Maharshi Valmiki

Valmiki is the Adi Kavi, the first poet. The Ramayana opens with him asking Devarshi Narada whether there lives in the world a man who is truthful, steadfast in dharma, grateful and beyond anger, and Narada answers with the life of Shri Rama. A little later, bathing at the Tamasa, Valmiki saw a hunter shoot one of a pair of krauncha birds. Grief broke out of him as a curse, and the curse came out in metre: ma nishada pratishtham tvam. Brahma came to the ashram and told him that this shloka, born of shoka, would carry the whole of Rama's story.

The Ramayana he composed has some 24,000 shlokas in seven kandas. A later Puranic katha, told in the Adhyatma Ramayana and the Skanda Purana, says that before he became a sage he was a forest robber named Ratnakara, whom the Saptarishis set to chanting the name of Rama; he sat so long in meditation that an anthill (valmika) rose over him, and from it he took his name.

Sita lived in his ashram in her years of exile, and there Lava and Kusha were born. Valmiki taught the boys the Ramayana, and they sang it at Rama's Ashvamedha. In the Yuddha Kanda Valmiki records how Maharshi Agastya came to Rama on the battlefield, as Rama faced Ravana tired and full of thought, and taught him the Aditya Hridayam, the praise of Surya that has been recited at dawn ever since.