Vimana
Vimāna are the mythological flying palaces or chariots described in Hindu texts and Sanskrit epics. The Pushpaka Vimana of the king Ravana is the most quoted example of a vimana. Vimanas are mentioned in Jain texts; the Sanskrit word vi-māna means "measuring out, traversing" or "having been measured out". Monier Monier-Williams defines Vimana as "a car or a chariot of the gods, any self-moving aerial car sometimes serving as a seat or throne, sometimes self-moving and carrying its occupant through the air, it may denote any car or vehicle a bier or a ship as well as a palace of an emperor with seven stories. In some Indian languages like Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi, vimana or vimanam means "aircraft", for example in the town name Vimanapura and Vimannagar, a town in Pune. In another context, Vimana is a feature in Hindu temple architecture; the predecessors of the flying vimanas of the Sanskrit epics are the flying chariots employed by various gods in the Vedas: the Sun and Indra and several other Vedic deities are transported by flying wheeled chariots pulled by animals horses.
The existing Rigveda versions do not mention Vimanas, but verses RV 1.164.47-48 have been taken as evidence for the idea of "mechanical birds": 47. Kṛṣṇáṃ niyânaṃ hárayaḥ suparṇâ / apó vásānā dívam út patanti tá âvavṛtran sádanād ṛtásyâd / íd ghṛténa pṛthivî vy ùdyate 48. Dvâdaśa pradháyaś cakrám ékaṃ / trîṇi nábhyāni ká u tác ciketa tásmin sākáṃ triśatâ ná śaṅkávo /'rpitâḥ ṣaṣṭír ná calācalâsaḥ"Dark the descent: the birds are golden-coloured. Again descend they from the seat of Order, all the earth is moistened with their fatness." "Twelve are the fellies, the wheel is single. What man hath understood it? Therein are set together spokes three hundred and sixty, which in nowise can be loosened." Dayananda Saraswati interpreted these verses to mean: "jumping into space speedily with a craft using fire and water... containing twelve stamghas, one wheel, three machines, 300 pivots, 60 instruments."although more the 12 fellies are the 12 months in a year, the 360 spokes are the days in a year. In the Ramayana, the pushpaka vimana of Ravana is described as follows: "The Pushpaka Vimana that resembles the Sun and belongs to my brother was brought by the powerful Ravana.
Pushpaka was made by Vishwakarma for Brahma, the Hindu god of creation. Vimāna-vāsin is a class of deities; these Vaimānika deities dwell in the Ūrdhva Loka heavens. According to the Kalpa Sūtra of Bhadra-bāhu, the 24th tīrthaṃkara Mahā-vīra himself emerged from the great vimāna Puṣpa-uttara; the tīrthaṃkara-s Abhinandana and Sumati-nātha both traveled through the sky in the "Jayanta-vimāna", namely the great vimāna Sarva-artha-siddhi, owned by the Jayanta deities. A vimāna may be seen in a dream, such as the nalinī-gulma; the Vaimānika Shāstra is an early 20th-century Sanskrit text on aeronautics, obtained by mental channeling, about the construction of vimānas, the "chariots of the Gods". The existence of the text was revealed in 1952 by G. R. Josyer, according to whom it was written by one Pandit Subbaraya Shastry, who dictated it in 1918–1923. A Hindi translation was published in 1959, the Sanskrit text with an English translation in 1973, it has 3000 shlokas in 8 chapters. Subbaraya Shastry stated that the content was dictated to him by Maharishi Bharadvaja.
A study by aeronautical and mechanical engineering at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1974 concluded that the aircraft described in the text were "poor concoctions" and that the author showed a complete lack of understanding of aeronautics. Pushpak Vimana, meaning "an aeroplane with flowers", is a mythical aeroplane found in Ayyavazhi mythology. Akilattirattu Ammanai, the religious book of Ayyavazhi, says that the Pushpak Vimana was sent to carry Ayya Vaikundar to Vaikundam. A similar reference is found in regards of Saint Tukaram, India. Lord Vishnu was so impressed by the devotion and singing of Saint Tukaram that when his time came, a Pushpak Viman came to take him to heaven. Though it is believed that every other human being can go to Heaven without body, Saint Tukaram went to heaven with body. Vimanas have appeared in books, films and games including: Biman Bangladesh Airlines is named after Vimana. Vimana is an arcade game from Toaplan. In Noctis, a space exploration game, an interstellar propulsion system called the "Vimana Drive" is used.
