The Bow Every Soul Must Still Break

2026-09-18

Tulsi Ramayana, Lecture 93, Balakanda verses 220 to 222

King Janaka made a vow. Whoever could lift and break the bow of Shiva would marry his daughter Sita. Sages, princes and warriors have gathered at Janakpuri to try, and among them, brought by Sage Vishwamitra, stand two young brothers from Ayodhya. That is the storyline. In this lecture Swami Jyotirmayananda states plainly that the bow-sacrifice never closed, that it is running now, and that the reader is in the assembly whether or not they came for it.

The allegory he works from is compact. The bow is bhava chapa. The word bhava names Lord Shiva and also names the world process, and the bow is the magnetic pull of that process, the force that keeps returning a soul to birth and death. Sita is viveka buddhi, the pure discriminating intellect, which he also calls sanmati. Every soul, he says, is waiting to be wedded to pure understanding. Then he pauses on a single English word. There is a but. The prize is conditional, and the condition is that the bow has to break first.

Most of the class is then spent on two things that look unrelated and are not. The first is a long decoding of how Rama and Lakshmana appear to the crowd, which turns into a map of how a mind approaches God at all: through form, then through presence, then past every concept it can hold. The second is a hard doctrinal point that arrives at the end and reframes everything before it. Janaka will not waive his vow, and Swamiji reads that refusal as a teaching rather than a plot device. Discrimination cannot be transferred. It is not a fruit of karma, it cannot be given as a gift, and a mind that is not integrated cannot hold it if it arrives.

Read the class for the allegory and it is an unusually clear piece of scriptural decoding. Read it for the last ten minutes and it is an uncomfortable question about what a person is actually willing to break.

Passage index

The contest that never closed

Swamiji sets the scene quickly because he wants to get past it. Vashishtha, Vishwamitra, Rama and Lakshmana have all arrived in Janakpuri for the Dhanush Yagya, and the highlight of the event is the announcement everyone has come to see tested. Then he makes the move that governs the rest of the class. The bow-sacrifice, he says, continues. It has never stopped.

Once that is said, the elements stop being characters in a story and become a description of a situation. The bow is the pull of the world process. Swamiji calls that pull a mother who wants her children close, and says he is putting it in a joking manner, but the joke has a point inside it. The world process is not malicious. It holds souls the way gravity holds objects, without intent and without exception, and it keeps them inside the cycle of birth and death by doing nothing more hostile than being what it is.

Sita is what waits on the other side of that pull. She is viveka buddhi, the intellect that can tell the real from the apparent, and she is also sanmati, the pure understanding invoked in the prayer that asks God to give everyone right understanding. The marriage is the union of a soul with that faculty. Swamiji says every soul is waiting for it, which sounds generous, and then attaches the condition that makes the rest of the lecture necessary.

Aspiration cannot be assembled from what you already admire

The first obstacle is not vice. It is the quality of what a person wants.

Swamiji uses a spacecraft. A vehicle leaves the earth only if it can break the earth’s pull, and no amount of ordinary travel accumulates into escape. Applied to a life, this means an aspiration limited to the world of time and space will not carry anyone out of it, however intense it becomes. He names the faculty that produces such aspirations mandabuddhi, the dull-witted mind, and he is not insulting anyone. The dullness is structural. The mind builds its wants out of what it has already seen, read and imagined, so its highest ambition is necessarily a rearrangement of things it has met before.

He grants the material its due. People do amazing things, he says, rising from poverty to wealth, and the qualities on display are real. Then he tells the story of the horse merchant, who describes his animal’s excellence for a full hour to an interested buyer. The buyer asks whether there is any difference at all between this horse and a perfect one. There is one, the merchant admits. The horse is dead.

The defect is not that worldly things are bad. It is that they are transient, and that a mind can fill itself with data about them indefinitely without moving an inch toward enlightenment. All of it comes to an end. That is the whole objection, and it is enough.

Three stages of approach, and the moment form falls away

The crowd is looking at the brothers and sizing up their muscles against the bow. Tulsidas instead describes youth, beauty and complexion, and Swamiji treats the description as technical rather than decorative.

