Vayuवायु

Vayu is the wind, and also the breath. The tradition does not distinguish these as sharply as English does: the same prana moves in the atmosphere and in the body, and Vayu is that movement.

He is a Vedic deity of real standing, invoked in the Rigveda alongside Indra, and he keeps a substantial role in later thought precisely because of the breath connection. Where other Vedic gods faded, Vayu was carried forward by yoga and Vedanta, which made prana central.

He is the father of Hanuman — who is Pavanputra, son of the wind, and Maruti — and of Bhima, the strongest of the Pandavas. Both sons take their defining quality, strength combined with speed, from him.

In the Dvaita tradition of Madhvacharya he holds an unusually elevated position: Vayu is the chief of the jivas, the highest being after Vishnu and the intermediary between the supreme and the soul, incarnate as Hanuman, Bhima and Madhva himself.

He is guardian of the northwest, one of the eight Dikpalas.

Vayu is prominent in the Rigveda, where he is often invoked with Indra as a pair, and is said to receive the first offering of soma — a mark of precedence.

He is closely associated with, and sometimes identified with, Vata, another wind deity, the two names covering the same phenomenon with slightly different emphases: Vayu the divine person, Vata the physical wind.

The Maruts, the storm gods, are a related host, and Vayu is their leader in some accounts.

His durability comes from the Upanishads. The Taittiriya Upanishad's scheme of the five sheaths (koshas) places the pranamaya kosha, the breath-body, between the physical and the mental. The Chandogya's contest among the faculties concludes that prana is the one without which the rest cannot function. In the Prashna Upanishad the five vital airs — prana, apana, vyana, udana, samana — are enumerated as the body's functional divisions.

This made Vayu structurally necessary to yoga, where pranayama is one of the eight limbs, and to Ayurveda, where vata is one of the three doshas. He survived the transition from Vedic to classical Hinduism better than Indra or Varuna did, because the tradition kept needing the concept.

His elevation in Dvaita is Madhvacharya's distinctive contribution, and it makes Vayu — through Hanuman, Bhima and Madhva — the central figure of that school's devotional practice after Vishnu himself.

Vayu is shown as a strong figure of blue-grey or smoky complexion, riding an antelope or deer — an animal of speed and sudden movement — or a chariot drawn by very swift horses.

He carries a flag or banner, the most natural emblem of wind, and an ankusha.

He is often depicted in motion with garments and hair streaming, and is one of the few deities whose iconography attempts to render movement rather than stillness.

As a Dikpala he guards the northwest, and appears there on temple walls across India.

He has comparatively little independent iconography, and is most often encountered in Dikpala sets or in the invisible form that matters most: he is worshipped as breath, which requires no image at all.

Vata — the physical wind, closely identified with him.

Prana — the vital breath, and the aspect through which he is most widely worshipped, though not usually personified.

Marut / Maruts — the storm host, related and sometimes led by him.

Mukhya Prana — the chief breath, the Dvaita designation for Vayu as the highest jiva, worshipped in that tradition through Hanuman.

Vayu as Dikpala — guardian of the northwest.

Pavana — the purifier, an epithet, and the root of Hanuman's name Pavanputra.

Hanuman's birth. Vayu fathers Hanuman on Anjana, and the accounts vary — in one, the offering meant for Anjali is carried by Vayu to her. When Indra strikes the infant Hanuman down for leaping at the sun, Vayu withdraws the air from the world in grief, and the gods must restore the child and grant him boons to make the wind relent. It is one of the most effective demonstrations in the Puranas of what a deity's withdrawal actually means.

Bhima's birth. Kunti invokes Vayu with the mantra given her by Durvasa, and Bhima is born — strongest of the Pandavas, and Hanuman's half-brother. The two meet in the Mahabharata when Bhima cannot lift an old monkey's tail from his path.

The contest of the faculties. In the Chandogya and Prashna Upanishads, the senses argue over which is chief. Each departs in turn and the body manages; when prana prepares to leave, the others find themselves being pulled up like tethered horses, and concede. It is the classic Upanishadic demonstration of the breath's primacy.

Uprooting Meru's peak. In a Puranic episode Vayu, provoked by Narada, breaks off a peak of Mount Meru and casts it into the sea, where it becomes Lanka — one of the accounts of that island's origin.

The Kena Upanishad. Vayu, boasting of his power before the mysterious yaksha, cannot move a single blade of grass. Along with Agni and Indra, he is humbled, and it is Uma who explains that the power was never theirs.

Vayu is worshipped less through ritual than through practice.

Pranayama — the regulation of breath, one of the eight limbs of Patanjali's yoga — is in a real sense his daily worship, and is performed by very large numbers of people, most of whom would not describe it as such.

He is invoked in Vedic recitation and in the sandhyavandana, and as a Dikpala at the opening of ceremonies, where he is addressed for the northwest.

In Dvaita practice, worship of Hanuman is worship of Mukhya Prana, and the Madhva tradition's Hanuman temples — including those established by Vyasatirtha — are Vayu shrines in that theology.

He is invoked in Ayurveda as vata, one of the three doshas, though that is a physiological category rather than a devotional one.

ॐ वायवे नमः is the mantra, and the Rigvedic hymns to him are recited in Vedic contexts.

He has essentially no festival, vrat or independent temple worship of his own — his presence is continuous rather than occasional.

Srikalahasti, Andhra Pradesh — the air element temple among the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams, where the wind is worshipped through a lamp in the inner sanctum that flickers constantly despite the absence of any draught.

Vayu shrines within Dikpala schemes — on the northwest face of temples across India.

Madhva Hanuman temples across Karnataka — theologically Vayu shrines, including the many established by Vyasatirtha in the Vijayanagara period.

Vayu Linga at Srikalahasti — the specific object of the element worship there.

He has no significant temples in his own name, and his most widespread site of worship is the practitioner's own breath.

Vayu is the Vedic deity who survived best, and the reason is instructive: he was the same thing as a concept the tradition kept needing. Indra was a warrior king and the tradition stopped wanting one. Vayu was breath, and every subsequent development — Upanishadic enquiry into the self, yoga, Ayurveda, Vedanta — required breath as a category. He was carried forward by usefulness rather than devotion.

The identity of wind and breath is his central idea, and it is doctrinally load-bearing rather than poetic. What moves outside moves inside; the atmosphere and the body run on the same principle; and the practitioner regulating their breath is working directly on the thing the cosmos is made of. Pranayama rests on that claim.

His sons carry the point into narrative. Hanuman and Bhima are the tradition's two great figures of physical strength, and both are the wind's — force that is invisible until it moves something, and that can be neither seen nor held.

And the withdrawal of the air when Hanuman is struck down is the most vivid thing in his material. A grieving deity stops the wind, and everything that breathes stops with it. The gods do not defeat him; they negotiate. It is a precise picture of what dependence on an invisible thing actually amounts to.