The tradition holds that Valmiki, before he was Valmiki, was Ratnakara, a man who robbed travellers on a forest road to feed his family. The turning point is a question rather than a vision. Narada, waylaid, asks whether the family for whose sake he commits these acts will share the consequences of them. Ratnakara is confident they will, goes home to confirm it, and is told plainly by each of them that providing is his responsibility and the sin is his alone.
That is the entire mechanism of the conversion, and it is notably unmystical. Nothing was revealed to him that he could not have worked out. He simply asked a question he had been careful not to ask, and the answer removed the justification he had been operating on. He returns, receives a mantra, and sits in meditation so long and so still that an anthill forms over him, which is where the name Valmiki comes from.
The tradition then makes him the author of the Ramayana, and specifically has him shelter Sita and raise her sons after Rama exiles her. A man who once took from travellers ends as the one who protects the abandoned, and the epic of dharma is composed by someone who spent years outside it. That the story was retained rather than quietly replaced with a more suitable pedigree tells you something about how this tradition understood transformation, and about what a lineage is willing to carry forward about its own founders.
Valmiki is the tradition declining to launder the biography of one of its greatest figures. To see how such lineages transmitted themselves, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 99 of 100 — Series I: From the Beginning
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