Who Vayu is
Vayu is the Wind. The poets of the Rigveda knew him as a god who cannot be seen and cannot be missed. They heard him and they felt him, and they said so.
He has two names in the hymns. As Vayu he is a person, a bright god with a chariot who is invited to the sacrifice. As Vata he is the wind itself, the thing that blows. The two are not kept strictly apart, and the last book of the Rigveda has two short hymns to Vata that are among the finest it holds.
Vayu the god drives a shining car. One hymn gives him two red horses and two purple ones. Others give him ninety-nine, or a hundred, or a thousand, harnessed at his wish. Indra often rides beside him, and several hymns call the pair together as Indra-Vayu. He is called the son-in-law of Tvashtri, the craftsman of the gods, though no hymn tells that story. One poet says he brought forth the storm gods, the Maruts, from the womb of heaven. Another says he was born from the breath of the first Person, from whose body the world was made.
One fact about him is repeated in hymn after hymn. Vayu drinks first. When the Soma is pressed in the morning, the first draught is his, before any other god. "You have none before you," a poet tells him. The hymns do not say how he won that right. The priests who came later told two stories to explain it.
The Vata hymns say something different. The wind's chariot goes crashing and thundering, they say, it reddens the sky and scatters the dust of the earth. He never rests on any day. No one knows where he was born or where he came from. He is the breath of the gods and the seed of the world, and he goes wherever he likes. The other hymn asks him for medicine and long life, calls him father, brother and friend, and says that a store of deathlessness is laid up in his house.
His sound is heard, but his shape is never seen. Let us worship this Wind with our offering.