The first stage of upasana is saguna sakara, God with qualities and with form. The form is not arbitrary and not a concession to weakness. It is a deliberate instrument, worked out by sages on the basis of intuitive knowledge, chosen because of what it does to a mind that rests on it. Rama’s blue complexion opens the mind to sky, and sky opens understanding to vastness. Lakshmana’s snowy white opens it to purity, and not ordinary purity. The point is that an image is given to the mind because the mind needs a basis, and the basis has been engineered.

The second stage is saguna nirakara. The mind still moves toward God, but the form is no longer where attention rests. Swamiji illustrates it with an arrival at an airport. While you are searching, form is everything, and the eyes go everywhere looking for the one face. Once that person is standing in front of you, appearance stops mattering entirely and something deeper takes over. Communion replaces recognition.

Past that, concepts themselves are the obstacle. Call God infinite, immeasurable, eternal, and you have still produced concepts, and Swamiji says the reality is a million times your eternity and billions of times your infinity. Rama, he says, represents all three stages at once. The same figure who holds a bow and wears a yellow garment is also the all-permeating presence, and also what remains when the mind stops producing descriptions.

When the show ends and the screen remains

This is the pivot of the class, and he gives it as a cinema.

Changes occur inside a film. Scenes replace scenes, and a mind watching is fully occupied by them. But the largest change of the evening is not any event in the story. It is the moment the show ends, the projection stops, and what has been there the whole time becomes visible. The screen was never absent. It was simply never noticed.

He names the two conditions. As long as the mind projects and perceptions exist, the state is bhava pratyaya. The goal is that the projections come to an end, and that is pratyaya bhava. The ordinary version of this is dreaming and waking. Making improvements inside a dream is the first condition. Waking is the second. Anything attained inside the projection, Swamiji says, is alpam, little, however impressive it looks from inside.

The project that serves everyone

Vishwamitra’s yajna is protected by the two brothers, and Swamiji reads the yajna as a project undertaken for all humanity. Then he makes a claim that can be misheard as indifference.

Do not think of people, he says. Just attain enlightenment. The reasoning follows immediately. A soul that attains it becomes, allegorically, a blossom, and the fragrance elevates all souls around it, vasantavat, the way spring entering a forest changes everything in the forest without addressing anything in particular. There is no waiting period in which you first get enlightened and then design a program to help others. The attainment is already the service.

He closes the gap before it opens. Seva belongs inside the process rather than after it. Helping people and serving God in people is part of spiritual movement, not a distraction from it. What he is refusing is the idea that enlightenment is a private acquisition with optional social consequences. Real enlightenment, he says, has a profound effect on all, and is not a personal attainment at all.

Impurities that die, and impurities that relocate

The demons in the storyline are graded, and the grading is practical.

Taraka is destroyed. Maricha and Subahu are malas, gross impurities, and Swamiji notes the detail that matters: Maricha was not killed. He was pushed away. The name is glossed through taste. Maricha is the black pepper whose sharpness remains in the mouth well after the eating is finished, and that is precisely the behaviour of certain impurities. They are dealt with, and they persist. Later in the story Maricha returns as the golden deer and plays his part in the abduction of Sita, and only then is he finished.

For a practitioner the implication is unglamorous. Some faults are removable in one decisive movement. Others are displaced, go quiet, and reappear at a later and more dangerous stage of the path wearing a more attractive shape.

Three spaces, and the one a phone cannot reach

Rama’s blue is also an opening into akasha, and Swamiji distinguishes three.

Bhutakasha is physical space. It carries letters, packages and, now, faces and voices on a phone. He grants the technology its reach fully, then produces the limit. When you want to send goodwill to someone, there is no way to put it into a device. Words can be sent, and he switches to Spanish for a moment to say so, palabras, but the feeling itself does not travel that way.

Chittakasha is the psychic space through which it does travel. His evidence is ordinary and hard to dismiss. You are busy, and out of millions of people your mind suddenly turns to one person, because that person has started thinking of you. A connection has been established, and it did not use physical space.

Chidakasha is the third, where space is only a symbol for absolute expansion, chit chaitanya brahman. Joy from physical expansion is small, he says, if there is no inner expansion in the feeling, and the sequence is an instruction to move attention inward from one space to the next.

