The child of Anjana and the wind was born with strength no one had measured, and one morning, hungry, he saw the sun rising red over the mountains and took it for a ripe fruit hanging in the sky. He leapt. The wind, his father, carried him, and he crossed the distance no being had crossed and reached for the sun with his small hand.

It was the day of an eclipse, and Rahu had come for the sun himself; the child brushed him aside as a nuisance. Indra, seeing the sun about to be swallowed by a baby, struck him with the vajra, and the child fell, his jaw broken, onto a mountain, and lay still. Then Vayu, the wind, gathered his son up and withdrew from the world in grief and rage, and the three worlds began to suffocate without breath.

The gods came to him and begged, and gave the child life and gift upon gift: that no weapon could harm him, that fire would not burn him, that he would choose the hour of his own death, that he would be the wisest of the wise. Because of the vajra upon his jaw, hanu, he was called Hanuman. And because such power in a child was dangerous, the sages laid a forgetting upon him, so that he would not know his own strength until someone reminded him.

The Moral

Everything Hanuman later becomes is already here, and he cannot use any of it, because he has been made to forget it. The forgetting is not a punishment in this story; it is what makes him safe, and it is what makes the later moment on the shore, when Jambavan reminds him, the great turning point of the Ramayana. The tradition is telling us plainly that most of us are not lacking power. We are lacking the reminder.

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