The psy-trance producers Etnica released'Vimana' in 1997 with samples drawn from the film'Roswell', which includes references to UFOs and alien life forms. In Fate/Zero, Gilgamesh h
Jain literature
Jain literature comprises Jain Agamas and subsequent commentaries on them by various Jain asectics. Jain literature is divided between Digambara literature and Svetambara literature. Jain literature exists in Magadhi Prakrit, Marathi, Rajasthani, Marwari, Gujarati, Malayalam and more in English; the canonical texts of Jainism are called Agamas. These are said to be based on the discourse of the tirthankara, delivered in a samavasarana; these discourses comprises eleven angas and fourteen purvas. According to the Jains, the canonical literature originated from the first tirthankara Rishabhanatha; the Digambara sect believes. However, they were lost starting from one hundred fifty years after Lord Mahavir's nirvana. Hence, they do not recognize the existing Agam-sutras as their authentic scriptures. In Digambara tradition, two main texts, three commentaries on main texts, four Anuyogas consisting of more than 20 texts are followed; these scriptures were written by great Acharyas from 100 to 1000 AD using the original Agama Sutras as the basis for their work.
According to Vijay. K. Jain: The prathmanuyoga contains the universal history, the karananuyoga contains works on cosmology and the charananuyoga includes texts about proper behaviour for monks and Sravakas; the Shatkhandagama is known as Maha‑kammapayadi‑pahuda or Maha‑karma‑prabhrut. Two Acharyas; the second Purva‑agama named. The text contains six volumes. Acharya Virasena wrote two commentary texts, known as Dhaval‑tika on the first five volumes and Maha‑dhaval‑tika on the sixth volume of this scripture, around 780 AD. Acharya Gunadhara wrote the Kasay-pahud on the basis of the fifth Purva‑agama named Jnana‑pravada. Acharya Virasena and his disciple, wrote a commentary text known as Jaya‑dhavala‑tika around 780 AD. Jain text composed by Acharya Kundakunda in the first century B. C. are: Samayasāra Niyamasara Pancastikayasara Gommatsāra is one of the most important Jain texts authored by Acharya Nemichandra Siddhanta Chakravarti. It is based on the major Jain text, Dhavala written by the Acharya Bhutabali and Acharya Pushpadanta.
It is called Pancha Sangraha, a collection of five topics: That, bound, i.e. the Soul. Bhadrabahu is considered by the jains as last sutra-kevali, he wrote various books known as niyukti. He wrote Samhita, a book dealing with legal cases. Umaswati wrote Tattvarthadhigama-sutra which describes all the basic tennets of Jainism. Haribhadra wrote the Yogadṛṣṭisamuccaya, a key Jain text on Yoga which compares the Yoga systems of Buddhists and Jains. Siddhasena Divakara, a contemporary of Vikramaditya, wrote Nyayavatra a work on pure logic. Hemachandra wrote a textbook on yoga and Adhatma Upanishad, his minor work Vitragastuti gives outlines of the Jaina doctrine in form of hymns. This was detailed by Mallisena in his work Syadavadamanjari. Devendrasuri wrote Karmagrantha. Gunaratna gave a commentary on Haribhadra's work. Dharmasagara wrote kaupaksakausi-kasahasrakirana. In this work he wrote against the Digambara sect of Jainism. Lokaprakasa of Vinayavijaya and pratimasataka of Yasovijaya were written in c. 17th century CE.
Lokaprakasa deals with all aspects of Jainism. Pratimasataka deals with metaphysics and logic. Yasovijaya defends idol-worshiping in this work. Srivarddhaeva wrote a Kannada commentary on Tattvarthadigama-sutra; this work has 96000 verses. Jainendra-vyakarana of Acharya Pujyapada and Sakatayana-vyakarana of Sakatayana are the works on grammar written in c. 9th century CE. Siddha-Hem-Shabdanushasana" by Acharya Hemachandra is considered by F. Kielhorn as the best grammar work of the Indian middle age. Hemacandra's book Kumarapalacaritra is noteworthy. Jaina narrative literature contains stories about sixty-three prominent figures known as Salakapurusa, people who were related to them; some of the important works are Harivamshapurana of Jinasena, Vikramarjuna-Vijaya of Kannada poet named Adi Pampa, Pandavapurana of Shubhachandra. Jains literature exists in Jain Prakrit, Marathi, Rajasthani, Marwari, Gujarati, Malayalam and more in English. Jains have contributed to India's popular literature. For example all early Kannada literature and many Tamil works were written by Jains.
