Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Araṇya · 19 of 50
19. Deeper into the forest
Araṇya (अरण्य)
Citrakūṭa is too close to a city that knows the way. The sages, and the simple fact that Bharata's army has trampled a path, send the three further. At the close of the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa they come to Atri's hermitage. Atri's wife Anasūyā receives Sītā and gives her ornaments, and a teaching about a wife's life that Sītā listens to as a woman who has already chosen the forest. Then, as the Araṇya-kāṇḍa opens, they walk into the Daṇḍaka, the forest of punishments and of hermitages.
The life of the walk is part of the meaning. Lakṣmaṇa keeps watch. Rāma gathers fruit. Sītā learns the names of trees. Visitors come: sages who have been hurt by rākṣasas and who have heard that a prince in bark is something more than a prince in bark. The exile begins to acquire a job. Protection was not in Kaikeyī's boon. It grows anyway, out of the kind of man he is and the kind of place the forest is.
A reader looking for the philosophical dialogues of the forest will find them, at length, in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha, which is a later composition and not this kāṇḍa. What this kāṇḍa philosophizes, it philosophizes by encounter. Each visitor is a claim about what dharma does when it is no longer in a palace.
नेपालीमा
चित्रकूट बाटो थाहा भएको सहरको अति नजिक थियो। अयोध्याकाण्डको अन्त्यमा उनीहरू अत्रिको आश्रम पुगे। अत्रिकी पत्नी अनसूयाले सीतालाई गहना र उपदेश दिइन्। अनि अरण्यकाण्ड सुरु हुँदा उनीहरू दण्डकतिर लागे। लक्ष्मणले पहरा दिए, रामले फल बटुल्नुभयो, सीताले रुखका नाम सिकिन्। राक्षसबाट पीडित ऋषिहरू आउन थाले। वनवासले काम पायो। संरक्षण कैकेयीको वरमा थिएन। योगवासिष्ठ पछिल्लो रचना हो, यो काण्ड होइन। यो काण्डको दर्शन भेटघाट हो।