C. Dharma, Karma, Avatar, and Other Ideas

This book explains its terms as it goes, at the point where each one first matters. This section is for readers who would rather have the whole frame at once, either before starting or at the moment a chapter stops making sense. Nothing here is required to follow the story.

Everything below describes how the world of this book is understood to work, from inside it. It is not a summary of what any living tradition holds today.

Dharma

The word appears more often than any other, and it is not translatable by one English word. It covers what is right, what is owed, and what holds together, all at once. A person's dharma is what their position requires of them: a king's is not a hermit's, an elder brother's is not a younger brother's, and the same act can be required of one person and forbidden to another.

Two things follow that a newcomer should know from the start.

The first is that dharma is not conscience. It is not what a character feels is right. It is an external obligation that binds whether or not they agree with it, and much of this book is about people doing what their position requires at enormous personal cost. Rama's exile, Sita's banishment, and Lakshmana's death all turn on this.

The second is that a conflict between two obligations is a real conflict, not a puzzle with a hidden solution. When Rama must choose between being a good king and being a good husband, the book does not resolve it for you, and it does not pretend one of the two was never a genuine obligation.

Karma, and death before its time

Actions have consequences that outlast the moment, and sometimes outlast the life. Suffering may be traced to a wrong done in a former life, which is why a grieving father at a palace gate asks what he himself did to deserve it. Yama's court is where the results are assigned.

There is a second and stranger mechanism at work in the later chapters, and it causes newcomers the most trouble. The order kept in a kingdom is understood to reach into the working of things physically, not just morally. If the order holds, people live out their proper span. If it is broken somewhere, the damage surfaces somewhere else, possibly to someone who had nothing to do with it. Chapters 90 to 93 turn entirely on this claim, and they are difficult chapters. The book states the claim clearly, because otherwise what Rama does is unreadable. It does not defend it.

The four groups

The social order in this book is hereditary and ranked, with four groups: brahmins, the priestly order; kshatriyas, the warrior and ruling order; vaishyas; and shudras, the lowest. A person's group is fixed at birth and determines what they may do, including what religious practice they may undertake, and that permission is said to change from one age to the next.

This is presented as the world these characters live in and argue from. It is not endorsed, and where the book shows the order producing an atrocity it does not supply a justification or soften the result.

Tapas, and the worlds

Tapas is disciplined religious practice: restraint, study and ritual sustained over years, sometimes with severe bodily hardship. It is not private devotion, and it is not meditation in the modern sense. It accumulates power. A person who has gathered enough of it can compel an answer from the gods, and much of this book's plot runs on that fact, including Ravana's boon, which is simply the invoice for a very long course of tapas.

It also earns worlds: realms beyond the earth, held as securely as a king holds land and entered when the body is left. They can be taken away, and in Chapter 10 they are.

Note that "the three worlds" is a different use of the same English word. That phrase means the ordered cosmos as a whole, the thing Ravana is said to oppress.

Boons and curses

A boon is a granted exception to the way things normally work, given by a deity or another exalted being, usually in exchange for tapas. It is not approval. Brahma grants Ravana's request without approving of Ravana, and the boon does exactly what it says and no more, which is why it eventually fails him.

A curse works the same way in reverse and is just as binding on the one who pronounced it. Curses in this book are frequently the reason a character is in the situation they are in, sometimes generations later.

Avatar

A deity taking embodied birth in the world is an avatar. In Chapter 2, Vishnu takes birth as Dasharatha's four sons, all four together, without becoming four separate fragments.

The important thing for a reader is that the characters mostly do not know this. Rama lives his life as a man. Divine identity surfaces at a handful of moments and is then set aside again, and the grief and the mistakes are not made unreal by it.

The ages

Time runs in ages that repeat: Krita, Treta, Dvapara, and the one after. The events of this book are placed in Treta. What is prescribed, and who may do it, differs between one age and the next, and a character citing which age they are in is making a legal argument, not describing the weather.

Rishis and sages

A rishi is not a priest and not a scholar. Rishis are the ones who have done the tapas, and they are consequently among the most powerful figures in the book: their curses land, their blessings hold, and kings stand up when they enter. Sages arrive at the door with requests that cannot be refused, and refusing one is how a great deal of trouble starts.