How the Ramayana Came to Be Written

On the bank of the river Tamasa stood the ashram of Maharishi Valmiki. One day the divine sage Narada came to visit. Valmiki had long carried a question, and he asked it: "Is there, in the world today, a man who is both virtuous and brave? One who knows dharma, never forgets a kindness, always speaks the truth and holds to his resolve? Who has mastered anger, envies no one, and whom even the gods fear when he is roused?"

Narada smiled. "The qualities you list are rarely found together. Yet there is one such man. He is born in the line of Ikshvaku, and people call him Ram." Then, in a few words, Narada told the whole life of Ram: the birth in Ayodhya, the exile, the loss of Sita, the fall of Ravana and the reign that followed. Having said this, he left.

The krauncha bird and the first verse

A little later Valmiki went down to the Tamasa to bathe, with his disciple Bharadwaja. The water was so clear that he said, "Look, Bharadwaja, it is as clean as the mind of a good man." On a branch nearby a pair of krauncha birds were calling to each other. Suddenly a hunter's arrow struck the male, and he fell bleeding to the ground. His mate circled him, crying.

The sage's heart filled with pity, and words left his mouth before he knew it:

Ma nishada pratishtham tvam agamah shashvatih samah,
yat krauncha-mithunad ekam avadhih kama-mohitam.

"Hunter, may you never find rest, for you have killed one of a pair lost in love."

Having spoken, Valmiki was astonished. This was not ordinary speech. It had four lines of equal length and could be sung to the veena. He said to Bharadwaja, "It came out of grief, shoka, so let it be called shloka."

Brahma's command

Back at the ashram he could not stop thinking of the bird. Then Brahma, the creator, appeared before him and said: "That verse came from you by my will. Now tell the whole life of Ram in this very metre. Everything that happened, seen or unseen, will be shown to you, and not one word of your poem will be untrue. As long as mountains stand and rivers flow on the earth, the story of the Ramayana will be told among people."

Valmiki sat in meditation. He saw Ram, Sita, Lakshmana and Dasharatha laughing, speaking and walking, as clearly as a fruit held in the palm of the hand. Then he composed the Ramayana in twenty-four thousand verses and seven kandas, and taught it first to two boys who were growing up in his ashram, Luv and Kush.

So the first poem in the world was born not from the praise of a king but from pity for a wounded bird. The story itself begins in Ayodhya, where Ram was born.