Uttar Kaanda
201 - Sri Rama's Coronation; Vedasí Alleluia; Lord Siva's Alleluia
Chhands
Description
"Hail, Crest-Jewel of kings, incomparable is your beauty; though transcending Maya and her attributes, you possess innumerable divine attributes. You killed by the might of Your arm fierce, mighty and wicked demons like the ten-headed Ravana. Appearing in human garb, you crushed the armies that constituted the Earth's burden and ended her terrible woes. Hail, merciful Lord, Protector of the suppliant ! We adore you with Your Spouse. Subject to Your relentless Maya (deluding potency), O Hari, gods and demons, Nagas and human beings, nay, all animate and inanimate beings wander for numberless days and nights in the path of metempsychosis impelled by Time, Karma (destiny) and the Gunas (modes of Prakrti). Those, O Lord, whom You ever regarded with compassion have been rid of the threefold affliction. Protect us, Rama, prompt as You are in putting an end to the toils of mundane existence; we adore You. Intoxicated with the pride of wisdom, they who respect not Devotion to You, which takes away the fear of transmigration, may climb up to a rank which even gods find it difficult to attain; yet, O Hari, we see them fall from it. On the other hand, they who have abandoned all other hopes and with unqualified faith choose to remain Your servants easily cross the ocean of transmigration by merely repeating Your name. It is for this reason, O Lord, that we particularly invoke You. O Mukunda (Bestower of Liberation), O Rama, O Lord of Rama (Laksmi), we ever adore Your lotus-feet, which are worthy of adoration to Lord Siva and the unborn Brahma, the touch of whose blessed dust redeemed Ahalya (the wife of the sage Gautama), from whose nails flowed the heavenly stream (Ganga)-which is reverenced even by the sages and sanctifies all the three spheres- and the soles of which, while bearing the marks of a flag, thunderbolt, goad and lotus, are further adorned by scars left by thorns that pricked them in course of Your wanderings in the forest. We further adore You as the tree of the universe, which, as the Vedas and the agamas (Tantras) declare, has its root in the Unmanifest (Brahma) and has existed from time without beginning; which has four coats* of bark, six stems, twenty-five boughs, numberless leaves and abundant flowers; which bears two kinds of fruits-bitter and sweet, which has a solitary creeper clinging to it and which puts on ever fresh foliage and evernew flowers. Let those who meditate on Brahma (the Absolute) as unborn, the one without a second, perceptible only through intuition and as beyond the ken of mind, preach and believe like that. We, for our part, O Lord, ever chant the glories of Your visible form. O All-merciful and All-effulgent Lord, O mine of noble virtues, this is the boon we ask of You: may we love Your feet, casting off all aberrations of thought, word and deed."