01The disciple who stayed
Kabandha, freed from his curse by Rama, told him to go west to the lake Pampa and the hill Rishyamuka, and spoke of an ascetic woman of the Shabara people who lived there. Shabari had served the rishis of Matanga’s ashrama all her life. When Rama came to Chitrakoot, she later told him, her gurus had risen to heaven in shining vimanas, telling her to stay: Rama would come to this ashrama, and when she had received him she would go to the worlds they had won.
02Rama at her ashrama
When the brothers arrived she rose and fell at their feet. Rama asked after her tapas, as one asks an equal; Valmiki calls her a siddha, perfected. She gave them the forest fruits she had gathered along the Pampa, and then showed them the Matanga forest: the altar where her gurus had made offerings with hands trembling from age, the seven seas they had called there by thought, the bark garments they had hung to dry, still damp. Then, with Rama’s leave, she offered her body into the fire and rose in a radiant form to the abode of her gurus.
03The berries, from later bhakti
The best-known picture of Shabari, tasting each berry and keeping only the sweet ones for Rama, is not in Valmiki. It grew in later devotional tradition and is now told in every Ramlila. The Ramcharitmanas adds that Rama taught her the nine forms of bhakti, the navadha bhakti, in her hut. Gujarat’s Dang district has Shabari Dham, where local tradition holds she met Rama, and in Chhattisgarh the town of Shivrinarayan is linked with her name.