Ravana Teaches Impermanence to the Women While Refusing Its Truth
Lanka Kanda, Doha 77
Doha 77 · Movement 2 of 2
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Ravana rises among the women mourning Meghnad and offers them consolation. Look within your hearts, he says. Every form visible in this world is perishable.
The teaching is true. Son, warrior, palace, body, and empire arise in form and pass from form. Nothing displayed before the senses can keep the promise of permanence that grief demands from it.
Yet the speaker remains enslaved to the desire and pride that produced the death he explains. Ravana can name impermanence for others without allowing it to loosen his hold upon Sita, sovereignty, or enmity. Wisdom spoken from an untransformed heart still shines as wisdom, but it also reveals the distance between understanding a sentence and becoming free through it.
Ravana correctly calls every form perishable while clinging to the one doomed form he still names himself.
Read the passage from the Manas
तब दसकंठ बिबिध बिधि समुझाईं सब नारि। नस्वर रूप जगत सब देखहु हृदयँ बिचारि।।77।।
Then the ten-necked Ravana consoled all the mourning women in various ways: 'Consider well in your hearts; all forms in this world are perishable.'