| Abstract: |
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki has been read for more than two millennia as a manual of dharma, yet scholarship has never systematically aggregated what the epic says about the governance of emotion. This paper presents a qualitative meta-analysis of thirty landmark studies published between 1923 and 2015, spanning Sanskrit philology, dharmaśāstric ethics, Indian aesthetics, and modern emotion science. Works were identified through a PRISMA-inspired protocol, screened against explicit criteria, and coded on two axes: emotional dysregulation through the six adversaries of the mind (ṣaḍ-ṛipu) desire, anger, greed, delusion, pride, and envy and the cultivation of regulatory dispositions such as equanimity (sama), sensory restraint (dama), fortitude (dhṛti), tolerance (titikṣā), discrimination (viveka), and devotion (bhakti). The synthesis yields four convergent findings. First, narrative catastrophe in the epic is traceable to failures of self-regulation rather than to fate. Second, Rāma's ethical authority rests not on the absence of emotion but on its disciplined expression, with grief as his principal trial. Third, contrast figures such as Rāvaṇa, Kaikeyī, and Mantharā operate as controlled negative cases that isolate specific vices. Fourth, classical rasa theory and contemporary appraisal models converge in treating regulated emotion as constitutive, not merely facilitative, of moral judgment. Bibliometric mapping shows an affective turn since the 1990s, with psychological studies now rivalling textual studies as the largest cluster of work on the epic. The review also exposes persistent gaps sparse empirical testing, thin coverage of non-Vālmīkian tellings, and one-way borrowing between psychology and epic studies and closes by proposing an integrative framework for future research. |
