Chapter 2 — The Birth of the Four Princes

When Sumantra heard the king's command, he remembered an old prophecy.

Long before, the sage Sanatkumara had spoken of a king of Ayodhya who would grieve because he had no son. The king would seek the help of an ascetic named Rishyasringa, and through rites conducted by him four sons would be born. Sumantra had kept those words in his memory. Now he told Dasharatha that the time had come to act upon them.

To explain why Rishyasringa was the man they needed, Sumantra began with a story from the kingdom of Anga.

Rishyasringa was the son of the forest ascetic Vibhandaka. He had been raised far from cities, among sacred fires, study, and the severe disciplines of his father's hermitage. He knew the duties of an ascetic life, but almost nothing of the larger human world. He had never encountered the manners of a royal court or even met a woman.

At that time no rain fell in Anga. Fields hardened, stored grain became a measure of fear, and the drought burdened the entire kingdom. King Romapada asked his counselors how it might be ended. They told him that rain would come if Rishyasringa could be brought into his realm.

Bringing him there was not simple. Vibhandaka's anger was feared, and his son had no reason to leave the forest. Romapada's counselors therefore proposed a calculated deception. They sent beautifully adorned courtesans to entice Rishyasringa by various means. Fearing Vibhandaka, the women entered the forest and approached the country near the hermitage.

When they approached him, he received them with the hospitality he had been taught. He offered them water and fruits of the forest. In return they gave him rich foods and sweets unlike anything he knew. They sang, laughed, placed their arms around him, and treated him with a practiced warmth for which his secluded life had given him no understanding. To Rishyasringa, their clothing, their food, and their gestures all belonged to an unfamiliar world. The royal plan was hidden from him.

The women left because they feared Vibhandaka. Their departure left Rishyasringa restless and unhappy. The next day he went back to the place where he had seen them. They met him there and invited him to visit the place from which they had come. He followed them out of the forest and crossed into Anga.

As he entered Romapada's kingdom, rain fell. The change was sudden: the long-held sky opened over a kingdom that had waited for water.

The king received the ascetic with every honor and sought to protect himself from Vibhandaka's anger by treating Rishyasringa with reverence. Romapada then gave him his daughter Shanta in marriage. The marriage is named, but neither Shanta nor Rishyasringa is given a private voice within it. From then on they stood together in the chain of events that would lead to the birth of Dasharatha's sons.

Having told this story, Sumantra returned to Sanatkumara's prophecy. Romapada was Dasharatha's friend. If the king of Ayodhya went to Anga and asked for Rishyasringa's help, the ascetic would conduct the necessary rites. The four sons promised in the prophecy would then continue the Ikshvaku line.

Dasharatha consulted Vashishta and received his approval. He traveled to Anga, where Romapada welcomed him, and asked that Rishyasringa and Shanta come to Ayodhya. Romapada consented. When the party approached Kosala's capital, the road had been prepared and the city adorned for their arrival. The royal household received Shanta and her husband with honor.

Then Dasharatha placed his longing before Rishyasringa. He asked the ascetic to conduct a sacrifice through which sons might be born to him.

Rishyasringa agreed.

The undertaking began with the release of the royal horse. A sacrificial ground was marked out on the northern bank of the Sarayu, and the horse was released under guard for the year prescribed by the ashvamedha, the horse sacrifice.

While the year passed, preparations spread along the riverbank. Vashishta directed builders, artisans, ritual specialists, servants, and performers. Halls and lodgings rose for the kings and learned guests who would come from other realms. Food and drink were gathered in abundance. The work demanded precision, but it also demanded hospitality. Those who labored there, no less than those who arrived in splendor, were to be fed and treated without contempt.

When the horse returned, rulers, priests, and visitors had assembled in Ayodhya. The rite proceeded under Rishyasringa and the other specialists who knew its words and actions. Days of recitation and offering followed one another. Fires burned on carefully constructed altars. Gifts and provisions moved through the great encampment, and Dasharatha submitted his royal desire to a discipline older and more exacting than any command he could give in his court.

The splendor of the gathering did not change what the horse sacrifice required. It was an animal sacrifice, not a symbolic release. Animals were offered, and Kausalya did not stand outside the killing of the royal horse. She performed the rite's prescribed action, killing it with three blades, and remained beside it through the ritual night. Afterward, its parts were offered in the sacred fire according to the rite.

These were solemn obligations, not bloodless symbols. Nor did Kausalya's part disappear behind the work of the priests: she, too, bore the weight of what Dasharatha had undertaken for the continuation of the royal line.

