BANGALORE: Nature as the symbol of Purity and always the symbol of Silence — not the silence which is the absence of words, but the silence which is the plenitude of Being — is an idea dear to all thinkers.
It is in India that the Self is Silence, Santoyam Atma. Here in India was discovered the truth, that the language of the spirit is not words, but Silence. Here the great ones who lived in the plenitude and the strength of the spirit practiced the art of Silence and non-retaliation before evil doers; and this tradition has flowed from Sita and Buddha down to our own day.
In order to understand the full structure of Sita’s personality we shall have to understand that she was the symbol of Nature, Nature being the archetype of purity and symbol of Silence, the Silence of Being. Sita by being what she was, by her capacity of suscitating intense love in Lord Rama, could provoke in him, by separation, an intense suffering.
Different yet complementary were the roles which Lord Rama and Sita played in the struggle in the conquest of evil: Lord Rama conquered evil by fight and virility; Sita did it by accepting evil and by transcending it even as Christ did, through suffering and through radiating the soul-force that comes out when one suffers without any thought of retaliation, but with the idea of increasing one’s strength and love.
That Lord Rama and Sita were completing one another is a very important idea helping us to understand both of them. In Indian tradition, the wife is called the ‘co-pilgrim’ or ‘partner on the path of truth or the spiritual path’ (Sahadharmacharini). She increases her husband’s spiritual thirst and value and completes his role and personality. She is fully content if she fulfils this high role, to preserve Lord Rama’s name and reputation.
Not retaliating to miscreants, abstaining from injury even to those who cause injury, remaining untouched by the desire to hurt even a fly, being tender in the extreme extending love and compassion to others - such were the dimensions of her inside, such was Sita, the Symbol of Silence.
When we use the word Silence, we are using it as the very dimension of Being, in its two aspects of being and works, or in the domain where Being is in the order i.e. where Being acts or works. Silence is not to be understood as simply non-retaliation or non-acting.
Silence is to be understood as active love and conversion of evil. To be able to convert evil into the substance of good, being should be above good and evil. Good ranging as the opposite of evil is not powerful enough to convert evil into good: It produces equilibrium of forces; that is all.
Sita was silence, the shining symbol of victory over evil by acceptation. The remarkable thing is that she was always aware of this Divine Nature of hers and of her mission. Rarely did she forget it and on occasions when she forgot or seemed to forget it, it was, as it were, to ornament or to nourish the setting in the practice of her mission.