In much of north India the ordinary greeting is still his name. Villagers say "Ram Ram" when they meet; a funeral procession chants "Ram naam satya hai", the name of Rama is truth. He is on the lips of people who have never read a page of scripture, which is fitting, because what Rama offers is not a philosophy but a way of behaving.
The story of the Ramayana, from the birth in Ayodhya to the return from Lanka, is told in its own article. This one asks a narrower question: what kind of person is being held up as the ideal, and what does that ideal ask of us?
What maryada purushottama means
Maryada means a boundary or limit, and by extension propriety, the line one does not cross. Purushottama means the best among persons, and is also a name of Vishnu. Put together, the title describes a God who chose to live entirely within human limits: he did not bend the rules of the world he entered, even when he could have. Hindus often set him beside Krishna, who is called lila purushottama, the supreme person at play. Krishna steals butter and bends promises for a higher end. Rama keeps every promise, even the ones that break his heart.
Valmiki opens his Ramayana by asking the sage Narada whether anyone alive is virtuous, strong, true to his word, grateful and free of envy. Narada answers with Rama. Later, the demon Maricha, who has every reason to hate him, warns Ravana in words the tradition never forgot:
Rama is dharma itself in bodily form, righteous and true in his valour. (Valmiki Ramayana, Aranya Kanda)
His father's word
The hinge of Rama's life is a morning in Ayodhya. Dasharatha has announced that Rama will be crowned the next day. Overnight his wife Kaikeyi claims two boons promised years earlier: that her son Bharata be crowned, and that Rama be exiled to the forest for fourteen years. Dasharatha collapses and cannot bring himself to say the words to his son.
So Rama says them himself. He hears the demands from Kaikeyi and his face does not change. He would have given Bharata the kingdom unasked, he tells her, and his father's word must not become false on his account. This is the detail to hold on to: Dasharatha never actually commanded him. Rama took the vow on himself to protect his father's truth. Lakshmana rages and offers to seize the throne; Rama calms him. Sita insists on coming; he lets her. He leaves in bark cloth without a backward look.
Bharata, returning to find his father dead and his brother gone, is the other half of this story. He refuses the throne, follows Rama to Chitrakuta and begs him to come back. Rama refuses: a promise is a promise. Bharata takes Rama's sandals, places them on the throne and rules as regent for fourteen years, living as an ascetic outside the city. Hindus honour his obedience almost as highly as Rama's.
The ferryman, the tribal woman and the bird
The forest years show what Rama's dharma looks like when no one is watching. At the Ganga he meets Guha, chief of the Nishadas, a forest people outside the caste order, and Valmiki has him embrace Guha as a friend. Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas adds the beloved boatman who insists on washing Rama's feet before letting him aboard, lest the dust that turned a stone into a woman turn his boat into one too.
Shabari, an old woman of the Bhil tribe, had waited years for Rama at her guru's instruction, sweeping the path each morning. When he came she offered him berries, and a detail cherished across India, though not in Valmiki, says she tasted each one first to be sure it was sweet. In the Ramcharitmanas he sits with her and teaches the nine forms of devotion, navadha bhakti, to a woman the learned would not have let into their kitchens.
When the vulture Jatayu died trying to stop Ravana's chariot, Rama performed his funeral rites with the care due to a father. A bird, a boatman, a tribal elder, and later a monkey king and a demon's brother: dharma, as Rama lives it, does not check birth before it offers respect.
Rama Rajya
After the return to Ayodhya, Rama ruled for many years, and the close of Valmiki's Yuddha Kanda describes his kingdom: no widows wept, there was no fear of disease, the rains came in season, and everyone was devoted to their own duty. Rama Rajya became the Hindu shorthand for a just society, and Gandhi used the phrase for the India he hoped to build. In practice it means a ruler who regards himself as the first servant of the people, who goes out in disguise to hear what they say, and who holds himself to a stricter standard than anyone else.
The hard episodes
That stricter standard produces the two episodes that trouble every honest reader.
After Ravana is killed and Sita is brought before him, Rama speaks coldly: he fought for honour, not for her, and she is free to go where she wishes. Sita, without pleading, asks Lakshmana to build a fire, and walks into it. Agni, god of fire, rises with her unharmed and declares her pure, and Rama says he never doubted her, but the world had to see. This is the agni pariksha, the trial by fire.
The second is harder. In the Uttara Kanda, the last book, a washerman is heard sneering that only a king would take back a wife who had lived in another man's house. Rama, unwilling to let the royal house become gossip, sends Sita, now pregnant, to Valmiki's ashram, where she raises their sons Lava and Kusha. Years later, when the boys sing the Ramayana at his court and are recognised, he asks her to swear to her purity once more before the assembly. Sita calls on her mother, the Earth, who opens and takes her home. Rama rules on alone, with a golden image of Sita beside him at every rite, and never marries again.
Hindus answer these episodes in several ways. One is that the king is not the husband: a ruler's household must be above suspicion, and Rama paid for that with the one thing he loved. Another, from the Adhyatma Ramayana and the Ramcharitmanas, is that the real Sita was never abducted; she was hidden with Agni before Ravana came, a shadow Sita went to Lanka, and the fire simply returned the true one. A third notes that Tulsidas, Kamban in Tamil and many reciters end at the coronation, and that many scholars regard the Uttara Kanda as a later addition. A fourth honours Sita: she does not beg, she chooses the fire and then the earth, and her dignity is the moral centre of both scenes. Tradition does not pretend these episodes are easy. It holds them up as the price of maryada and lets each reader feel the weight.
Ram Nam
The name of Rama is held to be a mantra in itself, the taraka mantra, the one that carries you across. Tulsidas insists the name is greater than the one named, since it saved the hunter who became Valmiki before the Ramayana was written, and in the Ramcharitmanas Shiva himself repeats it without end. A verse recited at the close of the Vishnu Sahasranama has Shiva tell Parvati:
Rama, Rama, Rama: I delight in Rama, O lovely-faced one. The name of Rama is equal to the thousand names.
Kabir and the nirguna saints sang of a Ram beyond all form. Gandhi's prayer meetings closed with "Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram". The name is written on walls, chanted in Ram dhun, whispered at births and shouted at funerals. No initiation is needed to say it.
What his example asks
Rama does not ask us to be God. He asks for things within reach, which is why he is called the ideal of ordinary people rather than of yogis.
- Keep your word when it costs you, especially a word given on someone else's behalf.
- Treat the ferryman, the cleaner and the stranger at the door as a brother or an elder.
- Grieve properly, as Rama did for Jatayu and for his father.
- Run whatever you are given to run, a home, a team, a shop, as its first servant.
- Accept that dharma sometimes offers no painless choice, and that choosing anyway, and bearing the cost without bitterness, is what makes a person worthy of trust.
And say the name. "Ram Ram" to the neighbour is not small talk. It is the whole teaching, in two syllables.