Introduction and links to related topics Below are some short introductions. Click on the blue hyperlinked word to get more related articles.
Ramayana - "The most ancient Sanskrit epic poem, written by the sage Valmiki. It is estimated to have been composed about 500 B.C., and contains approximately 50,000 lines. The Ramayana describes the life of Sri Rama: his banishment from Ayodhya; life in the forest with his faithful wife Sita; Sita''s abduction by Ravana; the war of Rama and his allies against Ravana; defeat of Ravana and rescue of Sita; Rama''s return to Ayodhya as ruler; slander of Sita by the people of Ayodhya and her banishment from the kingdom; her subsequent exoneration and final ascent to heaven, where she is joined by Rama."
-- Ramakrishna-Vedanta Wordbook
"The Ramayana is a work of the same essential kind as the Mahabharata; it differs only by a greater simplicity of plan, a more delicate ideal temperament and a finer glow of poetic warmth and colour. The main bulk of the poem in spite of much accretion is evidently by a single hand and has a less complex and more obvious unity of structure. There is less of the philosophic, more of the purely poetic mind, more of the artist, less of the builder. The whole story is from beginning to end of one piece and there is no deviation from the stream of the narrative. At the same time there is a like vastness of vision, an even more wide-winged flight of epic sublimity in the conception and sustained richness of minute execution in the detail.
...The eopic poet has taken here also as his subject an Itihasa, an ancient tale or legend associated with an old Indian dynasty and filled it in with detail from myth and folklore, but has exalted all into a scale of grandiose epic figure that it may bear more worthily the high intention and significance. The subject is the same as in the Mahabharata,, the strife of the divine with the titanic forces in the life of the earth, but in more purely ideal forms, in frankly supernatural dimensions and an imaginative heightening of both the good and the evil in human character. On one side is portrayed an ideal manhood, a divine beauty of virtue and ethical order, a civilization founded on the Dharma and realising an exaltation of the moral ideal which is presented with a singularly strong appeal of aesthetic grace and harmony and sweetness; on the other are wild and anarchic and almost amorphous forces of superhuman egoism and self-will and exultant violence, and the two ideas and powers of mental nature living and embodied are brought into conflict and led to a decisive issue of the victory of the divine man over the Rakshasa. All shade and complexity are omitted which would diminish the single urity of the idea, the representative force in the outline of the figures, the significance of the temperamental colour and only so much admitte as is sufficient to humanise the appeal and the significance.
The poet makes us conscious of the immense forces that are behind our life and sets his action in a magnificent epic scenery, the great imperial city, the mountains and ocean, the forest and wilderness, described with such a largeness as to make us feel as if the whole world were the scene of his poem and its subject the whole divine and titanic possibility of man imaged in a few great or monstrous figures. The ethical and the aesthetic mind of India have here fused themselves into a harmonious unity and reached an unexampled pure wideness and beauty of self-expression. The Ramayana embodied for the Indian imagination its highest and tenderest human ideals of character, made strength and courage and gentleness and purity and fidelity and self-sacrifice familiar to it in the suavest and most harmonious forms..."
-- Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture,
SABCL Vol 14 pp. 289-90
Ramayana - A holy narative of Lord Rama.
Shloka - (Sanskrit) "Verse," from the verbal root, shlok,"to compose."
A verse, phrase, proverb or hymn of praise, usually in a specified meter. Especially a verse of two lines, each of sixteen syllables. Shloka is the primary verse form of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
See: bhashya, sutra.
Sunasepha - Sunasepha (Sanskrit). The Puranic "Isaac"; the son of the sage Rishika who sold him for one hundred cows to King Ambarisha, for a sacrifice and "burnt offering" to Varuna, as a substitute for the king’s son Rohita, devoted by his father to the god.
