When Rama and Sugriva met for the first time on the Malaya Peak of Rishyamooka Mountain, they lit a bright fire with two dry twigs, araņis, and worshipped it together, forging thus the bond of friendship between each other. Vali the elder brother of Sugriva had forced him out of the kingdom and kept his wife with him; Ravana had abducted Rama’s wife Sita and carried her to his far away city of Lanka. Rama and Sugriva thus had a common cause to help each other. But Sugriva knew how strong his brother Vali was and he wanted to be sure if Rama would be in a position to meet him in a battle and vanquish him. He knew that Vali could pierce the seven impressive Sāl trees (Shorea Robusta) with seven arrows, the trees standing in a row a little beyond them. What the Sun is among the bright objects in the sky, what the Himalaya is among the imposing mountains, what the bright-maned lion is among the animals, says Sugriva, is no doubt Rama among the heroic men; yet he wants to make certain that he will be able to overpower Vali. He tells Rama to put his arrow to the bow, pull it full, and release it for it to pierce through one of the tall and stately Sāl trees. And lo and behold! Rama’s one single arrow, with a blazing gold-studded point, swarņaparişkŗtah as the poet of the Ramayana says, pierces through all the seven Sāl trees, one after the other. Not only that; it cuts through all the seven earths, saptabhūmih, and enters the deep subterranean regions. It takes it an hour to accomplish all that, and come back to Rama’s quiver.

So Rama passes Sugriva’s test, with the strong and firm arrow piercing the seven trees and the seven earths. It was nice of Valmiki, the seer-poet, to have introduced the episode in his poem, making the presentation absolutely plausible to our minds. But there seems to be something more to it than what might just appear as an epic description. It is charged with deep symbolism, seven trees and seven earths standing for seven creations in their majesty. Is that not a wonderful way of telling us about the Avatarhood of Rama? Valmiki was a mahāprajňa, one who was in possession of the divine Knowledge. With what mastery and consummate skill has he described the exceptional nature of Rama, his divinity in the human form!

There seems to be a kind of logic behind the necessity of Rama coming as an Avatar. Talking about the Avatarhood of Rama, Sri Aurobindo explains at considerable length in a letter to Dilip Roy that the human personality of Rama “has to be taken as a whole in the setting that Valmiki gave it… As for the Avatarhood, I accept it for Rama because he fills a place in the scheme—and seems to me to fill it rightly—and because when I read the Ramayana I feel a great afflatus which I recognise and which makes of its story—mere faery-tale though it seems—a parable of a great critical transitional event that happened in the terrestrial evolution... The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is—any of these or all—a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races. All the same, if anybody does not see as I do and wants to eject Rama from his place, I have no objection—I have no particular partiality for Rama—provided somebody is put in who can worthily fill up the gap his absence leaves. There was somebody there, Valmiki's Rama or another Rama or somebody not Rama.”

Continuing the discussion he elaborates that Rama's business was “to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattwic civilised human being who governs his life by the reason, the finer emotions, morality, or at least moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, co-operation and harmony, the sense of domestic and public order,—to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal mind and the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life… it was Rama's business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattwic human being by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rakshasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture, and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries, and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital, is likely to continue to do so until a greater ideal arises… When I spoke of the gap that would be left by his [Rama’s] absence, I did not mean a gap among the prophets and intellectuals, but a gap in the scheme of Avatarhood—there was somebody who was the Avatar of the sattwic Human as Krishna was the Avatar of the overmental Superman—I can see no one but Rama who can fill the place… I wanted to say this much more about Rama—which is still only a hint and is not the thing I was going to write about the general principle of Avatarhood. Nor, may I add, is it a complete or supreme defence of Rama. For that I would have to write about what the story of the Ramayana meant, appreciate Valmiki's presentation of his chief characters (they are none of them copy-book examples, but great men and women with the defects and merits of human nature, as all men even the greatest are), and show also how the Godhead, which was behind the frontal and instrumental personality we call Rama, worked out every incident of his life as a necessary step in what had to be done.”

Well, the test Sugriva had given to Rama to demonstrate his capability to conquer the enemy was an objective test. In contrast to this, Aswapati’s test, about the supreme Power to change the course of the evolutionary destiny, is a subjective test. How does he arrive at the perception that she is indeed the one who must be invoked to take the mortal birth and conquer Death? Possibly, we could get some idea about it from the yoga-tapasya of Aswapati.