Chapter Five: Avatāra Doctrine and Rama Worship
In the song immediately preceding it, Tulsidas explicitly reveals his own “form”:
She gave her companion beautiful counsel and became absorbed in love,
forgetting all awareness of herself.
Tulsi remained standing like a figure carved from stone—
not knowing whence she came or whose daughter she was.1
This “she” is Tulsi himself, and she is also the ascetic of the Mānasa. Several amorous songs in the Gītāvalī support the author’s conclusion that Tulsidas’s outward practitioner-form followed propriety and the servile disposition, while his inward, secret, perfected form enjoyed līlā in the disposition of a female companion.
A broad and tender crystal slab, crowded with divine tamala trees;
lovely nets of vines steal the beauty of canopies.
On the bank of the Mandakini, thronged with lovely deer and birds,
the grave voices of steadfast sages resound like chants of the Sama.
Bees and cuckoos sing; lovely mountain cascades pour,
droplets flashing beneath dense shade where the sun cannot reach.
Every season and the lord of seasons perpetually prevail; three kinds of breeze forever blow—
as though this were the pleasure garden of King Love.
There stands a wondrous hut of leaves fashioned by Lakshmana,
where compassionate Rama and Janaki ever dwell.
With their own lotus hands they make a bed of tender leaves and flowers,
thirsting for the nectar of one another’s love.
Rama paints Sita’s limbs with mineral colours and divides flowers into ornaments;
what need has the moonlike Lord of any other art?
Sweetness, play, and laughter are here—Tulsidas sings their glory.
May this supremely beloved pair, dearer than life, dwell within the heart.2
And again:
At dawn the life of Janaki awoke.
Skilled bards, flute and vina players, poured out delicious melodies and modes.
His lovely dark body stretched in languor, steeped in the nectar of his beloved’s love.
His charming eyes still drowsy, his lovely face an abode of happiness—
beholding him, the proud armies of Love fled defeated.
Poets, delighted by his naturally beautiful form, found their comparisons fulfilled.
Day and night, Tulsidas remains absorbed in loving attachment to this incomparable beauty.