Hanuman

An infant reaches for the sun. He thinks it is a ripe fruit, a red sphere hanging in the dawn, and he leaps into the sky to take it. The king of the gods, alarmed by the dark streak speeding toward the light, hurls his thunderbolt. It strikes the child on the jaw. The child survives, as children of the wind do, and from that broken jaw, hanu, he takes his name.

Hanuman.

The Child Who Reached for the Sun

His mother was Anjana, his father the wind god Vayu, and the scholars of the epics give him two patronyms at once: Anjaneya, son of Anjana, and Vayuputra, son of the wind. The Vaishnava tradition holds that he is the son of Vayu. The Shaiva tradition holds that he is an incarnation of Shiva, born to Anjana through the wind god’s agency. Both agree on the essentials: immense strength, a shape that can grow and shrink at will, and a devotion to Rama that never once wavers.

The Leap

The Ramayana is the story of Rama, the exiled prince, and the demon king Ravana, who steals Rama’s wife Sita and carries her away in a flying chariot. It is Hanuman who finds her. He crosses the ocean in one bound, locates Sita imprisoned in Ravana’s city of Lanka, and carries word back to Rama. Before he leaves, he lets the demons set his tail on fire and then runs the flames across the city, burning Lanka to the ground as a warning.

The Mountain

In the war that follows, Ravana’s son wounds Rama’s brother Lakshmana so badly that only a particular herb, growing on a distant Himalayan slope, can save him. Hanuman flies north at lightning speed. The problem is the mountain itself glows with herbs, each one shining with its own light, and he cannot tell which of the four he needs. So he uproots the entire mountain and carries it back to the battlefield, where the physician picks out what he needs and Lakshmana lives. This is why Hanuman is so often pictured flying with a mountain balanced on one palm.

The Wind’s Son in the Other Epic

Hanuman appears only once in the Mahabharata, and it is a meeting between two sons of the wind. The hero Bhima, also born of Vayu, comes across an old monkey asleep across his path and orders it to move its tail. The monkey invites him to move it himself. Bhima cannot budge even a whisker, and he learns, to his shame, that the monkey is Hanuman, the mightiest being on earth. As a mark of affection, Hanuman later takes his place on the banner of Arjuna’s chariot, which is why Arjuna is called Kapi-dhwaj, the ape-bannered, and why his war cries carried the roar of a monkey god.

A Hymn That Made Him a God

The strangest fact about Hanuman is how young his worship is. His devotional cult emerged around the second millennium CE, roughly a thousand years after the Ramayana was composed. The hinge was the poet Tulsidas, who retold the epic in the spoken language of Awadhi in the sixteenth century and wrote a forty-verse hymn to Hanuman, the Hanuman Chalisa. Demons and ghosts do not come near, one verse runs, when they hear the name of the mighty one. Diseases die and sorrows disappear for the one who chants Hanuman’s name.

Hanuman is the rare god who is wholly animal and wholly divine, and he earns his place by a single constant. He never asks for anything. Strength, the ability to leap oceans, the mountain carried across a continent, all of it is spent on someone else. The monkey who reached for the sun grew into the god who holds it up for Rama, and the record keeps the two images side by side: the child grabbing at the light, and the servant carrying a mountain because he could not tell the herbs apart.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Ramayana (Valmiki; the Sundara Kanda)
• Mahabharata
• Hanuman Chalisa (Tulsidas, 16th century)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Hanuman’
• Anindita Basu, ‘Hanuman’, World History Encyclopedia