The Leap

The Sundara Kanda is the only book of the Ramayana named for its beauty rather than its place or its hero, and the tradition reveres it above the rest — it is the book recited for protection, for the crossing of impossible things — because it is the book where devotion, reminded of its own power, simply does what cannot be done. It belongs to Hanuman, and it opens with him on the shore, growing.

Jambavan had reminded him who he was, and the knowledge returned, and Hanuman expanded on the beach until he stood vast against the sea. The epic stages the leap with enormous care, and the care is the meaning. He climbed Mount Mahendra and the mountain pressed down under his feet as he gathered; he fixed his mind not on the distance but on Rama; and he sprang — a hundred leagues of open ocean in a single bound, the sea heaving beneath him, the trees torn up by the wind of his going.

The Ramayana fills the crossing with trials, and each is a small teaching. The sea, to honour him, raised a mountain, Mainaka, out of the water to offer him rest; he touched it in courtesy and refused to stop, because the work was not done and rest before the work is a temptation dressed as kindness. A demoness, Surasa, rose to test him by swallowing — and Hanuman defeated her not by force but by wit, growing huge so she opened wide, then shrinking instantly to dart through and out, the epic’s point being that the obstacle was solved by intelligence, not strength, as Hanuman’s obstacles always are. A third, Simhika, seized his shadow to drag him down, and that one he killed, because some things in the way are not tests but threats and must simply be ended. Rest refused, cleverness over the trap, force only where force is the answer: the Sundara Kanda’s whole ethic of how a servant of dharma moves through the world is set in the air over the sea.

It is worth marking what the epic is doing by giving its most beloved book to Hanuman and not to Rama. Rama is dharma in a body, and the poem has shown, at the Vali killing, that dharma embodied cannot keep wholly clean once it acts in the world’s machinery. Hanuman is something the poem holds almost as high and finds, here, simpler to celebrate: capability that has given itself entirely to a purpose outside itself, and is therefore free — free of the calculations that bind Rama, free even, until reminded, of the knowledge of its own power, because it never acts for itself. The Sundara Kanda is beautiful, the tradition feels, because it is the one stretch of the epic where great power is wholly unconflicted, spent without residue, in love.

He crossed. He came down on the far shore, on the slopes above Lanka, and shrank himself small to enter unseen — the same instinct as the monk’s disguise on the mountain: power that hides itself the moment hiding serves the work. Below him lay Ravana’s city, golden, walled, guarded, and somewhere in it the woman the whole poem had been narrowing toward for four books. The leap was the impossible part, and he had made it look like a decision rather than a feat. The next chapter is the city by night, and the search that nearly ends in the despair the whole epic keeps placing right before its turns.