The Day Hanuman Tried to Eat the Sun

This is the story of the morning the infant Hanuman saw the rising sun, took it for a ripe fruit, and leaped into the sky to eat it. It is one of the best-known episodes of his childhood. It explains how Hanuman got his name and his injured jaw, why the gods showered him with gifts, and how the most powerful devotee in Hindu tradition came by his powers before he knew what they were for.

Who is who

• Hanuman — son of the monkey-mother Anjana and the Wind God, later the great devotee of Rama. His birth is told on a separate page.
• Vayu — the Wind God, Hanuman’s father.
• Surya — the Sun God.
• Rahu — the severed head of the asura (demon) who drank the amṛta, the nectar of immortality. He became one of the nine grahas, the celestial powers, and his swallowing of the sun and moon is how the tradition explains eclipses.
• Indra — king of the gods, whose weapon is the vajra, the thunderbolt, and whose mount is Airavata, the great white elephant.

A hungry morning

Young Hanuman had been awake since before dawn, full of the restless energy that filled every waking hour of his childhood. He was perhaps a few months old in the telling — old enough to leap, young enough to think the sun was a mango. Those two facts together produced the story.

He was hungry, and there on the horizon was a large, round, glowing orange object. (Vālmīki says only that he took it for a fruit; the mango is the popular detail.)

The leap

He leaped. It was not an ordinary leap, or even an extraordinary monkey leap that covers the length of several trees in a single bound. It carried him from the ground into the sky in one arc, straight towards the rising sun.

Surya saw him coming, and saw who this was. Tellings differ on what the sun did next. In some popular retellings the sun, surprised, began to move away: this was the son of Vayu, and there was no knowing what the child might do on arrival. In Vālmīki’s telling the sun simply did not burn him, knowing he was only a child and that great work lay ahead of him. Either way, the fierce heat of the sun did the infant no harm.

Rahu

Rahu was also there that morning. It was a day on which he was due to swallow the sun — his periodic right, the act his immortal existence was organised around. He arrived to find the sun already occupied by a child.

Hanuman looked at Rahu, considered him briefly, and apparently concluded that Rahu was another fruit of sorts. He lunged.

Rahu fled to Indra and complained. He had come for the sun, he said, and found someone else there first — something small that looked like a monkey, and that had tried to eat him.

Indra

Indra rode out on his elephant Airavata. Hanuman looked at the great white elephant and decided that this, too, was interesting — some versions say he took it for yet another fruit — and made for it.

Indra threw his thunderbolt. This was the vajra that in other stories splits mountains and subdues demons; it was not a weapon thrown lightly. It struck Hanuman on the jaw.

He fell.

Here too the tellings vary. In some retellings Vayu caught his son before he hit the ground, as only the wind can. In Vālmīki’s account the child fell onto a mountain, breaking his jaw, and Vayu lifted him and carried him into a cave. Sanskrit hanu means “jaw,” and from this injury he was called Hanumān, “the one with the (marked) jaw.”

What the wind did next

Then Vayu, the wind, stopped blowing.

The consequences were immediate. Every living thing breathes. Every fire needs air. Every cloud needs wind to move it. Without wind the world suffocates, the fires go out, the rains stop, and everything that depends on circulation — which is everything — begins to fail. In Vālmīki’s telling the gods, the humans and all other creatures, choking, run to Brahma the creator for help.

The boons

The gods had made a mistake. They came to Vayu, who held the child in his arms, and they begged, and they gave gifts. In Vālmīki’s account Brahma first restores the child with a touch.

What each god gave is told differently in different places. One widely told list runs like this:

• Brahma — protection against the brahmāstra, Brahma’s own supreme weapon.
• Indra — immunity to the thunderbolt: the weapon that had struck the child would never harm him again.
• Vishnu — divine speed.
• Shiva — long life.
• Varuna, lord of the waters — immunity to water.
• Agni, the fire god — immunity to fire.

Vālmīki’s list, told by the sage Agastya in the Uttara Kāṇḍa, is somewhat different. There Indra also gives the child his name, Hanuman, after the injured jaw. Surya gives him a share of his own brilliance and promises to teach him, so that he will be unequalled in learning — which is why Hanuman is often described as having studied the scriptures with the Sun as his teacher. Other gods, including Varuna, Yama (the god of death), Kubera and Vishvakarma, make him safe from their own weapons, and Brahma grants him long life and protection from Brahma’s own weapons.

Vayu, receiving these assurances and seeing his son surrounded by the gifts of the entire divine assembly, returned to his work. The wind blew again. The fires caught. The clouds moved.

Afterwards

Hanuman woke with a sore jaw and an immunity to almost everything worth being immune to, surrounded by gods who had, in the last hour, each given him something of their own.

He was probably still hungry. But the fruit would have to wait. He had just received, in the way of a child who does not quite know what is happening, every gift he would need for the work that was coming.

The sun continued to rise. Rahu continued to cause eclipses from time to time. And Hanuman bounded back to the forest, his jaw at its new angle, his powers more complete than they had been before anyone tried to hurt him. Soon afterwards, as the story of his childhood explains, a curse from the sages would make him forget those powers until the moment came to use them.

Where the story comes from

• Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa — the fullest early account is in the Uttara Kāṇḍa, where the sage Agastya tells Rama about Hanuman’s childhood. Jambavan also refers to the leap and the boons in the Kiṣkindhā Kāṇḍa, when he reminds Hanuman of his strength before the crossing to Lanka.
• Later retellings in Purāṇic, regional and devotional literature add colour — the mango, the retreating sun, the lists of boons — and differ on details.
• Hanuman Chalisa — Tulsidas’s famous hymn refers to the episode in one line:

जुग सहस्र जोजन पर भानू। लील्यो ताहि मधुर फल जानू॥

Roughly: “The sun, thousands of yojanas away, you swallowed, taking it for a sweet fruit.” A yojana is a traditional measure of distance. The line is sometimes presented online as a precise calculation of the distance from the earth to the sun; that is a modern reading, and the verse itself is a devotional description.

How the story is read

These are interpretations commonly offered in the tradition, not statements of fact.

• Gifts before the task. The story is often read as showing how grace prepares a person for work they have not yet met. All the boons were gathered in advance, before Hanuman had met Rama and before that name meant anything to him.
• Innocence and power. The child means no harm; he is simply hungry. Many readers see in it the danger and the beauty of great power that has not yet learned restraint.
• Breath as life. Vayu’s withdrawal shows how completely the world depends on the wind — often connected with prāṇa, the life-breath. Even the king of the gods must make amends when it stops.
• Wounds that become names. Hanuman’s best-known name comes from his injury. The story is sometimes read as saying that what strikes us down can become part of who we are.

In worship

Images of the child Hanuman leaping for the sun are popular in homes and temples, and the episode is recalled whenever devotees recite the Hanuman Chalisa. Because Surya was Hanuman’s teacher in the tradition, some devotees also connect Hanuman’s worship with honouring the Sun.

Read on AdiVeda

• Born of Wind and Devotion: The Birth of Hanuman — Hanuman’s parents, name and the curse of forgetting.
• The Enchantress Who Saved the Nectar: Mohini Avatar — how Rahu drank the nectar and lost his body.
• The Greatest Leap: Hanuman Crosses the Ocean — the power he received as a child, put to use.
• Hanuman Chalisa — the hymn that recalls the sun-leap.
• Aditya Hridaya Stotram — a hymn to the Sun from the Rāmāyaṇa.