Hanuman Wins Lankasundari

As Hanuman heads for Mount Trikuta, his army is stopped in the sky by a magic machine shaped like a great bow; Hanuman wonders whether the proud Asura lord Chamarendra, Indra, a Jina temple or a monk in his final body lies below, and the minister Prithumati explains that it is a cruel illusory device. The wall, higher than the luminaries and as hard to enter as the mind of a woman free of passion, bristles with fiery points, saw-like gleams and thousands of red-tongued serpent hoods that rain sparks of poison and swallow any proud warrior like frogs, and Hanuman resolves to break this display of the Rakshasa lord's skill by the power of his own vidya.

Leaving his ocean-like army in the sky, Hanuman dons armour made of vidya, takes a mace and enters the mouth of the illusory figure as the sun enters Rahu's mouth, and with blows of his mace pulverises the wall, which breaks with a thunderous roar as the vidya flees. Its lord Vajramukha charges in his chariot, but Hanuman's warriors scatter his troops and Hanuman cuts off his head with a chakra brighter than the sun, an ordinary discus, not the Sudarshana of a Chakravarti or Ardhachakri.

Seeing her father slain, Vajramukha's daughter Lankasundari mounts a chariot of swift horses and rushes at Hanuman like an angry Shachi, vowing to do what even an angry Ravana would not and send him to Yama's house; when he shoots down her parasol she breaks his bow with arrows, he shatters her shakti (spear) in mid-flight, and she rains arrows, axes, lances, discs, pestles and rocks upon his chariot by vidya, while he wards off arrows with arrows and spears with spears, neither able to win.

Struck outwardly by her arrows and inwardly by Kama's, Hanuman thinks it better to die by her shafts than live without her, and Lankasundari, captivated by his moon-like face and the monkey emblem on his crown, drops the shakti she had raised to kill him. Though he killed her father, she writes her name on a letter, ‘O lord, I whom hosts of gods could not conquer have been conquered by you with the arrows of love,’ ties it to an arrow and shoots it to him.

Delighted, Hanuman alights and meets her as Kama meets Rati, consoling her as she weeps for her father: a heroic Kshatriya gives his life in battle for his lord, all beings die by the rise of their own karma and others are mere instruments, so she should give up sorrowful brooding. Halting his army in the sky with the Stambhini vidya, he conjures a magic city with a royal palace, where the vassals recount the day's heroics through the night and Hanuman stays with Lankasundari.

At dawn Lankasundari warns that Ravana, hearing of his deeds, must be furious, and Hanuman explains that he goes to repay Rama's kindness to the Vanaras and to reunite Rama with Sita, whom the lord of the Rakshasas carried off unjustly; when she adds that with their old love gone the city that once decked itself to welcome him will now seize him, he answers that he must learn Ravana's mind and see Sita, his lord's faithful queen and a mother to him, whose beauty shook even Ravana's Sumeru-steady mind. Leaving his entire army with Lankasundari, he takes leave of her and goes on alone to Lanka, and Gautama remarks that beings swing in a moment from love to hatred and back under the sway of karma.