do not possess, is a humiliation deeper than defeat.

And Rāvaṇa, returning to his shaken city, defeated in his own person, his sorceries undone and his own might overthrown and his life granted him as a gift by his enemy, understood at last, perhaps, in the bottom of his proud heart, that he faced a foe he could not defeat, and that the doom the wise had warned of was truly upon him. And in that knowledge, desperate now, he turned to the last and mightiest of his resources, to the terrible sleeping giant who was his brother, and gave the order to wake Kumbhakarṇa.