Three Mothers Attain Vaikuṇṭha

In the years of Rāmarājya in Ayodhyā, Rāma’s three mothers, Kaikeyī, Sumitrā and Kauśalyā, each gained sudden and full jñāna (knowledge of the self) from something they met in the night. Each then reached Vaikuṇṭha, the supreme abode of Bhagavān Vishṇu. The second sarga of the Manohara Khaṇḍa of the Ānanda Rāmāyaṇa tells how. Each mother’s path suited her own nature.

The night teaching

During Rāmarājya, Rāma arranged for his dūtas (messengers and servants) to give adhyātma-pravacana (talks on the nature of the self) through the city during the night hours. Rāma did this to lift the spirit of everyone in his kingdom, not only the rulers and the learned.

Rāma’s three mothers did not gain jñāna through a formal talk or a long sādhana (spiritual practice). Each had a moment of clear understanding, set off by sounds and sights in the ordinary flow of that night.

Kaikeyī and the sheep’s cry

Kaikeyī was Rāma’s second mother. Her boons to Daśaratha had sent Rāma into exile. That night she heard sheep nearby calling in their own sound: “mē mē.” Through the grace of the night’s spiritual atmosphere, the sound came to her not as an animal’s cry but as a deep teaching.

“Mē mē” means “mine, mine.” It is the sound of mamakāra (the feeling of possession), the first claim of ego-ownership that drives all beings round the cycle of saṃsāra (birth and death). The sheep, in its simple animal nature, gave perfect voice to the root mistake of the bound soul. The whole crisis of the Rāmāyaṇa, Kaikeyī’s demands, Daśaratha’s grief and Rāma’s exile, had come from that root: the insistence on “mine,” on Bharata’s claim, on her own special place.

In a flash Kaikeyī saw through the veil of mamakāra that had ruled her life. The urge to possess dissolved, and with it dissolved her identity with the small self that had made those claims. She gained jñāna, the direct knowledge of the self beyond all possession. In that fullness she left this world and reached Vaikuṇṭha.

Sumitrā and self-inquiry

Sumitrā was Rāma’s third mother, and the mother of Lakshmaṇa and Śatrughna. Through the Rāmāyaṇa she was known for her calm and even nature. In the middle of that night she turned the question inward and asked a simple, radical thing: “Ko’ham?”, which means “Who am I?”

This is the basic inquiry of Advaita-jñāna. Instead of asking about the world, one turns the light of awareness back on the one who asks. Sumitrā’s question was not a mere thought. It was a real moment of turning within. In asking “Who am I?”, she found no fixed, limited self. The seeker dissolved in the search, and only the shining awareness that had always been there was left.

Through this self-inquiry Sumitrā knew her own true nature as unlimited, peaceful consciousness. She gained jñāna, and in the fullness of that knowing she also reached Vaikuṇṭha.

Kauśalyā and the cow’s call

Kauśalyā was Rāma’s eldest and chief mother. She was a devoted worshipper of Bhagavān Vishṇu-Nārāyaṇa and had kept up her pūjā and vows with great care all her life. That night she heard a cow calling to its calf, and the sound the cow made was “ahaṃ,” which means “I am.”

In the Vedānta tradition, “ahaṃ,” the first-person sound, points to the first sense of being, the self-shining “I am” that lies under all experience. When a cow calls to its calf, the feeling is pure love, the movement of the greater toward the smaller, of the source toward what has come from it. For Kauśalyā, the sound “ahaṃ” in that moment of a mother’s love was both the cow’s cry and the cry of Brahman reaching out to all beings.

As she heard it, Kauśalyā knew “ahaṃ” as the mahāvākya (great saying) “Ahaṃ Brahmāsmi,” “I am Brahman.” The cow’s mother-cry opened the deepest knowledge of non-dual awareness. Kauśalyā gained jñāna in that instant, and in the fullness of that knowing she left the earthly plane and reached Vaikuṇṭha.

Sources

• Ānanda Rāmāyaṇa, Manohara Khaṇḍa, Chapter 2 (the night teaching and the three mothers)