Kaikeyi and the Emotive Power: Why the Ramayana is Needed to Teach Inner Truths?

Question

I want to ask about Kaikeyi’s character. Ordinary people read her actions as a mother doing things for her son’s selfish interests. So the simple moral seems to be: she acted out of personal gain. But you keep saying every character personifies some inner faculty or insight. If Kaikeyi is more than “just a woman,” what does she personify?

Answer

First, remember: every character in the Ramayana personifies something in us. If you don’t hold that idea clearly, questions will keep spinning. Kaikeyi personifies our bhava-shakti — the emotive or feeling-power (which is closely connected to the will or desire-power). In other words, Kaikeyi is a personification of the emotional/ desire faculty of the mind. The forest (vana) is not merely a physical jungle; it is the inner region — “go into the forest” means look into your own depths and see which inner demons or samskaras live there. Ram visits many hermitages (Bhardwaja, Atri, Sutiksha, etc.) — those represent the good samskaras. He also finds the bad ones — the inner faults that must be destroyed. So when Kaikeyi asks that Ram be sent to the forest, read it like this: it is the emotive/will-power saying, “Do not sit on the throne yet; first go into the forest and destroy the inner demons. If you don’t, your throne will not be stable — your kingship (stability) will be repeatedly attacked.”
If you keep a running list of what each character personifies and recall it often, you won’t have to backtrack in understanding. Repetition helps fix it in memory.

Someone once wrote to me: “I attended lectures on the Ramcharitmanas; they tell the full story in dramatic form—but I prefer the Upanishads because they tell truth directly. Why read the Ramayana if you can read the Upanishads directly?” My answer was: if your temperament delights in and understands the Upanishads directly, then you don’t need the Ramayana. But many people cannot grasp the subtle inner meanings straight from terse Upanishadic statements; for them the Ramayana is a pedagogy — a story that embodies the inner teaching in images and scenes. The Ramayana carries all that Vedic and Upanishadic wisdom in a form that sinks into human life and imagination. You can teach a child the Upanishads? Not easily. But you can tell the child a story: “Ram killed Maricha” — the child nods, then you can add: “Maricha is moha; this is how moha works.” The story lets the child receive and remember the teaching. That practical usefulness — making the inner teaching accessible and rooted in life — is the value of the Ramayana.