Vanaras - The Agencies of Dharma

I share this short narrative only to verbalize the ideas that inspired this piece. The idea of art is to create the same bhava in the observer. Art makes you experience a bhava while language rationalizes it. Hence, language is, by its very nature, reductive. And if one is not careful, it can sometimes act against the very bhava that the art attempts to create. I pray that adding this description will only enhances the experience of the art:

वागर्थाविव संपृक्तौ वागर्थप्रतिपत्तये ।

जगतः पितरौ वन्दे पार्वतीपरमेश्वरौ ॥

COMMENTARY
Some time in the treta yuga, adharma was on the rise and many with evil intent were getting emboldened with Ravana’s increasing audacity and oppression. The devas pleaded with Brahma to save them from Ravana at the putrayeshti yagna being performed by Rishyashringa for Dasharatha. Brahma had earlier given Ravana a boon which meant he could be killed neither by the devas nor by beasts. In his arrogance, Ravana had sought immunity only from devas and beasts but not humans. Hearing the devas, Brahma asks them to procreate offspring having their own qualities with various female creatures of the forest. The shlokas on the art are Brahma’s instructions to the devas. These offspring would neither be devas nor animals - but the Vanaras! Twelve months after the yagna, one half of Vishnu incarnates in human form as Rama, who leads them to annihilate Ravana and re-establish dharma.

The story beautiful illustrates the inherent quality of the cosmos and its substrate of the formless divine being to coalesce and manifest in unique ways to quell adharma. In the Vana that represents the cosmos, the vanaras represent agencies of energetic action that are overwhelmingly all around. The lesson here is that no matter how clever a perpetrator of adharma maybe, no matter how powerful and unconquerable he or she may appear to be, adharma is an unsustainable condition - the inherent divine code (the rita) of the cosmos will overpower it through various agencies of action. In todays age, we are all agencies of action to uphold dharma. In the end, satyam eva jayate (truth alone triumphs). This is the essence of our itihasas, stories in the Puranas, and the message of the Gita.