The Great Causeway

The army stood at the sea, and the sea would not be crossed by an army, and so Rāma turned to the ocean itself, and what followed shows both the patience and the power of the divine, and gives us one of the best-loved small tales in the whole epic.

Rāma resolved first to ask the ocean’s help by the proper means, by petition, by penance, with courtesy and respect. For the ocean was not merely water but a power, a divine being, the lord of the sea, and Rāma would ask that power to grant him passage, to make a way for the army to cross.

So Rāma sat down upon the shore, upon a bed of the sacred kusha grass, and addressed himself to the ocean in penance, waiting, with folded hands and fixed devotion, for the sea-god to appear and grant his prayer, honouring the ocean as one honours a great power whose aid one seeks, choosing courtesy and patience before force.

And he waited. For three days and three nights, the tellers say, Rāma sat in patient petition upon the shore, humbly, respectfully, asking the ocean for passage. And the ocean did not answer. The sea-god, in pride or in indifference or in the mere insensibility of a great power to the courtesy of a suppliant, made no response, granted no passage, sent no sign, but lay there vast and silent and impassable, ignoring the petition of the very Lord of the worlds who sat humbly upon its shore asking its aid.

And here Rāma’s patience turned, at last, to a righteous anger, and the turning is instructive, for it shows that even divine patience has its limit, and that courtesy ignored may rightly give way to force.

When the ocean would not answer his three days’ humble petition, Rāma rose up in wrath, and he took up his bow, and he fitted to it the most terrible of weapons, and he threatened to dry up the ocean itself, to burn away its waters with a celestial fire, to reduce the whole sea to a parched bed of sand across which his army could simply walk, since the sea-god would not grant by courtesy what courtesy had asked.

He drew the fearful weapon, and the whole ocean began to boil and churn in terror as the power of that drawn astra reached toward it, and the creatures of the deep fled in panic, and it seemed that Rāma would indeed make good his threat and unmake the sea.

And now, of course, the ocean answered, for the great powers that will not heed courtesy will heed force, and the sea-god, terrified, rose up at last from his waters and appeared before Rāma in supplication, begging him to withhold the terrible weapon, granting now in fear the passage he had refused to grant in courtesy. Forgive me, lord, the ocean pleaded, and do not unmake me; I will grant you passage; only tell me how I may serve you, and hold back your weapon.

It is a slightly comic reversal, and the tellers enjoy it: the proud power that ignored three days of humble petition now groveling in terror the moment force was shown, and it carries its own quiet lesson about the limits of courtesy in dealing with the arrogant, and the rightness of force when courtesy has been exhausted.

But there remained the practical problem, for Rāma did not, in the end, wish to dry up the sea; he wished only to cross it; and the ocean now offered a better way. The waters could not simply be parted or dried for so vast a host; but a bridge could be built across them, and the ocean would bear it up, would suffer a causeway to be laid upon its surface and would hold it firm, if only the army could build one.

And there were among the vānaras those with the skill to build it: two in particular, Nala and Nīla, who had a divine gift for construction, sons of the celestial architect, able to build what others could not. Let them direct the work, the ocean counselled, and I will hold up what they build, and your army shall cross dry upon a bridge laid over my waters.

So the great work of the causeway began, and it was a labour worthy of the army that undertook it.

The vānaras set to it with their whole enormous strength and their boundless energy, tearing up trees and boulders and whole hillsides, uprooting mountains, carrying immense rocks to the shore and casting them into the sea, while Nala and Nīla directed the work, and the ocean bore it up, and day by day the great bridge, the Setu, extended itself across the water, a causeway of stone laid league by league over the sea, reaching out from the near shore toward distant Lankā.

It was a stupendous feat, the bridging of a hundred leagues of ocean by an army of vānaras casting mountains into the sea, and the tellers give us the spectacle of it, the countless workers, the hurled boulders, the rising causeway, the whole enormous labour of making a road across the sea.

And into this great labour the tellers weave the small and beloved tale of the squirrel, which is the moral heart of the chapter, and one of the most cherished stories in all the telling. For amid the mighty vānaras hurling their mountains and boulders, there was a tiny squirrel who also wished to help. The squirrel could not carry mountains; it could not hurl boulders; it was small and weak and its strength was nothing beside the strength of the great vānaras.

But it wished to contribute to the sacred work, and so it did what it could: it rolled in the wet sand of the shore until its little body was coated with grains of sand, and then it ran to the causeway and shook the sand from its fur into the cracks and crevices between the great stones, and ran back, and rolled in the sand again, and carried another tiny load, over and over, contributing its minute grains of sand to the mighty bridge of mountains.

And one of the great vānaras, a mighty builder, noticed the tiny creature underfoot, getting in the way of the great work with its absurd little grains of sand, and was annoyed, and moved to brush it aside, to sweep the insignificant thing out of the way of the serious labour of the mighty. But Rāma saw, and Rāma intervened, and gently, tenderly, he took the little squirrel up into his own hands, and stroked its small back, and rebuked the vānara, and spoke words that are among the most beloved he ever spoke.

Do not despise this small one, Rāma said. Do not imagine that its contribution is worthless because it is small. Look: it is giving all that it has, its whole strength, its whole effort, its little grains of sand offered with a pure and devoted heart. The mountains of the mighty vānaras are great, but they are given out of great strength, and cost the givers little of their all; this squirrel’s grains of sand are tiny, but they are the whole of what it has to give, and are offered with as much love and as much devotion as any mountain.

In my eyes the squirrel’s grains of sand are no less precious than the mightiest vānara’s mountains, for I do not measure a gift by its size but by the love with which it is given, and by what it costs the giver of the whole that the giver has. This small one gives its all; what more can the mightiest give than all?

And Rāma stroked the little creature’s back in blessing, and the tellers say that the marks of his fingers remain upon the squirrel to this day, the three pale stripes down its back the touch of Rāma’s hand, an eternal sign of the divine tenderness toward the smallest and the humblest of givers.

Let us take this small tale to heart, for it carries, in miniature, one of the deepest teachings of the whole epic, the same teaching we saw in Shabari’s half-eaten berries: that the divine measures our offerings not by their size or their worldly value but by the love and the devotion with which they are given, and by whether we give of our whole selves.

The squirrel’s grains of sand and Shabari’s tasted berries are the same lesson twice told: that the humblest gift, given with a whole and loving heart, is as precious to the divine as the greatest, and more precious than any great gift given without love.

The mighty vānaras with their mountains were doing a great work, and it was good; but the tiny squirrel with its grains of sand, giving the whole of its little strength out of pure devotion, was as dear to Rāma as any of them, for the whole of a little is as complete an offering as the whole of a great deal, and love does not come in sizes.

It is a teaching that lifts up the small and the humble and the poor, that tells every one of us, however little we have to give, that our little given wholly and lovingly is received as fully and cherished as dearly as the greatest gifts of the greatest givers; and it is one of the reasons this story has been loved, across the ages, by the humblest of the people, who found in it the assurance that their small offerings, their grains of sand, were precious in the eyes of the Lord.

The bridge was completed, the causeway of stone laid all the way across the sea from the near shore to Lankā, held up by the ocean, built by the vānaras, blessed by the squirrel’s grains of sand, and the way was open at last. The army that had stood halted at the impassable sea could now cross it, dry-shod, upon the great Setu, and pour across to the far shore, to Lankā, to the war.

And so the host began to cross, streaming across the miraculous bridge over the ocean, carrying the war at last to the very shore of the enemy’s island, and the great and terrible business of the siege and the battle was now, after all the long road that had led to it, about to begin.