qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
The medicine that is Ram's own name is with you — right there, close, in your keeping.
Stay Raghupati's servant for ever.
Rasāyana is a real technical word with two homes, and the line is richer if you let it keep both.
In Āyurveda, rasāyana is a whole branch of the medicine: the restoratives, the preparations concerned with renewal, long life and the repair of a body that has been worn down. In the Indian alchemical tradition rasa is mercury and rasāyana is the work done with it — transmutation, the turning of a base thing into a precious one. One sense restores what was there; the other makes something that was not. Calling Rāma's name a rasāyana reaches for both, and the poem does not pick.
Pāsā is the plainest word in the line. Near you. At hand, in your keeping — not stored somewhere, not applied for. The elixir is simply where he is.
The second half is the surprise, and it is easy to read past. Sadā raho is not a description; it is an optative, a wish made to him. Having spent thirty verses raising Hanumān as high as the poem can lift him, the singer's wish for him is that he stay exactly where he is: raghupati ke dāsā, Raghupati's servant. Not that he be rewarded, not that he ascend, not that he be relieved of the post.
That posture has a name in the devotional vocabulary. Of the nine forms of bhakti the Bhāgavata lists — listening, singing, remembering, attending, worshipping, bowing, service, friendship, self-offering — dāsya, service, is the one the Vaiṣṇava devotional literature keeps returning to Hanumān to illustrate. A servant who wants no promotion is the whole of his theology, and here the poem wishes it on him rather than merely observing it.
Is there a job you like so much that you would not want to be moved up out of it?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made