The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic poem in Sanskrit, the authorship of which is attributed to the legendary sage Valmiki. Its text, in the form in which it has reached us, was finally formed in the 2nd–3rd centuries. BC e. The Ramayana tells the story of the exploits of the subsequently deified Rama, the liberation of his wife Sita, captured by the leader of the demons Ravana. The philosophical content of the poem is important. The Ramayana contains everything that should be in an epic: war, the confrontation between the forces of good and evil, heroes and villains, abductions, glorification of heroes and their weapons. However, there is also something that is missing in the Mahabharata: an atmosphere of refined sensitivity, the pathos of love and fidelity, attention to nature, detailed descriptions of the seasons (later they will become an independent genre of Indian lyrics). All this creates a special style of the poem. The Ramayana has already passed the path from the heroic epic to the so-called “artificial”, where the literary form takes on greater significance. The Ramayana contains 24 thousand shlokas (four times less than the Mahabharata), divided into seven books p>