Some of the oldest known books in Hindi and Gujarati were written by Jain scholars. The first autobiography in the ancestor of Hindi, Braj Bhasha, is called Ardhakathānaka and was written by a Jain, Banarasidasa, an ardent follower of Acarya Kundakunda who lived in Agra. Many Tamil classics are written with Jain beliefs and values as the core subject. All the known texts in the Apabhramsha language are Jain works; the oldest Jain literature is in Shauraseni and the Jain Prakrit (the Jain Agamas, Agama-Tulya, the Sidd
Akilathirattu Ammanai
Akilathirattu Ammanai called Thiru Edu, is the main religious text of the Tamil belief system Ayyavazhi. The title is abbreviated to Akilam or Akilathirattu. Akilam includes more than 15,000 verses and is the largest collection of Ammanai literature in Tamil as well as one of the largest works in Tamil constructed by a single author. Author Hari Gopalan Citar states in the text that he wrote this book on a Friday, the twenty-seventh day of the Tamil month of Karthikai in the year 1839 CE; the author claims that God woke him up during his sleep and commissioned him to record his dictation. Akilathirattu was recorded on palm leaves until 1939. According to the author, the book is the story of God coming in this age, the Kali Yukam or Iron Age, to rule the world by transforming it into the Dharma Yukam; this story of faith weaves together the historical facts about Ayya Vaikundar and his activities with reinterpretations of episodes from the Hindu Puranas and Itihasas. It is presented. Though the Citar Hari Gopalan wrote the book Akilam, he claimed that he did not know anything about the contents of the book.
He woke up in the morning as usual and he didn't know what he had written the day before. Another legend says that he continued through the following days. Others say that it was written beginning on Friday, 27th Karthikai 1016 M. E, completed on the seventeenth day on the second Sunday of Margazhi 1016 M. E; when Ayya Vaikundar avatar was completed, God reached Vaikundam. It contained the regulations of the Ayyavazhi sect; as per the instructions found there in Akilam, Ayyavazhi was preached by the Citars wide. Akilam is in two parts: the first is an account of the ages preceding that of the present age, the Kali Yukam. Akilathirattu is written as a poem in the Tamil language; the narration alternates between two subgenres called viruttam and natai. Both subgenres employ poetic devices like alliteration and hyperbatons; the text contains seventeen sections, more than 15,000 verses. In a typical Ammanai style, Akilam maintains more than one context for its verses throughout the text. While the floating ideas of the lines could be comparatively communicated, the underlying theme couldn't be understood unless the background and culture are understood a foundational knowledge of the Hindu pantheon of gods, the Hindu scriptures, Dharmic concepts and philosophy, other rudiments of the religion.
The texts written by Hari Gopalan Citar are damaged and thus it is difficult to read the contents. The texts are still preserved as relics by his descendants. There are three versions, which were copied from the first version: Panchalagkuricchi Version Swamithoppe Version Kottangadu VersionOf these three, the Panchalankuricchi Version is believed to have copied by from the main version by Hari Gopalan Citar; the other two versions were copied later. Apart from these the Nariyan vilai Version, Varampetran-pantaram Version, Saravanantheri Version are the other early palm-leaf versions of Akilam. Other versions include the Palaramachandran version, the VTV, published twice, the Kalai Ilakkiya-peravai Version and the Vivekanandan Version, but of these, the Ayya Vaikundar Thirukkudumbam version is criticized for adding and removing additional verses from various versions. Some argue. Thirukkudumbam claims that these additional lines were added from the early palm-leaf versions, which are believed to have been missing from Akilam.
This version is not accepted. All the release versions except the Palaramachandran version organize the contents into seventeen sections as per the Thiru Eadu-vasippu partition; the Sentrathisai Ventraperumal version, released in 1965 includes more than two-thousand verses not found in other versions. The Palaramachandran version is the accepted and the largest circulated version; the book focuses on the devotion to Vaikundar, considered to be an aspect of the God Vishnu. It is a poetic narrative in Tamil intended to be an excellent compilation of the various aspects of Indian mythology and beliefs about God; the first eight chapters of the book narrate the events starting from the creation of the Universe to the time before the incarnation of Vaikundar. The ninth chapter describes in detail the events taking place in the divine plan during the incarnation of Vaikundar; the last eight chapters focus on the legendary, empirical and mythical aspects pertaining to the life of Vaikundar. The book starts with the explanation given by Vishnu to his consort Lakshmi about the evolution of Universe and of human beings.
