The Hard Result Reveals the Hard Cause
Ayodhya Kanda, Doha 179
Doha 179 · Movement 2 of 2
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Bharata explains his harsh self judgment through the relation of cause and result. What emerges carries the nature of what produced it.
A thunderbolt comes from bone, hard iron from stone. Cruel hardness does not appear without a corresponding source.
Thus he refuses to call his condition accidental. Born from Kaikeyi and placed at the center of her design, he imagines himself the fitting outcome of the cause. The reasoning is grief distorted into inheritance, yet it shows why assurances of innocence cannot reach him: he experiences the plot not merely around him but flowing through his own origin.
Bharata reads his mother's deed as the stone from which his own imagined hardness has been forged.
Read the passage from the Manas
कारन तें कारजु कठिन होइ दोसु नहि मोर। कुलिस अस्थि तें उपल तें लोह कराल कठोर।।179।।
When the cause is flawed, the outcome becomes painful; the fault is not mine. From thunderbolt comes bone, from stone comes iron, cruel and hard.