Chapter 91 — The Counsel of the Ages

Rama listened to the bereaved father's lament in its fullness. The cry at the palace gate did not fade into the noise of the city; it brought distress to the king himself.

He summoned his ministers. Vashishta came, along with Rama's brothers and representatives of the city. Eight sages entered with Vashishta: Markandeya, Maudgalya, Vamadeva, Kashyapa, Katyayana, Jabali, Gautama, and Narada. They took the seats appropriate to them in the council hall.

Rama told them why the brahmin stood weeping outside. He repeated the father's charge: a child of five had died before reaching youth, and the father believed such a death could not occur in a kingdom rightly governed.

The sages heard him. Narada then spoke before them all.

He began with an account of the ages through which the world moved: Krita, Treta, and Dvapara. He described a social order divided by hereditary group and said that its prescribed duties altered across those ages. In the earliest age, he said, only brahmins performed severe religious discipline. In Treta, kshatriyas also did so. Then, as the order changed again, other groups came within the account in different ways.

The terms mattered because Narada's explanation turned upon them. In his account, who was permitted to undertake tapas depended upon the rank assigned at birth, and that permission changed from age to age. Practice taken up outside the permitted rank was not a private fault, and it was not a sin to be weighed against the man who committed it. It was a disturbance in the arrangement that held the world in order, and the harm it did fell wherever the disturbance reached: in this case upon a child five years old, in a city far from where the practice was being carried out.

Narada said that, in the age he called Dvapara, a Shudra was undertaking severe tapas somewhere in Rama's realm. A Shudra belonged to the lowest of the four hereditary groups in that order. Narada identified this practice as the cause of the child's death.

The explanation was given as counsel, and it was not opened to dispute in the hall. Narada told Rama that a person who performed what he called an unlawful act in a king's realm brought ruin upon himself and the king. Rama was to search the whole country. Where he found the wrong, he was to act.

“Then dharma will increase,” Narada said. “The lives of the people will be extended, and this child will live again.”

The promised restoration stood beside the price Narada's words demanded. Rama received the instruction. The father was still at the gate with the child in his arms; the body could not simply be left while the king searched.

Rama called Lakshmana and gave him a practical order. The child was to be placed in a vessel of oil, scented with rich perfumes and fragrant oils, so that the body would not decay or come apart. The grieving father was to be comforted as far as comfort was possible.

Rama would go himself. He would search the realm in every direction for the offense Narada had named.