It is said that there is a total of eight aeons, or yugas, we are in the seventh yuga called Kali Yuga, the age of deterioration. It is believed. In the first yuga, Kroni was born. Vishnu fragmented him into six pieces and each fragment will incarnate as demon in each Yuga; the first four yugas are said to be Chatura Yuga, Nedu Yuga and Kretha Yuga. These four yugas do not have parallels in the mainstream Hinduism; the fifth yuga is said to be the Treta Yuga. The sixth yuga is the Dvapara Yuga, there is a short but striking description of the life of Krishna and the Bharatha war. Additionally, there is said to be another event called the birth of Sant
Mediumship
Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums." There are different types including spirit channeling and ouija. Humans have been fascinated with contacting the dead since the beginning of human existence. Cave paintings by indigenous Australians date back 28,000 years, some depicting skulls, bones and the afterlife. Other cave paintings in Indonesia date back a further 10,000 years. Mediumship gained popularity during the nineteenth century, when ouija boards were used by the upper classes as a source of entertainment. Investigations during this period revealed widespread fraud—with some practitioners employing techniques used by stage magicians—and the practice began to lose credibility. Fraud is still rife in the medium/psychic industry, with cases of deception and trickery being discovered to this day. Scientific researchers have attempted to ascertain the validity of claims of mediumship.
An experiment undertaken by the British Psychological Society led to the conclusion that the test subjects demonstrated no mediumistic ability. Several different variants of mediumship exist. Other forms involve materializations of the spirit or the presence of a voice, telekinetic activity; the practice is associated with several religious-belief systems such as Vodun, Spiritism, Candomblé, Voodoo and some New Age groups. In Spiritism and Spiritualism the medium has the role of an intermediary between the world of the living and the world of spirit. Mediums claim that they can listen to and relay messages from spirits, or that they can allow a spirit to control their body and speak through it directly or by using automatic writing or drawing. Spiritualists classify types of mediumship into two main categories: "mental" and "physical": Mental mediums purportedly "tune in" to the spirit world by listening, sensing, or seeing spirits or symbols. Physical mediums are believed to produce materialization of spirits, apports of objects, other effects such as knocking, bell-ringing, etc. by using "ectoplasm" created from the cells of their bodies and those of séance attendees.
During seances, mediums are said to go into trances, varying from light to deep, that permit spirits to control their minds. Channeling can be seen as the modern form of the old mediumship, where the "channel" purportedly receives messages from "teaching-spirit", an "Ascended master", from God, or from an angelic entity, but through the filter of his own waking consciousness. Attempts to communicate with the dead and other living human beings, aka spirits, have been documented back to early human history; the story of the Witch of Endor tells of one who raised the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel to allow the Hebrew king Saul to question his former mentor about an upcoming battle, as related in the Books of Samuel in the Jewish Tanakh. Mediumship became quite popular in the 19th-century United States and the United Kingdom after the rise of Spiritualism as a religious movement. Modern Spiritualism is said to date from practices and lectures of the Fox sisters in New York State in 1848.
The trance mediums Paschal Beverly Randolph and Emma Hardinge Britten were among the most celebrated lecturers and authors on the subject in the mid-19th century. Allan Kardec coined the term Spiritism around 1860. Kardec claimed that conversations with spirits by selected mediums were the basis of his The Spirits' Book and his five-book collection, Spiritist Codification; some scientists of the period who investigated spiritualism became converts. They included chemist Robert Hare, physicist William Crookes and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace. Nobel laureate Pierre Curie took a serious scientific interest in the work of medium Eusapia Palladino. Other prominent adherents included journalist and pacifist William T. Stead and physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle. After the exposure of the fraudulent use of stage magic tricks by physical mediums such as the Davenport Brothers and the Bangs Sisters, mediumship fell into disrepute. However, the religion and its beliefs continue in spite of this, with physical mediumship and seances falling out of practice and platform mediumship coming to the fore.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK in addition to flourishing microcultures of platform mediumship and'home circles'. Spiritualism continues to be practiced through various denominational spiritualist churches in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, over 340 spiritualist churches and centres open their doors to the public and free demonstrations of mediumship are performed. In 1958, the English-born Spiritualist C. Dorreen Phillips wrote of her experiences with a medium at Camp Chesterfield, Indiana: "In Rev. James Laughton's séances there are many Indians, they are noisy and appear to have great power. The little guides, or doorkeepers, are Indian boys and girls as messengers who help to locate the spirit friends who wish to speak with you." A spirit who uses a medium to manipulate psychic "energy" or "energy systems." In old-line Spiritualism, a portion of the services toward the end, is given over to demonstrations of mediumship throu
Malayalam
Malayalam is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry by the Malayali people, it is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam has official language status in the state of Kerala and in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry and is spoken by 38 million people worldwide. Malayalam is spoken by linguistic minorities in the neighbouring states. Due to Malayali expatriates in the Persian Gulf, the language is widely spoken in Gulf countries; the origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. One view holds that Malayalam and modern Tamil are offshoots of Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime after the c. 7th century. A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" in the prehistoric era. Designated a "Classical Language in India" in 2013, it developed into the current form by the influence of the poet Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan in the 16th century.
