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.

The combination is what makes Ravana's story unstable. He carried his father's brahmanic capacity for mantra and his mother's rakshasa appetite, and the two never fused. His mother raised her sons with one ambition: that they should match or surpass Kubera. The shadow Ravana grew up under was specific. His own elder brother had everything. He had nothing.

Nine Heads in the Fire

Ravana left for tapas as a young man. The Shiva Purana describes the tapas in unusual detail because it wants the reader to understand that the devotion was not casual. Ravana stood on one leg for years at a time. He fasted for cycles measured in cosmic time. He recited the Shri Rudram and the Mahamrityunjaya mantra continuously. The seasons changed around him. The forests grew, were cut, and grew again. Ravana did not move.

When ten thousand years had passed and Shiva had still not appeared, Ravana did the thing for which the Shaiva tradition remembers him most. He built a fire. He cut off one of his ten heads with his own sword and offered it into the flames. He waited. Shiva did not appear. He cut off the second. He waited. He cut the third, the fourth, the fifth.

By the time he had given nine heads and was raising the sword to his last remaining one, Shiva manifested in front of him.

The Purana is careful with the timing. The lord did not arrive when Ravana was performing dignified tapas. The lord did not arrive at the recitation of the Shri Rudram. The lord arrived when there was nothing of the devotee left to spend. The lord is not bought by duration. The lord is reached by exhaustion.

Shiva restored the nine heads. Shiva granted boons. Ravana asked for, and received, near-invincibility. He could not be killed by any of the high beings of the cosmos: deva, asura, gandharva, yaksha, or rakshasa. He overlooked, in the moment of asking, the simpler beings: manushya (man) and vanara (monkey). The omission is the seed of everything that comes later in the Ramayana, but the Shiva Purana records it without comment. The king who had been nothing now had everything except the protection from the two creatures he had not bothered to name.

The Mountain Settles Back

From the tapas Ravana returned to the south. He drove out his half-brother Kubera, took the pushpaka vimana as the spoils of the campaign, and seated himself on the throne of Lanka. He waged war on Indra and won. He defeated Yama in single combat. He drove Vishnu's chariot back at Vaikuntha. By the time the Kailasa episode arrived, Ravana was a man who had not been said no to in a very long time.

Now, at the foot of Kailasa, he was lifting. The mountain was rising in his hands.

On the summit, Parvati felt the ground tilt beneath her. The Puranic image is precise. It is not the image of a goddess affronted. It is the image of a woman in her own house feeling the floor begin to lift, household objects sliding, the unspeakable wrongness of the foundations themselves moving. She cried out one word. Natha. Lord. Hold.

Shiva, who had been seated in his usual stillness, performed the smallest possible counter-action. He did not raise a weapon. He did not summon the ganas. He did not unleash the cosmic dance. He pressed down with one toe of his right foot.

The mountain settled back. Ravana's twenty arms were caught between the mountain and the ground. The pinning was not theatrical. The Purana says the king could move neither his arms nor his shoulders, and that the pain was such that the king who had defeated Yama in single combat now screamed in a voice that shook the ranges.

The Sanskrit word for that scream is rāva. From this scream comes the king's name. Ravana means he who roars. The Purana is precise that the name is given here, beneath the mountain, by Shiva himself. Whatever the king had been called before, from this moment onward he is the screaming one.

A Hymn Composed Under a Mountain

A thousand years passed. The pushpaka vimana stood empty at the foot of the peak. The king's army, his ministers, his children waited in Lanka. The king did not return.

In that pinning, the Shiva Purana records, Ravana began to compose. Not a negotiation. Not a bargain. The king who had refused to seek permission was now in a position where there was nothing left to do except describe the lord under whom he was caught. He began to describe Shiva.

The verses are the Shiva Tandava Stotram. Sixteen verses in the panchachamara metre, a galloping cadence that mimics the tandava, the cosmic dance. The opening line is one of the most famous in the entire Shaiva canon.

