श्रीरामेण राक्षससेनायाः संहारः

Entering the assembly hall, King Rāvaṇa, wretched and in the deepest sorrow, sat down on the chief seat breathing hard like an angry lion; the image shows his anger and his misery together, for a wounded lion is still a lion, and even in grief he took the royal seat and gave his orders as king. Worn down by the loss of his son, mighty Rāvaṇa then spoke to all the leaders of his forces with joined palms. It is a strange picture, a king pleading with his soldiers with folded hands, and it shows how low he had been brought and how much, without Indrajit, he now needed his army's goodwill. "Go out, all of you," he said, "with all the elephants and horses, with throngs of chariots and bodies of foot-soldiers. Surround Rāma alone in battle and kill him, pouring down showers of arrows like clouds in the rainy season. Or else, when you have torn his limbs with sharp arrows in the great battle, I myself shall kill Rāma tomorrow while the world looks on." "Rāma alone" shows that he regarded Rāma as his one real enemy. He offered two courses: let the army kill Rāma, or let it wound him with arrows so that he himself might finish him. In the previous sarga Supārśva had spoken of going out on the new-moon day; now Rāvaṇa sends his army first and promises to come himself on the morrow. Taking up the words of the lord of the rākṣasas, the rākṣasas went out in swift chariots, joined by troops of many kinds.

The rākṣasas hurled iron bars, paṭṭiśas, arrows, swords and axes, weapons that end the body, at the monkeys, and the monkeys hurled trees and rocks at the rākṣasas. Toward sunrise the battle between them grew tumultuous and very terrible; the order had been given in the night and the army went out at dawn. With maces of every kind, darts, swords and axes, monkeys and rākṣasas struck each other down. Once the fighting had begun, the vast, astonishing cloud of dust that had filled the sky was laid by the streams of blood, a grim paradox, for the earth was soaked not with water but with blood, and it lets us guess how much blood was spilled. Rivers of blood flowed, carrying heaps of bodies, with elephants and chariots for their banks, arrows for fish and banners for the trees along the shore; a single picture shows the whole horror of the fight. Drenched in the floods of blood, the monkeys leapt again and again, as restless monkeys do, and smashed banners, armour, chariots, horses and weapons of every kind. They tore the rākṣasas' hair, ears, foreheads and noses with their sharp teeth and claws, fighting after their own nature, and a hundred monkey champions rushed upon each rākṣasa, like birds upon a tree in fruit; the number shows both how many monkeys there were and how huge the rākṣasas were, since it took a hundred to overcome one. Then the mountain-like rākṣasas struck down the fearsome monkeys with heavy maces, darts, swords and axes. The poet shows the course of the fight in three stages: first the monkeys have the upper hand, then the rākṣasas, and then Rāma enters. For the great host of monkeys, being slaughtered by the rākṣasas, went for refuge to Rāma son of Daśaratha, the refuge of all; to give refuge is his nature. It is the monkeys' plight that brings Rāma into the fight: he enters in person when his soldiers are in danger, as a leader should. Great as the monkeys' valour was, without Rāma's strength they could not overcome the rākṣasas.

Then mighty Rāma, full of valour, took up his bow, entered the rākṣasa army and rained down a shower of arrows. Once he was among them, the dreadful rākṣasas could not come near him, as clouds cannot reach the sun, for he was burning them with the fire of his arrows. The night-rangers saw only the terrible deeds Rāma was doing, deeds no one else could do, and never Rāma himself. As he shook the great army and scattered its great chariot-fighters they did not see him, as one does not see the wind moving through a forest, but knows it only by what it does. They saw their army cut, split, burned by arrows, shattered and tormented by weapons, but not the swift-acting Rāma. They did not see Rāghava striking at their bodies, just as creatures do not see the self that dwells among the objects of the senses. That simile recalls the thought of the Upaniṣads, where the self is present everywhere and does everything yet is never seen by the eye, and it hints that Rāma is an image of the supreme Self. The three similes of the sun beyond the clouds, the wind in the forest and the self within make his unreachableness and invisibility complete. "That one is killing the elephant troops! That one is killing the great chariot-fighters! That one is killing the foot-soldiers and their horses with sharp arrows!" they cried, and taking one another for likenesses of Rāma, the rākṣasas struck at each other in fury, so that they perished by their own army's hands. For they were bewildered by the supreme Gāndharva weapon that the great-souled Rāma had used, and could not see him even as he burned their host. At one moment they saw thousands of Rāmas, at the next only Kākutstha alone, as in a dream. They saw the golden tip of his bow whirling like a circle of fire, as he drew and loosed without pause, but not Rāghava himself. Then the poet draws a wheel: Rāma's body was its hub, his strength its flame, his arrows its spokes, his bow its rim, the twang of the string and the slap on the arm-guard its roar, his energy, wisdom and virtue its radiance, and the powers of his divine weapons its cutting edge; and as it slew the rākṣasas in battle, all creatures saw that wheel of Rāma as the wheel of Time, which none can escape. Every part of the wheel answers to some quality or limb of Rāma. There is a pointed contrast with what came before: Indrajit fought unseen by his magic, and now Rāma is unseen by a righteous weapon. The poet does not describe Rāma's form at all, only the results of his deeds, and his divinity grows by it; this is one of the famous descriptions of the Yuddha Kāṇḍa.

An army of ten thousand chariots swift as the wind, eighteen thousand mighty elephants, fourteen thousand horses with their riders and a full two hundred thousand rākṣasa foot-soldiers, all these forces of rākṣasas who could take any form were slain by Rāma alone, in the eighth part of a day, with arrows like tongues of fire. That so short a time should be enough for one warrior to destroy so great an army is a power beyond the human, and the exact numbers make the account read almost like a chronicle; the chariots were as fast as the wind and the elephants immensely strong, yet one man killed them all. Their horses and chariots slain and their banners shattered, the night-rangers who survived the slaughter fled into Laṅkā, subdued, their will to fight gone. With its slain elephants, foot-soldiers and horses the battlefield looked like the playground of great Rudra in his wrath, that is, a cremation ground where Rudra dances. Then the gods, with the gandharvas, the siddhas and the supreme sages, praised Rāma's deed, crying "Well done, well done!", a sign that heaven approved his righteous war. The chief lesson of the sarga is that when Rāma himself enters the fight his enemies are destroyed in a moment. After Indrajit's death this was the last great destruction of Rāvaṇa's army; the survivors would carry the news to Rāvaṇa, and in the next sarga the lament of the rākṣasīs is heard.

Immediately afterwards Rāma spoke to Sugrīva, to Vibhīṣaṇa, to the monkey Hanūmān, to Jāmbavān, best of monkeys, and to Mainda and Dvivida, the six chief companions he trusted, named here one by one. "This divine power of weapons," the righteous one said, "belongs either to me or to three-eyed Śiva." His words are modest: rather than praising himself he sets his power beside Śiva's. Having destroyed that army of the rākṣasa king, Rāma, great-souled and equal to Śakra, who had conquered weariness in the use of missiles and weapons, so that even after such fighting he was not tired, was praised by the delighted hosts of the gods.