Hinduism

BOOK IV: Canto LXVI.: Hanumán.

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This is a passage from an English verse translation of the *Ramayana*, the Sanskrit Hindu epic, likely from the 19th-century translation by Ralph T.H. Griffith. It belongs to the episode where the Vānar (monkey) army has stalled in despair before the ocean, and an elder chieftain delivers a rousing speech to Hanumān to persuade him to leap across the sea in search of the captive Sītā. The speech works by recounting Hanumān's miraculous origin: his mother Anjanā was a celestial nymph cursed to live on earth, the Wind-God Vāyu fathered Hanumān upon her, and the child's divine lineage was confirmed when, as an infant, he leapt three hundred leagues toward the sun and survived a thunderbolt from Indra that shattered his jaw — the injury that gave him his name. The chieftain argues that Hanumān alone inherits the Wind-God's boundless strength and is therefore the only being capable of the crossing. What makes the passage distinctive is its use of genealogical mythmaking as a form of heroic persuasion: the speech functions less as tactical planning than as a ceremonial awakening, reminding a hero of powers he seems to have forgotten. It ends with Hanumān literally expanding in size — a physical embodiment of restored self-knowledge — making the episode a compact dramatization of how divine identity is recovered through memory and exhortation.

BOOK IV: Canto LXVI.: Hanumán.

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