Sita's Soul Tests Rama, and Rama Attains Kevala Jnana

Gautama tells Shrenika that the great sage Rama, his attachment and aversion stilled, now practises austerities no one else could match. Wandering through fearsome forests, keeping the five great vows, five samitis and three guptis, master of the scriptures and of his senses, he gains many riddhis (supernatural powers) without heeding them and conquers the twenty-two parishahas (hardships), and by the power of his penance lions, tigers, deer and other wild beasts, their natural enmities forgotten, come and sit calmly around him to see him and hear his teaching.

Seated in the lotus posture on a clean rock, or standing in kayotsarga as steady as Sumeru, Rama sinks into meditation on his own nature as the sun sinks into a bank of clouds; when he wanders, he watches the ground four cubits ahead to protect living beings. Worshipped by gods and goddesses, he keeps a penance that no one in the present fifth age could even imagine.

One day his wanderings bring him to the Kotishila, the great rock that Lakshmana had lifted after reciting the Namokara mantra, and he sits on it to meditate, intent on destroying karma and climbing the kshapaka shreni (the ladder of karma destruction), so absorbed that he has no awareness of the world outside.

Meanwhile Svayamprabha, the Pratindra (deputy Indra) of the Achyuta heaven, who is the soul of Sita, learns through avadhi jnana (clairvoyant knowledge) of their deep bond, of his own many births, of Rama's diksha and of his meditation on the Kotishila. The god recalls that in the human world Rama, lord of the three khandas with Ayodhya in Jambudvipa, was his husband, for he was then Rama's chief queen Sita; that he has won Indra-like rank in the sixteenth heaven through vows and penance; that Lakshmana has passed on; and that Rama, who once conquered outer foes with weapons, is now conquering the mind, the senses and karma itself through shukla dhyana.

He resolves to beguile the sage's mind just a little with divine illusion, so that Rama slips from shuddhopayoga (pure consciousness) into shubhopayoga (merely auspicious consciousness), dies in meditative calm and is reborn beside him in the Achyuta heaven. Then, he imagines, they would share great love, journey together to the temples of the five Merus and Nandishvara island, spend twenty-two sagaras (oceanic ages) side by side and go together to see Lakshmana.

Coming to the place where Rama sits in meditation, the Pratindra conjures up spring in the forest: flowers of every kind bloom, fragrant breezes blow, cuckoos, mynas and parrots sing, the karnikara trees turn the forest golden as if King Spring were at play in yellow robes, and bakula flowers rain down. Taking the form of Janaki (Sita), the god approaches the sage, and the illusory Sita pleads that she is drowning in a sea of love tossed by waves of separation, moving now to his right and now to his left, but the sage remains unshaken and still.

The illusory Sita goes on: she took diksha rashly and without his permission, misled by the Vidyadhara queens, though such vows suit only the very old and a tender flower cannot bear the flames of a forest fire; now her heart is set on him again, and thousands of Vidyadhara princesses, who have brought her along, wish to marry the Baladeva through her. By the Pratindra's magic, thousands of celestial maidens in priceless jewels appear, gliding like royal swans, singing sweeter than cuckoos, playing the vina and flute, dancing and smiling around him, begging his protection, raising their arms toward madhavi blossoms to display their bodies, dancing the rasa and sporting in the water.

As the wind cannot shake Mount Sumeru, none of this moves Rama's mind: established in the experience of the self, he ascends the kshapaka shreni and enters the first stage of shukla dhyana, and in his utter purity the Pratindra's magic has no hold on him. Through the first stage, prithaktva-vitarka (meditation that moves among aspects of reality), he destroys the karma of delusion and rises to the twelfth gunasthana (stage of spiritual progress); through the second, ekatva-vitarka (meditation fixed on a single aspect), he destroys the karmas that veil knowledge and perception and the karma that obstructs, and in the last part of the night of the bright twelfth of Magha he attains Kevala Jnana, in whose mirror every substance in all its modes, in the world and beyond it, shines clear.

The seats of Indra and the gods tremble, and all the Indras come down to the middle world with the four classes of gods to celebrate the Kevala Jnana kalyanaka (the auspicious event of omniscience); charana munis, gods, humans, animals and all the hundred Indras bow to the Arhat, who sits as a Sayoga Kevali (an omniscient one still in the body) with parasol, chowries, lion throne and halo in the Gandhakuti (preaching pavilion) built by the gods. The divine voice of the eighth Baladeva begins to flow and the listeners praise him again and again; Svayamprabha, Sita's soul, worships him, circles him three times and begs forgiveness for the faults committed out of attachment, and the omniscient Rama, radiant with outer splendour and the inner wealth of the four infinitudes, sets out on his wanderings with the gods following.