Hanuman Could Not Work Out Which Herb Was Which, So He Carried Off the Entire Mountain

Rama’s brother Lakshmana is dying on the battlefield at Lanka. There is a herb that will save him. It grows on a particular mountain in the Himalayas, hundreds of miles north, and someone has to go and get it before morning.

Hanuman goes. He finds the mountain. And then he hits a problem that no amount of strength solves: he cannot tell which plant is the right one.

So he picks up the mountain and brings it back.

I love this episode, and not for the reason it usually gets told. It is normally offered as a display of power, and it is that. But look at what is actually happening. The strongest warrior in Rama’s army runs into a botany question, cannot answer it, and refuses to let that stop him. Bring everything. Lakshmana will live. There is a whole personality in that decision.

Itihasa: what happened

Indian tradition does not file the Ramayana under fable. Together with the Mahabharata it is counted as itihasa, a Sanskrit word that breaks down as iti-ha-asa, “thus it truly happened.” Valmiki’s poem is the record of Rama’s life, and Hanuman is in it from the moment Rama reaches the forests of Kishkindha.

For the hundreds of millions of people who pray to him, that is the starting point. Hanuman is not a figure they enjoy reading about. He lived, he served Rama, and he is still listening.

Who he is in Valmiki’s Ramayana

Hanuman is a vanara, and the word is worth pausing on. It is usually rendered as monkey, and that is how he is pictured now. In Valmiki’s telling the vanaras read more like a forest people than like animals, and the term itself is often broken down as forest dweller. How literally to take the tail is an old conversation, and devotion has never needed it settled.

His mother was Anjana, which is why he is called Anjaneya, the son of Anjana. Her husband was the vanara chief Kesari, so he is also Kesari-nandan. But his true father is divine: he is the son of Vayu, the wind. That is where the speed comes from, and the ability to grow or shrink at will.

The name itself carries a story from his childhood. The traditional account traces Hanuman to hanu, chin: as a child he mistook the rising sun for a ripe fruit and leapt at it, and Indra’s thunderbolt struck him on the jaw. The most widely worshipped deity in North India still carries, in his name, a moment of childhood daring.

What he does in the Ramayana

Sita has been carried off to Lanka by Ravana. Nobody knows where she is.

Hanuman crosses the sea in a single leap, finds her in Ravana’s garden, gives her Rama’s ring as proof, and brings her message back. That is the load-bearing act of the entire epic. Without it there is no war, no rescue, no homecoming. Everything that follows depends on Hanuman being fast enough and clever enough to search an enemy capital alone.

Then he lets himself be caught. Ravana’s people set his tail on fire, and Hanuman uses the fire to burn a large part of Lanka before leaping home. It is the moment Lanka learns what Rama’s messenger can do.

And then the mountain.

Every one of these acts is done for Rama, and none for himself. He asks for nothing, not even credit. That is the quality devotees have held up ever since: immense power, entirely given over to service.

He is there in the Mahabharata too

Generations later, in the Mahabharata, an old monkey lies across a forest path and asks Bhima, who is enormously strong and knows it, to move his tail aside. Bhima cannot lift it.

The monkey is Hanuman. He is Bhima’s elder brother, since both are sons of Vayu, the wind, and the meeting humbles the proudest of the Pandavas.

He then takes his place on Arjuna’s chariot banner for the war at Kurukshetra, which is why one of Arjuna’s names is Kapi-dhwaja, he whose flag bears the ape. Hanuman is present at the turning point of both epics.

Tradition explains how he can be there, ages apart. Hanuman is one of the chiranjivis, the seven who are held to live on earth until the end of the present age. Many devotees believe that wherever the Ramayana is being recited, Hanuman is quietly in the audience.

How devotion to him filled North India

Devotion to Hanuman is ancient, but in the sixteenth century it found its greatest voice. Tulsidas retold the Ramayana in Awadhi, a language ordinary people in North India actually spoke, as the Ramcharitmanas. Sanskrit had kept the epic at arm’s length from most of its audience. Tulsidas removed that barrier, and in his telling Hanuman stands at the centre of devotion: total, unembarrassed, strong, and entirely pointed at Rama.

Tulsidas is also credited with the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses that are probably the single most recited devotional text in North India. Many children learn it by heart before they can read it. People say it on the way to an exam, before a long drive, in a hospital corridor. If you want to know why there is a Hanuman shrine on so many street corners, that hymn is a large part of the answer.

Underneath it runs the bhakti tradition, which across medieval India put a direct, personal, loving relationship with God ahead of ritual and hierarchy. Hanuman, every one of whose acts in the Ramayana is loving service, is the fullest picture of what bhakti asks of a person.

Police stations and wrestling gyms

Two of the places you find Hanuman are worth noticing, because they tell you what people ask of him.

The first is the akhada, the traditional wrestling gym. Hanuman is the patron of wrestlers across North India, and the association is natural: strength, brahmacharya, discipline, a body kept deliberately in order. The Chalisa is recited in these places as training, not just as prayer.

The second is the police station. Hanuman shrines are common in Indian police stations. A protector whose defining quality is that he does the difficult, dangerous job faithfully and does not ask for the credit is a fitting patron for that line of work.

He also travelled. Hanuman went wherever the Ramayana went, across Southeast Asia, and temples to him stand far beyond India. The Sanskrit tradition keeps him a lifelong brahmachari, though some of those distant tellings give him a wife and children.

What the mountain is really about

Many of the great Hindu deities are approached with a certain awe at a distance. They are vast, they are cosmic, they contain the universe in their mouths.

Hanuman is close, and I think that is the whole of his appeal. He is the one who shows up. He does the errand. He cannot identify the herb and brings the whole mountain rather than come back empty-handed. His power is entirely at Rama’s disposal, and the tradition treats that not as a limitation but as the highest thing a person can be.

You can see why that lands harder than omnipotence. Very few people picture themselves as the cosmic principle underlying reality.

Quite a lot of people would settle for being the one who got the job done.