Vayuवायु

Vāyu (वायु), the wind, is among the elemental triad of the Veda, with Agni on earth and Sūrya in heaven holding the mid-air between them. He is invoked also as Vāta, the blast of the storm, and as Pavana, the purifier. The hymns celebrate his speed and his invisibility: his roar is heard, his touch felt, his form never seen. More intimately, Vāyu is breath. The Upaniṣads identify him with prāṇa, the vital air, the one power that never rests in the body, and this identification carried the wind-god into the heart of Indian physiology, yoga and metaphysics.

In the Veda

Vāyu is swift-thoughted, thousand-eyed, drawn by teams of horses, and holds a ritual privilege the texts are careful to record: in the soma sacrifice he receives the first draught, ahead even of Indra, with whom he shares invocations as Indravāyū. A celebrated funeral verse commits the breath of the dead to the wind, the eye to the sun, each element returning to its cosmic source.

Father of heroes

Epic tradition makes Vāyu the father of two of its mightiest figures: Bhīma, the strongest of the Pāṇḍava brothers in the Mahābhārata, and Hanumān, the monkey-god of the Rāmāyaṇa, who inherits his father's power of flight and is honoured as Pavanaputra, son of the wind. Tradition tells that when the child Hanumān was struck down by Indra, Vāyu in grief withdrew from the world, and every creature began to suffocate until the gods made amends, a story that states plainly what Vāyu is: the one god whose absence no being survives for a minute.

Worship and legacy

As a Dikpāla, Vāyu guards the north-west, the vāyavya corner. He has little independent cult, but one major tradition exalts him singularly: the Mādhva school of Vedānta holds Vāyu to be the foremost of souls and the mediator of Viṣṇu's grace, present in three descents, Hanumān, Bhīma, and the school's founder Madhvācārya himself. And wherever prāṇāyāma is practised, the discipline of the breath, the old wind-god is being handled directly, whether his name is spoken or not.