Lotus eyes, and tenderness that is not attachment

Rama’s eyes are described as lotuses, and Swamiji takes the flower apart. Water settles on a lotus and the lotus is not wetted or contaminated by it. It stays untouched while remaining in the water, which is the whole ideal of engagement without entanglement. And the lotus sends out tenderness, a tenderness that is divine rather than based on moha.

The distinction is sharp and slightly unkind. Tenderness built on attachment, he says, is not a lotus petal but a banana leaf. Then he points out that even foxes look at their prey with loving feelings, which disposes of the idea that warmth is self-evidently virtuous. Eyes that carry the other quality are not produced by trying. They radiate it because the heart behind them is already filled with profound sentiment, and he notes that this is not within the range of normal science, without making any claim against science.

The bow in your own hands

The bow and arrow are finally decoded, and the decoding moves in two directions at once.

Cosmically, the bow is the Cosmic Mind, and the activities radiating from it are arrows. What people mean when they say God’s will shall be done is that an arrow has been released. Then Swamiji brings it in close. Do not go so far, he says. Go into your own mind. A mind that is not under the domination of ego, a mind that has surrendered itself, becomes God’s bow, and the thoughts arising in it stop being the ego’s thoughts.

Lakshmana carries the same compression. He is dhyana, the meditative process, and Swamiji points out that lakshmana and lakshana are the same word. The divine virtues that develop in a personality practising meditation are the lakshanas, the characteristics by which progress can be recognised. His mother is Sumitra, and the name is read as the source of those virtues: a heart tender toward the entire creation.

He then applies that tenderness where it is least comfortable. Do not divide the world into the good who deserve heaven and the demoniac who can go to hell. The one who most needs compassion is the demoniac one, because he does not enjoy even a moment of his life.

What cannot be given

The friends of Sita talk among themselves, and one of them says what everyone is thinking. If King Janaka were only to see Rama, he would forget his vow and simply give Sita to him without the bow. Another answers that the king will not break his word.

Swamiji says this exchange is the philosophical centre of the passage. Attaining viveka buddhi has to rest on deserving it. If a person is not integrated, not mentally pure, contact with it is impossible, and no blessing arranges otherwise. It cannot be handed over by force, and it is not a fruit of karma. It is a matter of understanding, and understanding has to be awakened by the one who will hold it.

Anything that can be given as a gift, he adds, is an object in the world, and objects perish. A teacher may like a student very much, and if the liking is real the student still has to pass. A degree handed to someone who has not earned it becomes a source of trouble rather than an advantage.

So Janaka’s stubbornness, which the friends read as bad luck and lack of discrimination, turns out to be the one honest thing in the scene. The vow protects the prize. The bow stays unbroken until someone breaks it.

Terms in this lecture

bhava chapa — Shiva’s bow; the magnetic pull of the world process that keeps a soul inside the cycle of birth and death.
viveka buddhi — the discriminating intellect that separates the real from the apparent; allegorically, Sita.
sanmati — right or pure understanding; the faculty asked for in prayer and, Swamiji insists, never given as a gift.
mandabuddhi — the dull-witted mind, which builds its aspirations only from what it has already seen and imagined.
upasana — approach to God through worship and meditation, moving through form, presence, and what lies past concept.
saguna sakara — God conceived with qualities and with form; the deliberately engineered image a mind rests on.
saguna nirakara — God conceived with qualities but beyond form, where presence replaces appearance.
bhava pratyaya — the condition in which the mind projects and perceptions continue to exist.
pratyaya bhava — the condition in which projection ends and only the screen remains.
bhutakasha — physical space, through which objects, words and images travel.
chittakasha — psychic space, through which feeling and goodwill travel and no device can carry them.
chidakasha — absolute expansion; chit chaitanya brahman, where space is only a symbol.
mala — impurity; some are destroyed outright, others merely displaced, to be met again later.
vasantavat — like the spring season, which changes a whole forest without addressing any part of it.

Questions to take back into the lecture

When you examine what you are actually aspiring to, is any of it something you have not already seen, read or imagined?
Which of your faults have been destroyed, and which have only been pushed away like Maricha, waiting to return in a better disguise?
If pure understanding cannot be given to you by anyone, what does it mean in practice to become the kind of mind that can hold it?

Tulsi Ramayana (Sri Ramcharitmanas of Goswami Tulsidas), Balakanda, verses 220 to 222. Lecture 93 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation.

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This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.