Rámáyana is the name of one of the two great epic poems of ancient India (for the other, see the article MAHÁBHÁRATA). Its subject-matter is the history of Ráma (q.v.), and its reputed author is Valmiki, who is said to have taught his poem to the two sons of Ráma. But though this latter account is open to doubt, it seems certain that Valmiki was a real personage, and, moreover, that the Rámáyana was the work of one single poet—not, like the Mahábhárata, the creation of various epochs and different minds. As a poetical composition the Rámáyana is therefore far superior to the Mahábhárata; and it may be called the best great poem of ancient India. Whereas the character of the Mahábhárata is cyclopedic, its main subject-matter overgrown by episodes of the most diversified nature, the Rámáyana has but one object in view, the history of Ráma. Its episodes are rare, and restricted to the early portion of the work, and its poetical diction betrays throughout the same finish and the same poetical genius. Whether we apply as a test the aspect of the religious life, or the geographical and other knowledge displayed in the two works, the Rámáyana appears the older. Since it is the chief source whence our information of the Ráma incarnation of Vishnu is derived, its contents may be gathered from the article VISHNU. The Rámáyana contains professedly 24,000 epic verses, or Slokas, in seven books—some 48,000 lines of sixteen syllables. The text which has come down to us exhibits, in different sets of manuscripts, such considerable discrepancies that there are practically two recensions. The one is more concise in its diction, and has less tendency than the other to that kind of descriptive enlargement of facts and sentiments which characterises the later poetry of India; it often also exhibits grammatical forms and peculiarities of an archaic stamp, where the other studiously avoids that which must have appeared to its editors in the light of a grammatical difficulty. There can be little doubt that the former is the older and more genuine text.
A complete edition of the older text, with two commentaries, was published at Madras in 1856, at Calcutta in 1860, and at Bombay in 1861. Of the later version Gorresio edited the first six books without a commentary, but with an Italian translation in poetical prose (1843-58). A complete translation of the Rámáyan of Valmiki in English verse, by R. T. H. Griffith, appeared in 1870-75 in five large volumes. See Williams, Indian Epic Poetry (1863); and Weber, Ueber das Rámáyana (1870).