Ravana: The Paradox Devotee
A hymn composed under a mountain
Ravana performs a tapas so severe that he offers his ten heads one by one into the fire. Shiva appears and grants him power beyond measure. Then Ravana lifts Mount Kailasa itself to prove his strength. Parvati grips Shiva's arm. Shiva presses down with one toe, and Ravana is pinned under the mountain for a thousand years. The chapter on devotees places Ravana here deliberately: the most gifted bhakta, and the clearest warning about what devotion without humility becomes.
The Vimana Stalls Over the Mountain
Late afternoon over the Himalayas. The pushpaka vimana, a flying chariot that moved at the speed of the king's wish, came to a sudden halt in mid-air. The wind dropped. The clouds beneath the chariot stopped sliding past. Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, returning south from a campaign, looked up from his cushions and saw nothing but the white peak of a mountain and a sky that would no longer carry him.
The charioteer, more learned than the king, lowered his head. "Lord," he said, "this is Kailasa. Shiva and Parvati live here. No vehicle, however powerful, may pass over this mountain without permission. The vimana will not lift again until you go down on foot and ask the lord's leave."
Ravana did not erupt. He had built the dignity of his life around the rule that he was the one who granted permission to others, never the one who sought it. He stepped out of the chariot at the foot of the peak. He looked up at the mountain that had refused him. Then he placed his twenty arms beneath it, set his shoulders, and began to lift.
Kailasa rose by a finger's width. And another. And another. What follows is the story of a thousand-year pinning, the most-recited Shiva hymn in the world, and a question the Shiva Purana refuses to settle: can devotion threaded with ego still be devotion?
The House of Pulastya
To see why the Purana places Ravana in its chapter on the devotees of Shiva, the reader has to know who he was before he reached the mountain. He was not born a rakshasa in the simple sense.
- His grandfather was the sage Pulastya, one of the seven Saptarshis, born from the mind of Brahma himself.
- His father was Vishravas, a brahmana sage of high standing.
- His mother was Kaikasi, daughter of the rakshasa king Sumali.
- His half-brother (by his father's first marriage) was Kubera, lord of wealth and the original ruler of Lanka.