Picture in room 36: Hanumān set fire to Lañkā, balcony showing paints in The Emerald Buddha Temple, Bangkok, taken on July 2, 2023.
05. Sundara Kanda01,02.
First revision: Jul.23, 2022
Last change: Sep.25, 2023
Searched, Gathered, Rearranged, and Compiled by Apirak Kanchanakongkha.
The Sundarakāṇḍa
The fifth book of the poem is called, for reasons that are not wholly clear, the Sundarakāṇḍa, “The beautiful Book,” and it is centrally concerned with a detailed, vivid, violent, and often amusing account of Hanumān’s adventures in the splendid fortress city of the island Lañkā.
After a heroic and eventful leap across the ocean, Hanumān arrives on the shores of Lañkā. There, he explores the rākṣasas city and spies on Rāvaṇa. The poet’s descriptions of the town and the rākṣasa king are colorful and often finely written, as is his description of forlorn Sītā in captivity. Held captive in a grove of aśoka trees, Sītā is alternately cajoled and threatened by Rāvaṇa and the rākṣasa women who guard her. When Hanumān finally finds the despondent princess, he comforts her, giving her Rāma’s signet ring, which Rāma had bestowed upon him to serve as a token of his bona fides. He offers to carry Sītā back to Rāma, but she refuses, reluctant to allow herself to be willingly touched by a male other than her husband, and argues that Rāma must come himself to avenge the insult of her abduction.
Hanumān then wreaks havoc in Lañkā, destroying groves and buildings and killing many servants and soldiers of the king. At last, he allows himself to be captured by Indrajit, Rāvaṇa’s fearsome son, and is brought before Rāvaṇa. After an interview during which he reviles the king, he is condemned, and his tail is set afire. But the monkey escapes his bonds and, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, sets fire to the city with his tail, ensuring that conflagration spares both him and Sītā. Finally, the mighty monkey leaps back to the mainland and rejoins his companions. Together, they make their way back to Kiṣhkindhā, drunkenly raiding on the way a grove belonging to Sugrīva. Hanumān reports his adventures and the success of his mission to Rāma and Sugrīva.
The Sundarakāṇḍa is considered by many to be the bīja, “seed” — or, as we might say, the heart—of the epic poem. This is probably because it is in this book that the tragic trajectory of the narrative begins to reverse itself with Hanumān’s discovery of the abducted heroine and her renewed hope of rescue and reunion with her husband. Thus, ritualized formal recitations (parāyaṇa) of the complete text of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa are traditionally begun with this book and not the first one, the Bālakāṇḍa. In some Hindu communities where the work is a central scripture, the book is a prognosticative text, somewhat like the I Ching. Its recitation is believed to help solve many worldly problems. For this reason, the book is often printed and sold separately from the epic as a whole, like the Bhagavadgītā of the Mahābhārata.
Sources, Vocabularies, and Narratives:
01. from. "The Illustrated Ramayana: The Timeless Epic of Duty, Love, and Redemption," ISBN: 978-0-2414-7376-4, Penguin Random House, 2017, Printed and bound in China, www.dk.com.
02. from. "The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki - THE COMPLETE ENGLISH TRANSLATION," Translated by Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Rosalind Lefeber, Sheldon I. Pollock, and Barend A. van Nooten, Revised and Edited by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, ISBN 978-0-6912-0686-8, 2021, Princeton University Press, Printed in the United States of America
