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King Dasharatha had once granted his youngest queen, Kaikeyi, two boons; on the eve of Rama's coronation she called them in — her son Bharata crowned instead, and Rama sent to the forest for fourteen years. Rama accepted without protest, holding his father's word above his own claim to the throne, and left for the Dandaka forest with Sita and his brother Lakshmana (Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhya Kanda 10–20). The exile is what places him within reach of Ravana, and so sets the rest of the epic moving.

Seeing Arjuna paralysed at the sight of kin on both armies, Krishna's counsel is to act, but to release the claim on what the action returns. "You have a right to your actions, never to the fruit of those actions" (Bhagavad Gita 2.47) — duty performed for its own sake, not for gain or fear of loss. He calls this yoga itself: "Equanimity in success and failure is called yoga" (Bhagavad Gita 2.48). The renunciation he asks for is not of the deed but of the craving bound to it: "Let right action be your motive, not the fruit which comes from it" (Bhagavad Gita 2.47), and elsewhere, that action performed as duty, without attachment, does not bind the self the way action performed from desire does (Bhagavad Gita 3.19).

Nala, son of the celestial architect Vishvakarma, directed the vanara army in raising a causeway across the strait to Lanka — mountains torn down and dragged to shore, trees and boulders bound and laid so that, tradition says, the ocean itself agreed to bear what Nala set upon it. The causeway rose in five days (Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda 22), and the strait it crossed still carries the name Rama Setu.

Seeing Arjuna paralysed at the sight of kin on both armies, Krishna's counsel is to act, but to release the claim on what the action returns. "You have a right to your actions, never to the fruit of those actions" (Bhagavad Gita 2.47) — duty performed for its own sake, not for gain or fear of loss. He calls this yoga itself: "Equanimity in success and failure is called yoga" (Bhagavad Gita 2.48). The renunciation he asks for is not of the deed but of the craving bound to it: "Let right action be your motive, not the fruit which comes from it" (Bhagavad Gita 2.47), and elsewhere, that action performed as duty, without attachment, does not bind the self the way action performed from desire does (Bhagavad Gita 3.19).