When already stretched on the altar Sunasepha is saved by Rishi Visvamitra, who calls upon his own hundred sons to take the place of the victim, and upon their refusal degrades them to the condition of Chandalas. After which the Sage teaches the victim a mantram the repetition of which brings the gods to his rescue; he then adopts Sunasepha for his elder son.
(See Ramayana.) There are different versions of this story.
Aithihya - Aithihya (Sanskrit) (from iti thus, in this manner + ha emphatic particle)
Thus indeed it was; traditional instructions, tradition. Closely similar to itihasa, a name applied to semi-legendary and epic accounts; also to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. As the instructors of certain schools in handing on teaching (especially oral teaching delivered with "mouth to ear") invariably commenced an installment with the phrase "iti maya srutam" or "iti ha maya srutam" (truly thus have I heard), such instruction came to be called aitihya or aitiha. The adjectival form aitihasika also means what is communicated or derived from tradition, ancient legend, or heroic history.
Chhaya-grahini - Chhaya-grahini chaya-grahini (Sanskrit) Shadow-catcher; in the Ramayana, it "was able to arrest the aerial progress of Hanuman by seizing on his shadow on the surface of the Sea" (BCW 6:341).
Rama - A very popular hero god who is an avatar of Vishnu, whose story is told in one of the most famous in India - The Ramayana. His wife is Sita.
Epic History - Long narrative poem in a high style about grand exploits of Gods and heroes. The Ramayana and Mahabharata are India''s two great epic histories, called Itihasa.
See: Itihasa, Mahabharata, Ramayana.
Apsaras - Apsaras (Sanskrit) (from ap water + saras flowing from the verbal root sri to flow, glide, blow (as of wind))
Moving in the waters; a class of feminine divinities known as celestial water nymphs, whose location is commonly placed in the sky between the clouds rather than in the waters of earth, although they are often described as visiting earth. These fairy-like wives of the gandharvas (celestial musicians) can change their shape at will, often appearing as aquatic birds.
In Manu they are held to be the creations of the seven manus, but in the Puranas and the Ramayana their origin is attributed to the churning of the cosmic waters, and it is said that neither gods nor asuras would have them for wives. Since mythologically they were common to all, they are called Sumadatmajas (self-willed pleasurers) -- 35 millions of them, of whom Kama, god of love, is lord and king. One of their roles is to act as temptresses to those too ardent for divine status. Only the individual who can withstand the perfumed entreaties of the apsarasas is worthy of full enlightenment. In the Yajur-Veda the apsarasas are called sunbeams because of their connection with the gandharva who personifies the sun.
Blavatsky looks upon the apsarasas as "both qualities and quantities" (SD 2:585) and also as " ''sleep-producing'' aquatic plants, and interior forces of nature" (TG 28).
In the Puranas the apsarasas are sometimes divided into two classes, the daivika (divine or belonging to the devas), hence highly ethereal beings, and the laukika (from loka worldly)
, belonging to the worlds of manifestation, such as a physical plane. Considered apart from mythologic references, the apsarasas bear a strong resemblance to the undines of medieval Europe, nature forces and elementals appurtenant to all ten ranges of their hierarchical distribution, from the spiritual to the grossly material and physical. Every one of the seven or ten cosmic elements (bhutas) or principles (tattvas) has its own class of inhabitants.
Itihasa - (Sanskrit) "So it was."
Epic history, particularly the Ramayana and Mahabharata (of which the famed Bhagavad Gita is a part). This term sometimes refers to the Puranas, especially the Skanda Purana and the Bhagavata Purana (or Srimad Bhagavatam).
See: Mahabharata, Ramayana, Smriti.
Troy - Troy, Trojans Since Schliemann rediscovered at Hissarlik the several superincumbent sites of ancient Troy, there has been increasing reason for placing confidence in the historicity of what have been regarded as fables. The Trojan War, for instance, is now known to be a historical fact, although according to The Secret Doctrine it should be dated much earlier than the 1200 BC or so at present allowed by archaeology. In Isis Unveiled the Homeric account of this war is described as a Greek counterpart of the Ramayana. Allegory and fact are curiously mixed in such narrations, but it is well known that mythoi were originally and intentionally built on a basis of former factual occurrences.
