Mataṅga Vana is the forest of Mataṅga. It is the forest around the āśrama of the great ascetic Mataṅga Muni, near the Mataṅga hill. At the foot of that hill Śabarī lived and waited for Rāma. The tapas of Mataṅga Muni had calmed all enmity among the animals of this forest, and hunter and hunted lived together in peace.

The forest and its qualities

The great ṛshi who had lived here had filled the forest with the power of his tapas. Because of this, the usual order of the wild, where one animal fears and hunts another, did not hold. Elephants lived in peace with lions. Mongooses played on the hoods of serpents. Fawns drank milk from tigresses. The fear and enmity of ordinary forest life did not act within the reach of Mataṅga’s tapas. Śabarī lived in this forest in great peace. The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa tells this in the Āraṇya Kāṇḍa, chapter 73.

Śabarī’s wait

Mataṅga Muni left the body and went up. Śabarī stayed on in the forest āśrama and kept her guru’s promise that Rāma would come. She gathered fruit, kept the āśrama, purified herself each day, and waited. The Mataṅga Vana was the place of this long and devoted wait, held up by her faith in her guru’s word and her love for Bhagavān Rāma. The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa tells this in the Āraṇya Kāṇḍa, chapters 73 and 74.

Sources

Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, Āraṇya Kāṇḍa, chapters 72–74