Hanuman's birth, the sun, and the thunderbolt

Classical

The air itself went on strike for a monkey child.

The monkey army stands on the southern shore, staring at a hundred yojanas of ocean, and nobody speaks. Nobody except one: Hanuman sits apart in silence. Jambavan, the old bear, notices and goes to him. Why are you saying nothing? he asks. You are as strong and as brilliant as Sugriva, he says, as good as Rama and Lakshmana. He compares him to Garuda, who has been seen lifting serpents out of the sea: your arms are as strong as his wings, your speed and daring are the same. Then he tells Hanuman who he is, which Hanuman seems to have forgotten.

Anjana, Jambavan says, was an apsara of Punjikasthala who had been cursed to be born as a monkey. She was born the daughter of the monkey chief Kunjara and became the wife of the monkey Kesari. She could take any shape she pleased. One day she took human form and walked on a mountaintop in a fine silk garment.

The Wind god, Vayu, saw her. He lifted the edge of her garment, was struck by her beauty and embraced her. She protested: she was faithful to one husband. Vayu reassured her. He had entered her through the mind, not in any bodily way, he explained, and he promised her a brave, intelligent son who would equal him in strength and in leaping. The child was born in a cave. The page's translator notes that the verb Valmiki uses suggests a supernatural bringing into being, not an ordinary birth.

Jambavan then tells of the boy's childhood. In a great forest, the young Hanuman saw the rising sun and took it for a ripe red fruit. He leapt into the sky after it and flew more than three hundred yojanas. The sun's heat did not stop him. But Indra, angered at the child's audacity, struck him with the thunderbolt. Hanuman fell on a mountain peak and his left jaw was broken. That, says Jambavan, is how he got his name, Hanuman, meaning the one with the broken jaw.

His father reacted with fury. Vayu pulled the wind out of the three worlds, and every living thing was in distress. The gods begged him to relent. Brahma granted the boy a boon of invulnerability to weapons, and Indra granted that he could die only by his own choice.

Jambavan sums up: Hanuman is Kesari's son by his wife and Vayu's son in fact, equal to the Wind in strength and in leaping, and the only one of them with the skill and courage to lead, a second Sugriva. If he does not act, he says, the monkeys are as good as dead. And Jambavan adds a few memories of his own. During Vishnu's great three-stride incarnation he circled the earth twenty-one times, and at the churning of the ocean he collected the herbs for the nectar. But he is old now, and has lost much of his strength; what is needed, he says, is exactly what Hanuman has. Leap the ocean, he urges, the way Vishnu strode over the three worlds, and let the whole army see your power.

It works. Hanuman, roused, enlarges his body to a vast size, which lifts the spirits of the whole army and prepares him for the leap.

The translator's page adds some traditional stories that are not in the verses. In one, sages cursed Hanuman to forget his powers until somebody reminded him, because his pranks had grown unbearable; on that reading, Jambavan's speech is the reminder. Others say that Hanuman later became a student of the Sun and learned all the scriptures, and that Sita granted him life on earth as long as Rama's name is spoken.

The story matters because it shows what the epic means by strength: a gift of birth and boons that has to be called out of someone by the right words at the right time.

Who: Hanuman, Anjana, Kesari, Vayu, Indra, Jambavan

Bound to

The sages' curse: Hanuman forgets his strength causes

Horse-sacrifice, divine dessert, and the births causes

Mainaka, the mountain that kept its wings in the sea mirror

Places: Anjaneri (tradition)

Where this comes from

valmiki · Valmiki Ramayana, Kishkindha Kanda (valmikiramayan.net translation) sarga 66
commentary · Essence of Valmiki Uttara Ramayana (kamakoti.org PDF) - summary of Valmiki's Uttara Kanda Uttara: sargas 35-36 as numbered in that summary
read for this telling · valmikiramayan.net Valmiki Ramayana Kishkindha Kanda sarga 66

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