When the ashvamedha was complete, Dasharatha offered enormous gifts. The priests declined the lands first presented to them. Devoted to sacred study, they said, they were not able to govern and protect a kingdom. The king therefore gave them other wealth. Only after the horse sacrifice had been brought to its end did he ask Rishyasringa once more for the sons he desired.

Rishyasringa promised that four sons would be born. He then began a second offering, distinct from the ashvamedha and directed specifically toward the birth of heirs.

As the offering entered the fire beside the Sarayu, the story opened into a world hidden from the king.

The gods and other celestial beings had gathered to receive their shares of the sacrifice. They went before Brahma, the creator deity, with a danger that their own power could not remove. Ravana, lord of the rakshasas, had become a source of terror throughout the worlds.

The word rakshasa names a kind of powerful nonhuman being in the world of the Ramayana; it is not simply another tradition's word for a demon. Ravana was feared because of what he had chosen to do with his strength. He oppressed gods, sages, and other beings, and acted as though no power could restrain him.

That confidence rested on a boon Brahma himself had granted. Ravana had asked to be safe from gods and from many orders of mighty nonhuman beings. He had not asked for protection from humans. They seemed too weak to deserve his fear.

His contempt had left an opening in the boon.

Brahma told the assembled gods that a human could bring about Ravana's death. They turned to Vishnu, the great deity who protects the worlds, and asked him to accept human birth among Dasharatha's sons. In that form he could meet Ravana beyond the protections the rakshasa lord had demanded.

Vishnu chose Dasharatha as his human father. He would enter the king's household in fourfold sonship and take up the work for which the gods had appealed to him. A deity's taking of embodied birth in the world is known as an avatar. Vishnu would become human through the four sons, without becoming four separate fragments of a finite body.

Nothing of this council was heard in Dasharatha's encampment. The king knew only his own longing, Rishyasringa's promise, and the offering before him. He did not know that the need of his household and the need of the worlds had met within the same fire.

Then the flames changed. The heat before the altar seemed to gather itself; those watching saw the fire no longer only as flame consuming an offering, but as the threshold from which an answer might come.

From them emerged a formidable radiant being, dark in hue and clothed in red. He held a large golden vessel with a silver cover in his great arms. He announced himself as a being of Prajapati, lord of created beings, and came before Dasharatha.

“This has been divinely prepared for you,” he said. “It will bring you sons and increase your line. Give it among your worthy wives.”

Within the vessel was payasa, a divine milk-based preparation. It was food, not a potion, and the promise it carried came from the gods whose presence Dasharatha had sought through sacrifice.

The king received the vessel reverently and carried it into the palace. He gave one half of the payasa to Kausalya. Of what remained, he gave one half to Sumitra—a quarter of the original whole. He then gave one half of the food still remaining to Kaikeyi, an eighth of the whole, and placed the final eighth in Sumitra's hands.

No reason is given for this division. The portions are not described as rewards or judgments; the smaller share is not an insult, nor the double gift an omen. Kausalya, Kaikeyi, and Sumitra all received the divine food with joy. Each understood that she had been included in the honor and in the promise of sons.

The purpose unfolding around Ayodhya reached farther than its palace. At Brahma's direction, celestial powers brought into being future allies for Vishnu's human life: vanaras and great bears of extraordinary strength, able to change their forms and move through forest and mountain. Vanaras are powerful forest beings, often represented in monkey-like form, not merely ordinary animals. Their names and deeds still lay ahead. For now, the worlds were quietly preparing help for a struggle that no human character yet knew was coming.

The rites beside the Sarayu ended. The visiting kings returned to their own lands, and the vast encampment emptied. Rishyasringa and Shanta departed with honor. Dasharatha remained in Ayodhya with the promise he had pursued through counsel, travel, a year of preparation, and two solemn offerings.

In time, that promise entered the life of the royal household.

Kausalya gave birth to a son. Kaikeyi also gave birth to a son, and Sumitra gave birth to two. In the birth of all four, the human hope of the Ikshvaku house and the hidden purpose of Vishnu had taken living form. The king who had looked beyond himself and seen no heir now had four newborn sons.

Eleven days after their birth, Vashishta performed the ceremony of naming them. To Kausalya's son he gave the name Rama. Kaikeyi's son he named Bharata. Sumitra's two sons he named Lakshmana and Shatrughna.

Within the family that had waited so long for them, Vashishta spoke the four names for the first time: Rama, Bharata, Lakshmana, and Shatrughna.