The Eleventh Rudra

On Kailasa, Shiva heard that Vishnu was going down to earth again, this time as a man, Rama, the son of a king.

He sat very still for a long time. Then he told Parvati.

"I am going too," he said.

"As what?" said Parvati. "He is going as a prince. Will you be a second prince?"

"No," said Shiva. "He will go through grief, and exile, and a war. I want to be with him in all of it, close enough to touch. I will go as his servant."

Parvati was not pleased. "And who will be here, with me?" she asked.

Shiva laughed. "There are eleven of me," he said. "Eleven Rudras. Ten will stay on Kailasa with you. The eleventh will go."

So the eleventh Rudra went down to earth. On a mountain called Anjana, the wife of the monkey chief Kesari was praying for a son, and the Wind carried Shiva's power to her, and she gave birth to a son with a monkey's face, who would be called Hanuman.

He grew up strong and wild and forgetful, and when the time came he found Rama in the forest, looking for his lost wife, and fell at his feet, and never left him.

The Shiva Purana tells the birth another way. When Vishnu took the form of Mohini, the enchantress, Shiva saw her and his seed fell. The seven sages caught it on a leaf and, for Rama's sake, carried it to Anjana and placed it in her ear, and from it Hanuman was born, Shiva's own son and Shiva's own self.

The Ramayana's last book has a story that Shaivas read the same way. Long before, Ravana had come to Kailasa and laughed at Nandi, Shiva's door-keeper, for his monkey face. Nandi cursed him.

"Creatures with a face like mine," he said, "will come and destroy your city and your family."

Ravana laughed at that too. Years later the monkeys came, as Nandi had said, an army of them, with bears among them, across a bridge they had built over the sea, and the first of them, the one who came alone before the others, burnt Lanka with his tail.

Hanuman never claimed any of this for himself. When he stood before Rama for the first time, in the forest, he called himself a minister of the monkey king and a son of the Wind, and nothing more.

In the Shaiva telling this is the point of Hanuman: the great god, who needs nothing, chose to come down and serve, with folded hands, for the love of a friend, and kept the promise his door-keeper had made.

The Vaishnava telling has no need of Shiva. In the Ramayana, when the monkeys sit on the shore unable to cross the sea, the bear Jambavan reminds Hanuman who he is.

"Your mother was Anjana," he says, "a nymph of heaven born on earth as a monkey woman because of a curse. One day she stood on a mountain in a fine dress, and the Wind fell in love with her and held her in his arms. She was afraid, and he told her he had not harmed her faithfulness, only thought of her, and that she would have a son as strong and as fast as the Wind."

"You are that son," says Jambavan. "You saw the sun come up when you were a baby and thought it was a fruit, and leapt for it. Indra struck you down with his thunderbolt and broke your jaw, and that is why you are called Hanuman, the one with the jaw. Your father was so angry that he stopped blowing, and nothing in the three worlds could breathe, until the gods came to him and gave you their gifts. Fire will not burn you. Water will not drown you. You will die only when you choose. You can cross this sea."

That is all the parentage Hanuman has in Valmiki: Kesari's son in name, the Wind's son in fact, born to serve Rama, who is Vishnu.

The Madhva school counts him among the Wind's own appearances on earth, with Bhima of the Mahabharata and Madhvacharya himself. For Vaishnavas Hanuman is the perfect devotee, the servant who wants nothing but his master, and his service is a monkey's service to God, not one god serving another.