Hanuman

The summit of Mount Mahendra. Below, a hundred yojanas of sea, and on its far shore, in Lanka, Janaki held captive. Above, open sky, and between them a single vanara, who has just risen to his feet after being reminded of the strength he had forgotten. Jambavan had said only this, that you are the son of the wind, that you can do it. And that was enough. The body tightened, the neck lifted, the feet dug into the earth so hard that the mountain shuddered. The leap has not yet begun. This is the moment in which Hanuman is most fully Hanuman, the moment when someone leaves behind the measured limit inside himself and sets his foot down on faith he has not measured.

The simplicity with which Valmiki’s Ramayana tells this moment carries over onto this site’s Sundarakanda page exactly as it stands, “The deed that was too hard for others, he stood ready to accomplish alone, without any support at all.” No army, no bridge, no other means. One solitary resolve and the open sea.

But Hanuman’s story does not begin with the leap. In Valmiki’s Ramayana his first scene is near Kishkindha, where he comes down from Mount Rishyamukha in the guise of a mendicant to meet Rama and Lakshmana. Sugriva had sent him, out of fear, worried that these two might be men sent by Vali. And in that very first meeting Rama tells Lakshmana that a man who speaks like this, whose grammar carries no flaw anywhere, from whose mouth not a single word falls in vain, is no ordinary envoy. Hanuman is known first by his voice, and only afterward by his strength. This is worth remembering, because through all the story that follows his strength always walks behind his intelligence and never ahead of it.

Then the sea. Mount Mainaka rises from the water with its golden peaks and offers an invitation to rest, and Hanuman touches it with his hand and moves on, because pausing before the work is done is not in his nature. When Surasa blocks the way and opens her jaws wide, he shrinks his body, passes into her mouth, and comes back out, giving her test an answer made of suppleness. And Simhika, who catches hold of his shadow and drags him down, he finishes by entering inside her. Three obstacles in a single journey, and for all three, three different answers. This is the first lesson of the Sundarakanda.

From the shade of the shinshapa to the burning tail

The first thing Hanuman does in Lanka is wait. Hidden in a dense shinshapa tree in the Ashoka grove, he watches through the whole night, Ravana’s arrival, his threats, the ring of demonesses, and in the middle of it all, Sita sunk in grief. He does not leap down. First, softly, still seated in the tree, he sings the story of Rama, so that Sita below will not be startled, so that she hears first and sees afterward. And when Sita looks up, there comes that image of Valmiki’s, set on this site’s page like this, that Hanuman appeared to her “as though he were the sun newly risen in the east.” On the night whose darkness ran deepest, the sun appeared, and it appeared on the branch of a tree.

Having given her the ring, having given her reassurance, Hanuman could have turned back if he wished. The work was done. But he stays, and here his second form opens. He lays waste to the grove, cuts down the Kinkaras and Jambumali, and lets himself be bound, deliberately, in Indrajit’s Brahmastra, because seeing Ravana with his own eyes was also part of his task. And when they set his tail on fire, that same fire travels along the parapets of Lanka’s palaces. Carrying his burning tail, that vanara left Lanka to reckon, that night, what the master of such an envoy must be like.

On into the Yuddhakanda he keeps doing whatever is hardest. When Lakshmana falls senseless, overnight he carries the whole of Dronagiri, the mountain with the sanjivani on it, back from the Himalaya, since wasting time to pick out the single herb did not seem right to him. And after the victory, when the moment comes to carry the sweetest news of all, Rama hands that too to Hanuman, to go into the Ashoka grove and tell Sita that Ravana is dead. The one who had carried the first message carried the last one as well.

And then, centuries later, comes Tulsidas, who composes the Hanuman Chalisa in Awadhi. There the same sea, the same ring, the same sanjivani fold into forty verses, and it becomes the reading that millions of throats still repeat every Tuesday. Valmiki’s Hanuman is the hero of the epic; Tulsi’s Hanuman is the guardian of every home. The two are one and the same, only the doorway of darshan differs.

His path

Hanuman and Rama’s first meeting · That first exchange, in the guise of a mendicant, where Rama recognizes from the speech alone that this envoy is no ordinary one.

The crossing of the sea · Mainaka, Surasa, and Simhika, three obstacles and three different answers. The flight of the Sundarakanda begins here.

The Ashoka grove and the darshan of Sita · The waiting on the shinshapa branch, and the ring that came down as trust in the dark.

The burning of Lanka · Carrying a burning tail, a single vanara showed the whole of Ravana’s city its first defeat.

Lakshmana’s swoon and the sanjivani · When the herb could not be found, the whole mountain came up instead. Hanuman’s answer is always larger than the question.

The message to Sita after the victory · The one given the hardest task received the sweetest news to carry as well.

Hanuman Chalisa · That whole saga in Tulsidas’s Awadhi voice, the home of forty verses.

The Ramayana main page · The whole story in one place, from Balakanda to Uttarakanda, in which Hanuman’s thread shines again and again.

The moment before the leap

What touches us most in Hanuman’s story is that his strength had been forgotten by him because of a curse. The power was there; the memory of it was not. Someone else had to remind him. Most of us live in exactly this condition, having forgotten our greatest capacity, waiting for some Jambavan. And the second thing, Hanuman does not bring the same tool to every problem. For Mainaka, humility; for Surasa, cunning; for Simhika, a strike; for Sita, patience; for Ravana, fire. One who has only strength is a slave to strength, and one who carries, alongside strength, the discernment of when and how much and in what form, becomes the center of the story even while he remains a servant. On fear, Hanuman’s answer is plain, choose a task so large that the fear begins to look small. And on faithfulness, plainer still, always keep your name smaller than your work. The vanara who came back from burning Lanka arrived and said only this much, “Sita is seen.” To gather all that glory into a single sentence and lay it at his master’s feet, this is the thing in him that rises even higher than his leap.