Vayu

Among the most celebrated narratives involving Vayu is the dramatic episode of Hanumān's birth and the subsequent humbling of the gods, recounted in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and expanded in the Śiva Purāṇa.

Añjanā, a celestial apsarā cursed to live as a vānara woman, performed intense tapasyā on a mountain peak to earn a divine son who would free her from the curse. Śiva, pleased by her devotion, decreed that a portion of his own essence would be born as her son. At the appointed moment, Vayu — the all-pervading wind — carried the divine spark of Śiva's grace across the sky and breathed it into Añjanā. From this union of wind and divine will, Hanumān was born atop a mountain at sunrise, radiant as the morning sun itself.

The infant Hanumān, mistaking the rising sun for a ripe fruit, leapt across the sky to seize it. This alarmed Indra, who struck the child with his vajra, fracturing his jaw (hanu — hence the name Hanumān) and sending him hurtling earthward. Vayu, witnessing his son struck down, was consumed by grief and fury. He withdrew himself from the cosmos entirely — retracting prāṇa, the breath of life, from every creature. Across the three worlds, beings gasped, choked, and began to perish. The gods, sages, and all living things were suffocating without the vital wind.

In terror, the Devas rushed to Vayu and begged him to relent. Brahmā himself revived Hanumān and granted him immunity from death. To appease Vayu's wrath, each god bestowed a boon upon the child: Indra granted that his body would be as hard as his vajra; Sūrya later became his guru and taught him all the śāstras; Varuṇa shielded him from water; Yama granted him freedom from death. Thus, through Vayu's righteous anger, Hanumān became the most blessed and invulnerable being in creation — the very embodiment of devotion who would later serve Rāma in the war against Rāvaṇa.

In the Mahābhārata, Vayu's role as the divine father of Bhīma is equally momentous. When Kuntī, using the mantra given to her by sage Durvāsā, invoked Vayu, the wind god descended in a mighty gale and from that union Bhīmasena was born — the strongest of the Pāṇḍavas. Bhīma inherited his father's irresistible force: his war-cry was like a tempest, his mace-blows struck like hurricanes, and his appetite was as vast as the atmosphere itself. In the final great battle at Kurukṣetra, it was Bhīma who fulfilled the terrible vow to slay all one hundred Kauravas, channeling the relentless, unstoppable power of the wind.

In the Dvaita Vedānta tradition of Madhvācārya, Vayu is exalted as the supreme intermediary between Viṣṇu and the jīvas. Madhva taught that Vayu incarnates in every age to restore dharma — as Hanumān in the Tretā Yuga, as Bhīma in the Dvāpara Yuga, and as Madhvācārya himself in the Kali Yuga — a doctrine known as the Vāyu Traya (the three descents of Vayu).