The oldest documents written purely in Malayalam and still surviving are the Vazhappalli Copper plates from 832 and Tharisapalli Copper plates from 849. The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu alphabet, the Kolezhuttu, which derived from it; the current Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script, extended with Grantha script letters to adopt Indo-Aryan loanwords. The oldest literary work in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil tradition, is dated from between the 9th and 11th centuries; the first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785. The word Malayalam originated from the words mala, meaning "mountain", alam, meaning "region" or "-ship"; the term referred to the land of the Chera dynasty Tamil dynasty, only became the name of its language. The language Malayalam is alternatively called Alealum, Malayali, Malean and Mallealle; the earliest extant literary works in the regional language of present-day Kerala date back to as early as the 12th century.
However, the named identity of this language appears to have come into existence only around the 16th century, when it was known as "Malayayma" or "Malayanma". The word "Malayalam" was coined in the period, the local people referred to their language as both "Tamil" and "Malayalam" until the colonial period; the held view is that Malayalam was the western coastal dialect of Tamil and separated from Tamil sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries. Some scholars however believe that both Tamil and Malayalam developed during the prehistoric period from a common ancestor,'Proto-Tamil-Dravidian', that the notion of Malayalam being a'daughter' of Tamil is misplaced; this is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the western coast have common features which are not found in the oldest historical forms of Tamil. Robert Caldwell, in his 1856 book "A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages", opined that Malayalam branched from Classical Tamil and over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs.
As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, written in Tamil-Brahmi and the Vatteluttu alphabet greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Tamil-Brahmi script in the 9th centuries, and by the end of the 13th century a written form of the language emerged, unique from the Tamil-Brahmi script, used to write Tamil. Malayalam is similar to some Sri Lankan Tamil dialects, the two are mistaken by native Indian Tamil speakers; the Portuguese called the Kerala variant of Malayalam-Tamil Lingua Malabar Tamul. It was called Malabar Thamozhi; the first book to be printed in Lingua Malabar Tamul was Cartilha in 1554, which used Portuguese letters to write the Malabar Thamozhi. Ravikutty Pilla Por, written in the 17th century, is the shining example of Malayanma literature. Ananthapuri Varnanam, written in the 1800s, was among the last of these Malayalam-Tamil books. Itty Achudan, the famed Ayurvedic physician, used Malayanma and Kolezhuttu to write Hortus Malabaricus in 1678.
In the 17th century, the Malayanma script was extensively used by the Catholics of Kerala. Samkshepa Vedartham, in Malayanma, was printed in Rome in 1772; the Ramban Bible, written in Malayanma, was translated from Syriac by Fr. Phillipose and published in 1811. After this period, the British banned Malayanma and most of the books written in Malayanma disappeared; the British never supported or translated Malayanma books into Grantha Malayalam, which they chose to promote in the 19th century. Iravikutti Pilla Por, Vadakkan Pattu, Thacholi Pattu, Kannassa Ramayanam, Ramacharitham Ananthapuri Varnanam are a few of the Malayanma books which have survived. Malayanma, the indigenous Dravidian tongue, its great literary tradition were lost in history. In the 12th century, Kerala was invaded by the Tulu Bana Kings, with an army from Ahichatra on the Indo-Nepalese border. Keralolpathi mentions a Tulu invader called Banapperumal, the brother of Tulu king Kavi Raja Singhan of the Alupa dynasty, who invaded Kerala with a Large Nair army led by Pada Mala Nair.
