Sita's Soul Awakens Lakshmana and Ravana; Rama Attains Liberation

Recalling Lakshmana's virtues, the Pratindra, Sita's soul, goes to the third hell, where Shambuka, son of Kharadushana, now an Asurakumara god, delights in cruelty, setting the hell-beings against one another. Down to the third hell the Asura gods incite the torments; beyond it the hell-beings torture each other: thrown into fire pits, dragged over thorny shalmali trees, beaten with iron clubs, fed their own flesh, made to swallow molten copper for the liquor, meat and honey they once consumed, sawn apart, crushed in presses and blinded.

The Pratindra rebukes Shambuka: why torment these wretched beings, what will you gain from such cruelty? Shambuka grows calm, and when the frightened hell-beings flee from the god's radiance, he tells them to fear not him but the sins that brought them there. They reflect that violence, lies, theft, adultery and greed have earned them this, while merit carries the gods wherever they wish, and Shambuka's mind becomes pure.

Ravana's soul asks who he is, and the god explains that he was Sita, now Pratindra of the sixteenth heaven by the power of austerity, while Rama, having destroyed the destroying karmas, is a Kevali in Bharata teaching the world. Ravana's soul awakens, mourns that as a man he never took the vows and caused such suffering, and praises the god. When the Pratindra tries to lift him out, the hell-body melts like butter in fire and cannot be held, like a reflection in a mirror; Ravana says that no god can free a soul from the fruit of its own karma and asks only for the teaching that will keep him from such births again.

The Pratindra teaches that the root of supreme happiness is right faith and knowledge: the soul, formless and like a Siddha, is to be known as distinct from all other substances, and faith in the nine categories taught by the Arhats is samyak darshana, without which no one has ever been liberated. Ravana's faith grows firm; he resolves to endure his term, be reborn a man and take refuge in the Jina, and thanks the god for this great kindness. The Pratindra, who from the sixteenth heaven can see down to the sixth hell, circles the five Merus three times, worships the shrines and takes no pleasure even in heaven for fear of hell.

Coming with many gods to the Kevali Rama, the Pratindra bows again and again and asks how the Lord can go alone to liberation leaving him in the forest of births. Rama tells him to give up attachment: one bound to the mountain of love and hate can no more cross the river of the four states of life than a man with a stone tied to his neck can swim; only detachment leads to the city of liberation. Asked about the others, Rama says that Dasharatha, Kaushalya, Sumitra, Kaikeyi, Suprabha, Janaka and Janaka's brother Kanaka have all gone by austerity to the thirteenth heaven, and that Lavana and Ankusha will attain nirvana in this very life.

Bhamandala and Queen Sundaramalini were reborn as a couple in the Devakuru bhogabhumi for three palyas, by the merit of feeding sages: the merchant Kulapati of Ayodhya, grieving at Sita's banishment, became a muni under Dyutibhattaraka with his sons Ashoka and Tilaka, and when the monsoon caught the three in a waterless forest fifty yojanas wide, Bhamandala raised a whole city there by his vidya and fed them through the four months. Later lightning struck his palace and killed the king and queen as they slept.

Rama foretells that Lakshmana and Ravana will be born in Vijayavati as Arhaddasa and Rishidasa, sons of Sunanda and Rohini, keep lay vows and rise to heaven, be born again in that city, enjoy a middle bhogabhumi in Harikshetra, and become Jayakanta and Jayaprabha, sons of King Kumarakirti, reaching the seventh heaven. Sita's soul will descend from Achyuta as the Chakravarti Chakra of Ratnasthalapura, and they will be his sons Indraratha and Megharatha. Because Ravana, though ruling three continents, kept to his death his vow never to force a woman who did not want him, his soul will become a Tirthankara, and the Chakravarti, after renouncing and becoming an Ahamindra in Vaijayanta, will be that Tirthankara's first Ganadhara and attain nirvana; Megharatha, Lakshmana's soul, will become a Tirthankara and Chakravarti in Shatapatra city in Pushkarardha.

Overjoyed, the Pratindra worships at the holy places and eternal shrines of the middle world, performs the eight-day ashtahnika worship at the temples of Nandishvara island, visits Bhamandala's soul in the bhogabhumi to teach him, and returns to the sixteenth heaven to enjoy its pleasures with detachment. Rama, the eighth Baladeva, sixteen dhanush tall, who had kept the muni's vows for twenty-five years before attaining omniscience, completes his life of seventeen thousand years and becomes a Siddha, free of birth, old age and death, seated forever at the summit of the universe.

The book closes with the fruits of reading Rama's story: enemies grow calm, the exiled regain kingdoms, the sick are healed, absent loved ones return and the planets cease to trouble. It contrasts Ravana, ruined by desire for another's wife though he had thousands of queens, with Rama, chaste and devoted to the Jina, and urges all to become munis if they can and householders under vows if they cannot. Told by Mahavira to Gautama and by Gautama to Shrenika, the story came down through Indraguru, Divakarasena and Lakshmanasena to Ravishena, who wrote it in some eighteen thousand verses twelve hundred and three and a half years after Mahavira's nirvana, and it reached Hindi through Pandit Daulatram's Dhundhari rendering.