Rāma's Great Dispassion The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha opens at a precise moment of crisis: Rāma has just returned from a pilgrimage — young, acclaimed, radiantly accomplished — and has stopped. Something has broken loose inside him. He will not speak of governance or duty or the future. He sits, and what comes from him is an avalanche of disillusionment that the sages listen to without interrupting. This is that monologue — or a portion of it. It is one of the oldest descriptions in world literature of what the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha calls viveka and vairāgya ripening simultaneously: the capacity to discern what is real, arriving together with the complete inability to pretend that what is not real matters. For the Vedantic…