Banapperumal established his capital at
Ravana
Ravana is described in the Hindu epic Ramayana as the demon king of Lanka. Ravana is described as having been as a follower of Shiva, a great scholar, a capable ruler and a maestro of the Veena, but someone who wished to overpower the Devas, his ten heads represent his knowledge of the four Vedas. In the Ramayana, Ravana kidnaps Rama's wife Sita to exact vengeance on Rama and his brother Lakshmana for having cut off the nose of his sister Shurpanakha. Ravana is worshiped by Hindus of Bisrakh, he is considered to be the most revered devotee of Shiva. Images of Ravana are seen associated with Shiva at some places, he appears in Buddhist Mahayana text Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, Buddhist Ramayanas and Jatakas, as well as in Jain Ramayanas. The word Rāvaṇa means roaring opposite of Vaiśravaṇa meaning "hear distinctly". Both Ravana and Vaiśravaṇa, popularly known as Kubera, are considered to be patronymics derived as sons of Vishrava."Rāvana" was a title taken on by Dashananda, it means "screamer" in Sanskrit.
Further, "roravana" is Sanskrit for "loud roaring." In Abhinava Gupta's Krama Shaiva scripture, "yāsām rāvanam" is used as an expression to mean people who are aware in terms of the materialism of their environment. According to F. E. Pargiter the word may have been a Sanskritisation of Iraivan, the Tamil name for a lord or king. Ravana has many other popular names such as Dasis Ravana, Dasis Sakvithi Maha Ravana, Ravula, Lankeshwaran, Ravanasura and Eela Vendhar. Ravana is depicted and described as having ten heads, although sometimes he is shown with only nine heads because he has sacrificed a head to convince Shiva, he is described as a devout follower of Shiva, a great scholar, a capable ruler and a maestro of the Veena. Ravana is depicted as the author of the Ravana Samhita, a book on Hindu astrology, the Arka Prakasham, a book on Siddha medicine and treatment. Ravana possessed a thorough knowledge of political science, he is said to have possessed the nectar of immortality, stored inside his belly, thanks to a celestial boon by Brahma.
Ravana was born to great sage Vishrava, his wife, the daitya princess Kaikeshi. People of Bisrakh village in Uttar Pradesh claim that Bisrakh was named after Vishrava, Ravana was born there, but according to Hela historical sources and folklore, Ravana was born in Lanka, where becomes its king. Ravana's grandfather on his father's side, the sage Pulastya, was one of the ten Prajapatis or mind-born sons of Brahma and one of the Saptarishi in the first Manvantara, his grandfather on his mother's side, king of the Raksasas, was the son of Sukesha. Sukesha's parents were King Vidyutkesa, who had married Salakantankata, who had abandoned Sukesha, but by the grace of Shiva he survived. Sumali had wished her to marry the most powerful being in the mortal world, so as to produce an exceptional heir, he rejected the kings of the world. Kaikesi searched among the sages and chose Vishrava, the father of Kubera. Ravana and his siblings were born to the couple, they completed their education with Ravana being a great scholar of the Vedas.
The brothers won boons from Brahma. Ravana was blessed with a boon that would make him invincible to the creation of Brahma, except for humans, he received weapons, chariot as well as the ability to shapeshift from Brahma. Ravana usurped Lanka from his half-brother Kubera and became the King of Lanka, he learnt the Arthashastra from him. Rama once addressed Ravana as a "Maha Brahman". After worshiping Shiva on the banks of the Narmada, in the more central Yadu region, Ravana was captured and held under the control of king Kartavirya Arjuna, one of the greatest Yadu kings, it is clear from the references in the Ramayana that Ravana was no commoner among the Humans or Asuras, but a great chanter of the Sama Veda. Ravana's family are hardly mentioned outside the Ramayana, viewed by some as being only the point of view of Rama devotees. According to that: Ravana's grandfather was Malyavan, against the war with Rama and Lakshmana. Ravana's parents were Pushpothkata. Kaikesi had two brothers Maricha and Subahu which would make them Ravana's uncles.
Ravana had six brothers and two sisters:Kuberan – the King of North direction and the Guardian of Heavenly Wealth. He was an older half-brother of Ravana: they were born to the same father by different mothers. Vibhishana – A follower of Rama and one of the most important characters in the Ramayana; as a minister and brother of Ravana, he spoke the truth without fear and advised Ravana to return the kidnapped Sita and uphold Dharma. Ravana not only rejected this sane advice, but banished him from his kingdom. Vibhishana sought protection from Rama, granted without hesitation. Kumbhakarna – One of the most jovial demons in Hindu history; when offered a boon by Brahma, he was tricked into asking for eternal sleep. A horrified Ravana, out of brotherly love, persuaded Brahma to amend the boon. Brahma mitigated the power of the boon by making Kumbhakarna sleep for six months and being awake for the rest six months of a year. During the war with Rama, Kumbhakarna was untime
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