sāmānyo 'yaṁ dharma-setur nṛpāṇāṁ kāle kāle pālanīyo bhavadbhiḥ
sarvān etān bhāvinaḥ pārthivendrān bhūyo bhūyo yācate rāmacandraḥ
Rāmacandra begs repeatedly to all these future kings: “This bridge of Dharma is common to all the kings: you always must protect it!”
The numerous quotations of this stanza in epigraphical records in South and South-East Asia establish the epic hero Rāma as a shining exemplar of the protecting king. Sometimes this stanza is the only one quoted to protect the gift; sometimes the authorship of other benedictive and imprecatory stanzas is also assigned to Rāma, while occasionally Rāma is replaced with the name of the issuer king. In other cases, the stanza is absent but substituted by a prose address to the future kings delivered by the issuer king. Although there is no reference to Rāma’s address to future kings in Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa, it seems that it has served as a reference and guarantee of long-term protection over a vast territory for centuries. For example, this well-known stanza is at the heart of a Purāṇic story which narrates how a copperplate bestowed by Rāma to Brahmins was preserved through the yugas and was brandished, centuries later, by despoiled Brahmins to recover their land.
This paper aims to define in what extent this reference to Rāma was used in epigraphical context and to describe over what period, what places, how often and in what contexts Rāma’s address occurs. For that, I will analyze the quotations of this stanza in more than seventy epigraphical records and will offer a mapping and a chronology of its use in South and South-East Asia. This diachronic and transregional study will be completed by an exploration of other sources (Purāṇas and Dharmanibandha literature) to observe how the epic figure became a security for the long protection of the gifts.