The Shrine Rama Built to Atone for His Own Victory

Rama won the war, and then he went looking for forgiveness for winning it.

The problem with the victory

The epic tradition refuses to treat Rama's defeat of Ravana as morally simple, and it has a specific reason.

Ravana was a great scholar, and a genuine and deeply learned devotee of Shiva.

Killing him was no small thing, and the tradition does not pretend otherwise. Rama had killed a devoted worshipper of the very god he was about to worship.

And the tradition treats that as grave regardless of how thoroughly the killing was justified. The war was justified. Ravana had taken Sita. None of that dissolves the category.