Acquainted with Grief: R?ma, Kro?a, and Medieval Debates on the Suffering of God

The authors of the numerous medieval and early modern Sanskrit-medium com-mentaries on the various recensions and sub-recensions of the Valmikiramaya?a frequently found themselves in a somewhat awkward hermeneutical position. The epic itself, like many Indic texts, is highly revered both as a religious text, one of the earliest and most influential Vaio?ava texts, and as a literary work that is not only a great poem but indeed the very first poem and the fons et origo of all subsequent poetry. Moreover, like Vyasa, the author of the Ramaya?a's sister epic, the Mahabharata, Valmiki was regarded not merely as an inspired poet and sage, but as a rsi, that is to say an inerrant seer whose speech, in his case inspired directly by the creator divinity Brahma and the god's gift of a divine vision, must therefore be accepted as absolutely true and authoritative. The problem facing the work's commentators is that Valmiki's text portrays its hero, Rama, as not only a god in the form of a man, but as one who, ignorant of his own divinity, suffers all of the mental, emotional, and physical pain to which ordinary mortals are prey. In this Rama differs sharply from the subsequent Vaio?ava avatara and central figure of the Mahabharata, Kro?a, who, fully aware of his godhood, rarely suffers in any way mentally or physically. But the Ramaya?a's commentators are living and writing in a world in which the development of the medieval bhakti movements has led poets and theologians to conceive of and write about Rama as an omnipo-tent and omniscient figure very much like Kro?a.The present essay discusses the lexical, grammatical, and hermaneutical strat-egies the commentors adopted to negotiate the tension between Valmiki's apparent depiction of the suffering of his hero and a proposed deeper meaning in which the avatara conforms more fully to what became the medieval and modern theology of god on earth.