Chapter Six — Rama’s Transcendent Form and Infinite Qualities

Rama’s divinely auspicious form stands beyond material nature, while he dwells within every heart. He is Brahman—desireless, stainless, and imperishable.

Rama, your essential form is beyond speech and beyond the intellect: inaccessible to the senses, indescribable, and boundless. The Vedas can only say, “Not this, not this.”

Your body consists of consciousness and bliss. Those qualified to know it understand that it is free from every transformation.

Sense objects, sense faculties, gods, and living beings are each conscious through another. The supreme illuminator of them all is beginningless Rama, Lord of Ayodhya. The world is what is illumined and Rama is its illuminator; he is master of maya and the abode of knowledge and virtue. In dependence upon his reality, insentient maya appears real under the assistance of delusion.

Rama is beyond mind and speech and is not an object of the senses. He reveals himself solely through his own grace. That grace itself is devotion: one who worships by taking refuge in its cord abides in him, and he abides in that devotee.

The all-pervading Brahman, stainless, attributeless, unborn, and beyond worldly play, is nevertheless held by loving devotion as a child in Kaushalya’s lap.

Although impartial, the Lord responds according to what resides in the hearts of devotees and non-devotees. The Bhagavad Gita declares:

I am equal toward all beings; none is hateful or especially dear to me. Yet those who worship me with devotion dwell in me, and I also dwell in them.

Rama’s endless divine qualities include gracious accessibility, tenderness, parental affection, gentleness, and steadfastness. Every quality found within the three worlds appears from only a fraction of his qualities. Even Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesha receive from him the virtues by which they are honoured:

It is he who gives the creator his power to create, Hari his power to preserve, and Shiva his auspiciousness. That sweet, bliss-filled and all-auspicious form is Janaki’s Lord. (35, completed)