Shiva Kumar Tripathi

A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics Shiva Kumar Tripathi

Tulsidas' Ramacharitmanas is the story of a war against unending vandalism of wild bullies. Terrorism has made a home in every part of the world today. Its sporadic national and international ramifications are making their ugly appearance everywhere and the world is frantically searching for a way to assuage fear and redeem hope.

The Ramacharitmanas offers a solution by providing real examples of how to deal with terror. It counsels union for subjugation of a tyrant. It supports the creation of a wonder weapon to kill a savage tyrant but does not advocate a weapon for mass killings. It validates the importance of peaceful negotiation before destroying the evil to protect the good. It indicates more ways than one, of resisting and defending the good; of how the good should encounter an obdurate evil; of how an individual as well as the whole mankind can produce plenty, prosperity and peace.

A Garden of Deeds helps the reader understand the epic "Ramacharitmanas" as not religion but a treatise on discipline and ethics for the individual in his family, in society and in the world at large. It beckons hope and fulfillment.