जटाटवीगलज्जलप्रवाहपावितस्थले गलेऽवलम्ब्य लम्बितां भुजङ्गतुङ्गमालिकाम्।

jaṭā-ṭavī-galaj-jala-pravāha-pāvita-sthale gale'valambya lambitāṃ bhujaṅga-tuṅga-mālikām

On the place sanctified by the river falling from the forest of his matted hair, the great garland of serpents hanging from his neck.

Shiva Tandava Stotram, verse 1

Sixteen such verses, each describing a different aspect of Shiva, each more rhythmically dense than any other surviving stotra. The hymn is so musically tight that it remains, even today, the most recited Shiva hymn in the world. It is sung at every Mahashivaratri night vigil. It is performed in the tandava traditions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It is the most-streamed Shiva chant on Indian platforms.

Ravana, in the Purana's telling, did not know any of this. He was a man pinned beneath a mountain, in pain, with nothing left except his voice. He used the voice to describe the lord. The hymn ends with a quiet plea: kim u na maheśvaram. When will I reach the great lord? The plea is not for release. The plea is for darshan. After a thousand years of pinning, the king's prayer is not, lift the mountain. The king's prayer is, let me see you.

When the hymn was complete, Shiva lifted his toe. The mountain rose. Ravana's arms were freed. The king, broken and trembling, came up the slope on foot. Shiva did not rebuke him. He gave Ravana the Chandrahasa, the moon-bright unbreakable sword that would become the mark of Ravana's kingship in every later telling.

Both Halves Kept

The Shiva Purana is unsentimental about what comes next. The same Ravana, now armed with Chandrahasa, will go on to abduct Sita from Panchavati. The same devotion that produced the Tandava Stotram will not save him from his ego or from Rama's arrows.

Most spiritual traditions, faced with a figure whose devotion is real and whose conduct is poor, choose one half and discard the other. The Shiva Purana refuses both moves.

Both records are kept in the same chapter. Ravana was a true bhakta. Ravana was also the abductor of Sita. The reader is asked to sit with the discomfort. The lord receives the tilted offering. The lord does not protect the devotee from the tilt.

Modern Echoes

Carl Jung, working in Zurich across the first half of the twentieth century, gave the modern world the idea of the shadow: the unintegrated part of the self that operates beneath awareness. Jung's clinical observation, after thirty years with patients, was that the spiritual capacities of a person and the destructive capacities of the same person are not separate streams. They are one stream tilted in different directions. The pious figure with an unattended shadow does not lose the piety. He performs the piety sincerely and acts out the shadow sincerely, and the two coexist in him without ever fusing.

Jung's finding is what the Shiva Purana, two thousand years earlier, named Ravana. The Shri Tandava Stotram and the abduction of Sita are not produced by two different people. They are produced by the same person. The dharmic tradition is the only one mature enough to keep both records in the same chapter.

The organisational psychologist Robert Quinn, at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, made a related observation in his 2004 book Building the Bridge as You Walk on It. After three decades of consulting with senior executives, Quinn found that the leaders who fall hardest are not the ones who lacked spiritual capacity. They are the ones who had unmistakable capacity in one domain, treated that capacity as a credential, and assumed the credential exempted them from the discipline that the unattended parts of themselves still required. The brilliant founder who can give a moving keynote on integrity and cannot refuse a single appetite. The lord, the dharmic tradition would say, may receive the keynote. The dharmic tradition would also say that the appetite is going to do its work.

Back at the foot of Kailasa, the king is rising to his feet. The Chandrahasa is in his hand. The pushpaka vimana is waiting. He climbs in. The chariot lifts. He is going home to Lanka, to a throne, to a life, to a forest at Panchavati where, years from now, he will see a woman gathering flowers. The hymn he composed under the mountain will be sung for the next two thousand years. The arrow that finds him will be released by a man whose name he has not yet heard.