Why Lord Rama Is the Greatest: Maryada Purushottam Explained

The Ramayana does not begin with Rama. It begins with a question about whether anyone like him is possible.

Valmiki puts it to the sage Narada. Is there a man alive in the world right now who is virtuous and capable, who knows dharma and keeps his word, who is steady in conduct, who wishes well to all creatures, who is learned, who is beautiful to look at, who has mastered anger? The list runs to sixteen qualities in the traditional count, and it is deliberately unreasonable. Any one of them is difficult. All sixteen in one man is the sort of thing a sage asks about because he expects the answer to be no.

Narada says yes. One. Born in the line of Ikshvaku, known among men as Rama.

That exchange is the first sarga of the Bala Kanda, and everything the epic does afterwards is an attempt to make the answer hold up. The claim is not that a god came down and was impressive. The claim is that the highest standard a human being can be held to was actually met, once, under conditions that were made as hard as a poet could make them.

Maryada, and what the word means

Rama's title is maryada purushottama. The second half is the easy part: purushottama, highest among men. The first half is where the whole figure lives.

Maryada is a boundary. It is the line drawn on the ground, the mark on a field, the shore that the sea does not cross. It carries the sense of a limit that is honoured rather than a limit that is enforced, which is a distinction with consequences. Nobody is stopping Rama. He stops himself.

So the title reads: the highest of men, within the line.

This is a strange thing to build a god around, and Hinduism built a second one the other way to prove it knew what it was doing. Krishna moves through the Mahabharata breaking form wherever form has become an obstacle, lying when the truth would destroy the world, counselling a warrior to strike a man in the thigh. Rama, given a comparable set of pressures, does not bend once. The tradition kept both and subordinated neither.

A figure who can do anything is a low bar for a story. A figure who can do anything, and declines, is the harder thing to write, and much harder to be.

Fourteen years, accepted in a single conversation

The city is already decorated. The coronation is set for the morning. Dasharatha has made his decision, the ministers have agreed, and Ayodhya has been awake all night getting ready.

Then Kaikeyi calls in two old boons. Bharata takes the throne. Rama goes to the forest for fourteen years.

What happens next is the reason the epic exists. Rama is told the news by Kaikeyi herself, the person who benefits from it, in the presence of a father too broken to speak. He has the army's loyalty, the city's love, the law of succession and an obviously manipulated king. Every instrument of power in the kingdom is within reach.

He asks no questions about whether the boons were fair. In Valmiki's Ayodhya Kanda he tells Kaikeyi that his father had only to say the word, that the boons were unnecessary, that he would have gone at a single command. Then he asks her to look after Dasharatha, and goes to tell his mother.

The refusal repeats, and the second time is harder. Dasharatha dies of grief. Bharata, who wanted none of this, marches to Chitrakuta with the army and the ministers to bring his brother home. The father whose word bound Rama is now dead. The brother he would be displacing is on his knees asking to be displaced. There is no one left with a claim against him.

Rama holds the term anyway. Bharata takes his sandals back to Ayodhya, sets them on the throne, and rules for fourteen years as regent for a pair of shoes rather than as king.

The vow that let an enemy's brother in

The war is about to begin and Rama has no kingdom, no army of his own, and a coalition of forest people against the strongest ruler in the world.

Vibhishana arrives. He is Ravana's brother, he has walked out of Lanka, and he is asking for refuge on the eve of the fighting. Sugriva's objection is the obvious one and the correct one: this is the enemy's blood, arriving at the exact moment a spy would arrive.

Rama's answer is one of the most quoted things he says.

"He who comes to me even once, seeking shelter, saying 'I am yours', I grant him freedom from fear of every creature. This is my vow."

Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda, in the council over Vibhishana

He is the weaker party. He is being told, accurately, that this is how the weaker party gets killed. He takes the risk because the vow does not contain an exception for danger, and a vow with an exception for danger is not one.

The same restraint runs into the fighting itself. On the first day Rama breaks Ravana's bow, destroys his chariot and leaves him standing in the field with nothing. He does not finish him. He tells him to go home, rest, and come back tomorrow properly armed, and he hands back a war he had already won.

Mareecha, who has fought Rama and survived it, gives Ravana the warning that has become the standard description of the man: Rama is dharma given a body. That assessment comes from an enemy, in the Aranya Kanda, and the epic lets it stand as the plainest thing anyone says about him.

Sita, and the part a case cannot skip

An argument that avoids its hardest evidence is not an argument, so here it is.

After Ravana is killed, Rama does not receive Sita back the way the audience expects. He speaks to her coldly in front of the assembled army and says the war was fought for his house's honour rather than for her. Sita asks for fire, walks into it, and Agni himself carries her out unburnt. In Valmiki's Yuddha Kanda it is at this moment that the gods appear and tell Rama what he is, and he answers that he had thought of himself as a man.

