Valmiki, the First Poet

One morning, on the bank of the Tamasa River, a man stood still in the forest. Then he heard the sound of an arrow.

The arrow flew past. A male krauncha bird fell. The female watched her mate fall, and she began to cry out in grief.

The man stood there, stunned. He had never felt anything like this before. Something in his chest broke open, warm and painful, like an old wound suddenly opening again. And all at once, without meaning to, without thinking first, a line of verse burst from his lips.

"Ma nishada pratishtham tvam."

He was astonished at himself. The verse was not born of learning, or of any wish to compose. It was born of pain, the first time he had felt the pain of another living creature. In the tradition of the Valmiki Ramayana, this counts as the first verse of classical Sanskrit poetry, set in the anustubh meter. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic, composed in Sanskrit. It is said that a whole stream of poetry began in that moment.

The man's name was Valmiki. But he had not always carried that name.

His story began long before that moment, with another name that he left behind deep in the forest.

A later legend tells that long ago, he was called Ratnakar. He lived in the forest and stopped travelers on the road, taking their belongings to feed his wife and children. Day after day, he caused suffering to others, and he felt nothing. That was his life.

Then one day, the sage Narada passed through that forest. Ratnakar blocked his way as usual. But Narada was not afraid. He asked one simple question: "Will your family share the sin of what you are doing?"

Ratnakar went home and asked his wife. He asked his children. Their answers were the same: no. What he did was his own affair, they said, and it had nothing to do with them.

He stood there and understood, for the first time in his life, that he was walking alone. The wrongs he had done were his own, and no one would carry them with him. He felt heavy. It was not a heaviness of the body but a heaviness inside, of a kind that had no name. Something inside him collapsed.

Ratnakar went back to find Narada. He asked to be taught.

Narada taught him to chant a sacred name. Ratnakar sat down. He closed his eyes. He began to chant. He did not stand up, and he did not leave. The rainy season passed. The dry season passed. Plants grew thick around him, and a termite mound rose over him like a small hill.

In Sanskrit, valmika means a termite mound. When Ratnakar stepped out of that cocoon of earth, people gave him a new name: Valmiki, the one who came out of the termite mound.

After that long meditation, Valmiki went to the bank of the Tamasa with a pupil. He looked at the clear water, and his heart was at peace. And then he saw that pair of krauncha birds. He saw the arrow fly, and he saw the female bird weep.

For the first time since the days when he was called Ratnakar, he felt the pain of another. And, as the legend tells it, this was the first time that such pain turned itself into poetry.

According to the epic, the god Brahma appeared and told him that the verse came from Brahma himself, sent through Valmiki's lips. Before that, the sage Narada had already told him the story of the life of Rama. Brahma granted him what people call divine sight, the power to see everything that had happened as if it were unfolding before his eyes. Not remembering. Not imagining. Truly seeing.

Valmiki sat down and wrote. He wrote day after day. Two pupils, named Lava and Kusha, learned the whole epic by heart. Later they sang it before King Rama himself, the hero of the story. The epic has 24,000 verses. 24,000. That is almost as many as the days in a whole human life. It is divided into seven books, and people call Valmiki the Adi Kavi, the First Poet.

The cry of that bird on the bank of the Tamasa traveled farther than anyone could have imagined.

In the 7th century, people in the old kingdom of Champa had a place of worship set aside for Valmiki. Champa was an ancient kingdom on the central and southern coast of what is now Vietnam. The ancient capital of that kingdom stood at Trà Kiệu, which the Cham called Simhapura. There, a king named Prakasadharman had words carved in stone about that place of worship. They named the poet himself: Valmiki. The carved stone still survives today, and 14 centuries later its carved words can still be read. It shows that the Cham did not only know the story of Valmiki. They also honored him as a holy sage in that land.

From that same Trà Kiệu came a large slab of sandstone, carved on four sides with scenes that many scholars read as coming from the Ramayana. They show an archery contest, a wedding, and heavenly maidens dancing. That altar dates from about the 7th or 8th century, and in 2012 it was recognized as a National Treasure of Vietnam. Today it rests in the Museum of Cham Sculpture in Da Nang. It quietly recalls a story that began with the cry of a bird. That story traveled from the bank of the Tamasa in India all the way to the coast of central Vietnam.