Rama Names the Most Painful Form within Maya's Powerful Host
Aranya Kanda, Doha 43ख
Doha 43ख · Movement 2 of 2
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Rama gathers the adversaries surrounding embodied life: desire, anger, greed, pride, and their companions. Together they form the powerful army of delusion, able to seize the mind and carry it away from the refuge that knows its weakness.
Within this ascetic teaching to Narada, woman as the form of Maya is named the most dreadful and sorrow-giving among them. The statement belongs to the question of the sage's desire for marriage and to Rama's explanation of the danger from which he withheld him.
The verse stands as a severe warning within that renunciant frame. Attraction takes visible form, Maya becomes intimate, and the threat is not distant philosophy but the exact attachment toward which Narada once ran. Rama reveals the protection hidden inside the refusal.
Narada remembers the desire that once mastered him, and Rama names the Maya from which grace drew him back.
Read the passage from the Manas
काम क्रोध लोभादि मद प्रबल मोह कै धारि। तिन्ह महँ अति दारुन दुखद मायारूपी नारि।।43।।
Kama, krodha, lobha, and other forms of mada, and the powerful moha they sustain; among these, the most fearsome and sorrowful is maya in the form of woman.