The second episode is worse and comes in the Uttara Kanda. Rama is king. A washerman in Ayodhya is heard saying he is not Dasharatha's son, to take back a woman who lived in another man's house. Sita is pregnant. Rama sends her into exile, and Lakshmana leaves her near Valmiki's own hermitage. Years later, when the ashvamedha requires a wife beside the king, Rama refuses to remarry and has a golden image of Sita made to stand in her place. When she finally returns, she does not stay. She calls on the earth, her mother, and the earth opens and takes her.

Three things can be said about this, and each one strengthens the case rather than weakening it.

First, the poem's honesty here is the reason to trust it everywhere else. Valmiki gives Sita the best speeches in the poem and lets them stand. A court flatterer would have cut this book. An epic that spends six books establishing a man's perfection and then records exactly what that perfection cost the person who trusted him most is not mythmaking. It is testimony, kept by a poet who valued the truth above his hero's comfort.

Second, the Uttara Kanda, along with the Bala Kanda, is widely held by scholars to be a later layer added to a core running from the Ayodhya Kanda to the Yuddha Kanda. That is a fact about the manuscript tradition and it is worth knowing. But the case does not lean on it, because the fire ordeal is in the core, and the case survives the fire ordeal whole.

Third, taken as it stands, the exile comes out of the same machinery as everything admirable in the man. Maryada cuts in both directions. Someone who will not place himself above the standard will, pushed far enough, place the standard above the person he loves. That is a real cost, the poem records it as a cost, and a standard that cost its keeper nothing would not be a standard worth the name.

Hindus have argued about this for centuries without settling it, in commentary, in regional Ramayanas that change the ending, and in living conversation. It is an old internal argument, not something outsiders found.

The first poem

Valmiki is walking near the Tamasa when a hunter shoots one of a pair of krauncha birds and the surviving bird cries over the body. Grief comes out of the sage as a curse, and the curse comes out in perfect metre. Shoka becomes shloka.

The tradition calls him adi kavi, the first poet, and the Ramayana adi kavya, the first poem, and the origin story it tells about itself is that poetry began as an involuntary response to somebody else's loss.

What follows is roughly twenty-four thousand verses in seven books. Its core is commonly placed in the middle of the first millennium BCE, which puts it among the oldest sustained narrative poems in any human language, and unlike most of its contemporaries anywhere in the world it has never once stopped being read. There is no gap in the transmission to recover it from. No dark age, no rediscovery, no scholar unearthing a forgotten manuscript. It has been recited continuously for something like two and a half thousand years.

The story that crossed every border it reached

Thailand's national epic is the Ramakien. The old Siamese capital was called Ayutthaya after Ayodhya, and the kings of the current dynasty are titled Rama, up to Rama X.

Java has the Kakawin Ramayana in Old Javanese from around the ninth century, and the Prambanan temple carries the story around its walls in stone. Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country on earth and it dances the Ramayana still, as inheritance rather than as religion.

Cambodia has the Reamker, and Angkor Wat carries the battle of Lanka in bas-relief. Laos has Phra Lak Phra Ram, Myanmar the Yama Zatdaw, Malaysia the Hikayat Seri Rama.

Inside India the retellings run to Kamban in Tamil, Krittibas in Bengali, Ezhuthachan in Malayalam, Tulsidas in Awadhi, and dozens more in every literary language the subcontinent produced. Scholars who have tried to count the distinct Ramayanas stopped somewhere in the hundreds.

None of that spread was administered. No empire imposed it and no missionary carried it as doctrine. Traders, poets and courts moved a story, and the story kept working in languages and religions that owed it nothing.

What the record shows

There is no need to measure Rama against the founders of other traditions, because the record stands on its own, and it stands early.

Consider what is actually on the page, and when it was put there. A ruler bound by a line he will not cross even with every instrument of power in his hand. An unconditional grant of refuge to anyone who asks, made at the moment it is most dangerous to make. A disarmed enemy sent home from the field instead of killed. A king held to the standard more strictly than his subjects, not less. The modern world knows these ideas as constitutional restraint, asylum, the laws of war, and equality before the law, and it reached them slowly, by treaty and revolution, over the last few centuries. The Ramayana states them complete, as one man's lived practice, in a poem whose core sits in the middle of the first millennium BCE. The concepts are here first, and they are here whole.

And here is a figure whose greatness is composed entirely of things he did not do: a throne he did not take, an enemy he did not finish while unarmed, a suppliant he did not turn away, a war he did not start, a second marriage he did not make. He is worshipped for restraint at a scale usually reserved for conquest.

The standard he models is aimed at exactly the person hardest to bind, the one holding all the power, and the epic applies it to him without mercy and without exempting him from the consequences, including the ones that cost him most.

Valmiki opened with a question. Does such a man exist anywhere in the world?

Twenty-four thousand verses later the answer offered is not a demonstration of power. It is a life in which nearly every advantage was declined, the hardest chapters were written down rather than edited out, and the standard survived contact with the man. Narada answered yes, the record has carried that answer for two and a half thousand years, and nothing in it has forced the answer to be taken back.