rakshasa
So as a child Rama was studying with a very great saint, Vishwamitra, and he had an ashram where Rama and His brothers studied, and they used to come for holidays to their father’s place. Then He had the capacity to kill a demon with only one arrow. One arrow of Shri Rama’s was sufficient. And He was a small little child, say about seven, eight years of age and people were surprised how He could do it.
Now these Yagnyas [ceremonies] were created to evoke the deities within the spinal column, actually. And for these Yagnyas they used to sit down and do all these Havanas the way we do it. But at that time the rakshasas [demons] would come and try to spoil the Yagnya. Because Yagnyas are to be done with a pure heart, and with cleanliness and with purity. It should not be insulted. There is a protocol about it. While they thought that, “If we insult the deities there, then the deities will disappear and their Yagnyas will be spoiled.”
At the time of Rama also there were some rakshasas who took a special pleasure in spoiling these Yagnyas, and Rama as a child would go and protect the rishis [saints] from the demons. And the demons would take on some sort of a funny form, and come like miserable creatures and put some bones of animals and things like that in the Yagnya, and that would spoil the effects of the Yagnya. And Rama would protect that, as a child. Imagine, as a child He used to do that. They would be doing the Yagnya and He would be sitting outside with all His small brothers around Him, and they would kill the demons who would try to destroy the Yagnya.
This is the early life of Rama in which you see how as a child also He showed an amount of expertise in arrow and bow. So any time you see a statue, how to make out if it’s a Rama statue is to see if there’s an arrow and a bow – then it’s Rama’s statue.
Now His coming on this earth gave us the development of the right side, and so the Yagnyas were also on the right side. Because first of all when human beings came on this earth, they were frightened of all the animals who would invade them and all kinds of horrible rakshasas and all those people, and negative forces would trouble them. In that state they needed to create a king, a ruler who was an ideal king and who would rule according to the laws of dharma [right conduct]. So He was the one in charge of that.
He was here in Treta Yuga, and Krishna came at the time of Dwapar Yuga. When I came it was Kali Yuga, but now today the time is of Krita Yuga. The Yuga where work will be done – Krita Yuga. This is the time where work will be done. So far things have moved from one to another.
Now in the Treta Yuga when Shri Rama came, the idea of kingship and rulership started, so the greatest emphasis was on the goodwill of the people. The people had to have goodwill, for the people and for the king, and for the betterment of humanity. The will: that is the right side. So how to create the goodwill? First the leader has to sacrifice, and show how far he can go on sacrificing to keep the moral and the goodwill of the people. So the right side was created by the advent of Shri Rama, because He showed a path of creating among people the awareness that they should be ruled, that they should not be anarchists. There should be one head who should be able to organise, coordinate and work out a collective thing.
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, 1982
(Photograph: infobankofindia.com)