Ragon, in his defense of the antiquity of Masonry, recalls the statements of classical writers that Neptune and Apollo offered themselves to Laomedon as masons "to build the city" of Troy, a well-known expression symbolically interpreted as meaning to establish a religious cult or Mystery school. Troy lay in a strategic position in regard to the trade routes of the ancient world and relics from distant lands prove that it was an active center of traffic. Even the first city, built in what archaeologists call the Neolithic period, was a strong and dominant center. Excavations at the lowest level revealed a great fortified wall with two towers and a stone carving of a human face, antedating by some 18 centuries the Troy of which Homer sang and which was the seventh city of the nine, counting upwards, that successively occupied the same site.
Tulasidasa - (Sanskrit) Vaishnava sannyasin poet (ca 1532-1623) whose Sri Ramacharitamanasa, a Hindi rendering of Valmiki''s Sanskrit epic, Ramayana, is acclaimed one of the world''s greatest literary works.
See: Ramayana.
Smartism - (Sanskrit) Sect based on the secondary scriptures (smriti).
The most liberal of the four major Hindu denominations, an ancient Vedic brahminical tradition (ca 700 bce) which from the 9th century onward was guided and deeply influenced by the Advaita Vedanta teachings of the reformist Adi Shankara. Its adherents rely mainly on the classical smriti literature, especially the Itihasas (Ramayana and Mahabharata, the latter of which includes the Bhagavad Gita), Puranas and Dharma Shastras. These are regarded as complementary to and a means to understanding the Vedas. Smartas adhere to Shankara''s view that all Gods are but various depictions of Saguna Brahman. Thus, Smartas are avowedly eclectic, worshiping all the Gods and discouraging sectarianism.
The Smarta system of worship, called panchayatana puja, reinforces this outlook by including the major Deity of each primary Hindu sect of ancient days: Ganesha, Surya, Vishnu, Siva and Shakti. To encompass a sixth important lineage, Shankara recommended the addition of a sixth Deity, Kumara. Thus he was proclaimed shanmata sthapanacharya, founder of the six-fold system. One among the six is generally chosen as the devotee''s preferred Deity, Ishta Devata. For spiritual authority, Smartas look to the regional monasteries established across India by Shankara, and to their pontiffs. These are the headquarters of ten orders of renunciate monks who spread the Advaita Vedanta teachings far and wide. Within Smartism three primary religious approaches are distinguished: ritualistic, devotional and philosophical.
See: dashanami, panchayatana puja, Shankara.
Ramayana - One of the great epic poems of India; attributed to the sage Valmiki, the Ramayana recounts the life and exploits of Lord Rama. This story, so rich with spiritual meaning, has been told and retold down through the ages by saints, poets, scholars, and common folk.
Garuda - Garuda (Sanskrit) A gigantic bird in the Ramayana, the steed of Vishnu. Esoterically - the symbol of the great Cycle.
Agastya - Agastya (Sanskrit). The name of a great Rishi, much revered in Southern India; the reputed author of hymns in the Rig Veda, and a great hero in the Ramayana. In Tamil literature he is credited with having been the first instructor of the Dravidians in science, religion and philosophy. It is also the name of the star "Canopus".
Agneyastra - Agneyastra (Sanskrit). The fiery missiles or weapons used by the Gods in the exoteric Puranas and the Mahabharata the magic weapons said to have been wielded by the adept-race (the fourth), the Atlanteans.
This "weapon of fire" was given by Bharadwaja to Agnivesa, the son of Agni, and by him to Drona, though the Vishnu Purana contradicts this, saying that it was given by the sage Aurva to King Sagara, his chela. They are frequently mentioned in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
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