in their prayers, but his figure has not been invested with the attributes (often of dubious moral value) which most attract sectarian devotion.  His worship combines easily with the adoration of other deities.  The great temple of Ramesvaram on Adam’s Bridge is dedicated not to Rama himself but to the linga which he erected there, and Tulsi Das, the author of the Hindi Ramayana, while invoking Rama as the Supreme Lord and redeemer of the world, emphatically states[363] that his worship is not antagonistic to that of Siva.

No inscriptions nor ancient references testify to the worship of Rama before our era and in the subsequent centuries two phases can be distinguished.  First, Rama is a great hero, an incarnation of Vishnu for a particular purpose and analogous to the Vamana or any other avatara:  deserving as such of all respect but still not the object of any special cult.  This is the view taken of Rama in the Mahabharata, the Puranas, the Raghuvamsa, and those parts of the Ramayana which go beyond it are probably late additions.[364] But secondly Rama becomes for his worshippers the supreme deity.  Ramanuja (on the Vedanta sutras, II. 42) mentions him and Krishna as two great incarnations in which the supreme being became manifest, and since Krishna was certainly worshipped at this period as identical with the All-God, it would appear that Rama held the same position.  Yet it was not until the fourteenth or fifteenth century that he became for many sects the central and ultimate divine figure.

In the more liberal sects the worship of Rama passes easily into theism and it is the direct parent of the Kabirpanth and Sikhism, but unlike Krishnaism it does not lead to erotic excess.  Rama personifies the ideal of chivalry, Sita of chastity.  Less edifying forms of worship may attract more attention, but it must not be supposed that Rama is relegated to the penumbra of philosophic thought.  If anything so multiplex as Hinduism can be said to have a watchword, it is the cry, Ram, Ram.  The story of his adventures has travelled even further than the hero himself, and is known not only from Kashmir to Cape Comorin but from Bombay to Java and Indo-China where it is a common subject of art.  In India the Ramayana is a favourite recitation among all classes, and dramatized versions of various episodes are performed as religious plays.  Though two late Upanishads, the Ramapurvatapaniya and Ramauttaratapaniya extol Rama as the Supreme Being, there is no Ramapurana.  The fact is significant, as showing that his worship did not possess precisely those features of priestly sectarianism which mark the Puranas and perhaps that it is later than the Puranas.  But it has inspired a large literature, more truly popular than anything that the Puranas contain.  Thus we have the Sanskrit Ramayana itself, the Hindi Ramayana, the Tamil Ramayana of Kamban, and works like the Adhyatma-Ramayana and Yoga-Vasishtha-Ramayana.[365] Of all these, the Ramayana of Tulsi Das is specially remarkable and I shall speak of it later at some length.