The Ramayana

In a cool gallery of the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang, a grandmother and her small grandchild stand quietly before a large block of sandstone. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa. The block is almost as tall as a grown person. Its surface is rough and dark, speckled with the marks of time. All four sides are covered in carvings, one scene on each. The grandmother speaks softly, in the warm voice of a bedtime story. This is the first page of a book that the Cham left for us, she says. Then she points to one side. Look, here is the young man drawing his bow.

She begins to tell the story of the Ramayana. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic, composed in Sanskrit. Long ago, in the kingdom of Mithila, King Janaka held an archery contest. Whoever could draw the divine bow of the god Shiva would marry Princess Sita. Many princes came to try, and every one of them gave up. The bow was so heavy that no one could shift it. At last Prince Rama of Ayodhya stepped forward. He did not only lift the bow. He drew it until it broke in two. Sita smiled and placed a victory garland around his neck.

But that happiness was short. Because of scheming at court, Rama had to give up the throne and live in the deep forest for 14 years. Sita would not be parted from him. She followed her husband into the forest, together with his loyal younger brother Lakshmana. Far out in the old woods, the demon king Ravana, who had ten heads and fearsome magic, caught sight of Sita. He carried her away across the sea to the distant island of Lanka.

Rama set out in sorrow to find his wife. Luckily, he had an extraordinary friend. This was Hanuman, the son of Vayu, the god of the wind. According to the epic, Hanuman crossed the ocean in a single leap and found Sita held captive in a garden on the faraway island. The good news flew back, and hope rose again in Rama's heart.

With an army of brave vanara monkeys, Rama fought on the island of Lanka and brought Sita home. The grandmother points to another side of the stone, where apsaras are dancing. An apsara is a celestial maiden, a being who lives in heaven. This is the celebration, she says. Sita has come home. Then she points to the next side, where a wedding is being prepared. And the last side shows messengers setting out in all four directions to announce the happy news.

But this story is not only about Rama. It is also about how far the story itself has traveled. The epic left the land of India and crossed many oceans, just as Hanuman once crossed the sea. Each country gave the same story its own name and told it in its own voice. In Cambodia it is the Reamker. In Thailand it is the Ramakien. In Indonesia it is the Kakawin Ramayana. In Laos it is the Phra Lak Phra Lam. Among the Cham it became the Tewa muno, about 480 lines of old Cham verse.

The Cham did not only listen to this story. They carved it into stone. The Khương Mỹ Cham towers in Da Nang were built between the 9th and the 11th centuries. Their reliefs show Rama facing Ravana with the great army of vanara monkeys. The researcher Trần Kỳ Phương took great pains to record those carvings. This altar came from Trà Kiệu, which was Simhapura, the old capital of the kingdom of Champa. In the 7th century, King Prakasadharman had a temple built and dedicated to Valmiki, the poet who composed the Ramayana. The stone slab carved with that dedication survives to this day.

The story crossed one more boundary, into the memory of the Vietnamese. The Lĩnh Nam chích quái is a collection of tales compiled under the Trần dynasty. That was around the 13th and 14th centuries. One of its tales is called Dạ Thoa Vương. It tells of a demon king with ten heads who carries off a princess, and of an army of monkeys who come to rescue her. A Vietnamese reader of that tale may well have met Ravana and Hanuman without knowing it.

If all this still feels far away, there is a closer link. Every Vietnamese high school student today has read an excerpt from the Ramayana called Ra-ma buộc tội, which means Rama's accusation. It is in the tenth-grade literature textbook. The grandmother smiles at her grandchild and asks whether they have already studied that lesson.

The two of them turn back to the Trà Kiệu altar. The sandstone has darkened over the years. The carved figures have worn down, but they are still there: the young prince with his bow, the dancing maidens, the messengers, and the wedding feast. This block of stone has told the story of Rama and Sita for more than 14 centuries. At first it told the Cham of Simhapura. Now it tells every family that stops in front of it, like the grandmother and her grandchild at this moment.