Who is Hanuman?

There is a moment in the Ramayana when an army stands at the edge of the sea and cannot cross it. Sita is held captive a hundred leagues away on the island of Lanka, and not one of the great warriors gathered on the shore can make the leap. Then an old bear reminds one of them who he is. He had forgotten. And Hanuman grows until he fills the sky, takes the whole ocean in a single bound, and carries the hope of the story across the water on his back.

The tradition has never forgotten that leap, because it is what Hanuman is. He is the one who does the impossible thing for someone else’s sake. Of all the figures in the vast cast of Hindu devotion, he may be the most loved, and the reason is simple. He is power turned completely into service.

The son of the wind

Hanuman is a vanara, one of the forest people of the epic, a word usually rendered in English as monkey though it carries more than that, a whole woodland race with speech and valour and kings. He is the son of the wind-god Vayu, which earns him his commonest names, Pavanaputra and Maruti, the wind’s child, and the source of his speed and his power of flight. Born to Anjana, he is also Anjaneya; raised by the vanara Kesari, he is Kesarinandan. His own name comes, by an old folk etymology, from an injury: as a wonder-child he leapt at the rising sun, mistaking it for a fruit to eat, and was struck on the jaw, the hanu, by the thunderbolt of Indra. For that boldness he was cursed to forget his own vast powers until the moment someone reminded him of them, which is exactly the moment that comes on the seashore.

There is a further claim the tradition makes, and it should be made carefully because it crosses the streams of devotion. A widespread tradition holds that Hanuman is an amsa, a partial descent, of Rudra-Shiva, and the Hanuman Chalisa itself calls him Shankar suvan, the son of Shiva. This is real and dear to many, and it is a later devotional identification rather than a teaching of Valmiki, whose Hanuman is the wind’s son and Rama’s servant. The honest way to hold it is as a both, and. He is a deity revered across the whole tradition, claimed by Shaivas as a portion of Shiva, and held by all as the perfect devotee of Vishnu in his descent as Rama.

The heart of the epic

The whole fifth book of the Ramayana, the Sundara Kanda, the “beautiful book,” belongs to Hanuman, and the tradition treasures it above the rest. It is the account of one day and night in which he crosses to Lanka, searches the city, finds Sita alone and grieving in a grove of ashoka trees, gives her Rama’s ring as a token, lets himself be captured, and, when the demons set his tail alight, uses the fire to burn their city before leaping home. Later, in the war, when Rama’s brother Lakshmana falls in battle, it is Hanuman who flies to the Himalayas for the healing herb, and, unable to tell which plant it is, simply tears up the entire mountain and carries it back.

These are feats of strength, and the strength is real. But notice what it is always for. He never lifts a mountain for himself. The Sundara Kanda is loved less for the burning of Lanka than for the meeting in the grove, the moment a frightened captive learns that her lord has not forgotten her and that help has come. Hanuman is the bringer of that news. His power exists to close the distance between the devotee and the one she longs for, and that is precisely what the tradition asks devotion to do.

Devotion as service

The Sanskrit word for Hanuman’s kind of love is dasya bhakti, the devotion of a servant, and he is its supreme example. He wants nothing for himself, no reward, no recognition, only the chance to be useful to Rama. The most beloved image in all his iconography makes this literal: asked once for proof of his devotion, Hanuman is said to have torn open his own chest, and there, seated within his heart, were Rama and Sita. The story is not in Valmiki; it belongs to the later devotional tradition, and it is cherished precisely because it shows what dasya bhakti finally is. The servant carries the master in his very body. There is nothing of himself left over.

The hymn that carries this devotion into daily life is the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses composed in the sixteenth century by Tulsidas, the same poet who gave the north its beloved Ramayana. It is learned by heart by millions and recited for courage and protection. In Philip Lutgendorf’s translation, one verse names the heart of the matter:

“You delight in hearing of the Lord’s deeds, Ram, Lakshman, and Sita dwell in your heart.”

And another sets him at the threshold of the two great streams of devotion, calling him in the same breath the son of Shiva and the joy of Kesari:

“You are Shiva’s son and Kesari’s joy, your glory is revered throughout the world.”

A word of caution belongs here, in keeping with the tradition’s own care for truth. A popular modern claim holds that one verse of the Chalisa secretly encodes the exact distance from the earth to the sun. It does not. The verse describes the child Hanuman leaping at the sun, and reading a modern astronomical measurement into it is a well-meaning invention. The hymn needs no such trick. Its power is the plain power of a devotion that asks for nothing.

The deathless one

Hanuman is one of the chiranjivis, the deathless ones. The tradition holds that he never died and never will, that he remains present in the world wherever the story of Rama is told, listening from the back of every recitation. This is why a seat is sometimes kept empty for him at a reading of the Ramayana, and why his devotees feel him near, a living presence still at work rather than a figure from a closed past. The boon fits him. The perfect servant does not retire.

The many Hanumans

Part of what makes Hanuman so widely loved is that he holds so many roles at once, and the scholar Philip Lutgendorf, whose Hanuman’s Tale is the major modern study of him, has traced how a helper in an old epic became one of the most worshipped deities in all of living Hinduism. He is the model brahmachari, the celibate whose continence is the source of his power, and so the ideal of the yogic disciplines of body and breath. He is a healer and a protector against affliction, called on to drive away fear, illness and malign spirits, his red shrines posted like sentries at the edge of habitation. He is the patron of strength and the wrestler’s saint. And he is the learned one, a master of grammar and scripture, so that students pray to him as readily as athletes do.

The breadth is the point. Hanuman meets the devotee at whatever door they come to: the frightened, the weak, the studious, the unwell, the one who simply wants to love God and does not know how. To each he offers the same thing, the example of a strength entirely placed at the service of devotion. It is a measure of how the tradition grows that a vanara who began as Rama’s lieutenant now stands, in temple after temple, as a great deity in his own right.

How he is shown and served

In image and shrine Hanuman is unmistakable. His body is often coated in sindoor, the orange-red vermilion, by a story in which he smeared himself with it on learning that Sita wore it for Rama’s long life, devotion taken to a literal extreme. He carries the gada, the heavy mace, the weapon of his strength. He is shown in mid-leap, or bearing the herb-mountain on one upraised palm, or, most tenderly, kneeling with folded hands before Rama, or tearing open his chest to show the divine pair within. To read these poses is to read his whole character at a glance.

His days of worship are Tuesday and Saturday. The Hanuman Chalisa is his core prayer, recited against fear, illness, and the influence of malign forces; he is the guardian one calls on in the dark. He is the patron of the wrestling grounds, the akharas, where his celibacy and disciplined strength are the ideal, and his red shrines stand at the edges of countless villages, the protector posted at the boundary. For sheer breadth of living devotion across India he has few rivals.

Strength made perfect

Set the leap and the torn chest and the daily hymn side by side and the figure comes whole. Hanuman is everything the tradition means by a devotee: strong without pride, learned without vanity, mighty and yet entirely at another’s service. He shows that the highest use of power is to spend it for someone you love, and that the self is most fully found when it is wholly given away.

He had the strength all along. He needed only to be reminded whom it was for.