Vayu

In the Vedic pantheon

Vāyu appears among the Rigveda's significant deities, though with fewer hymns than Indra, Agni, or Varuṇa. He is closely paired with Indra as a joint recipient of hymns (Vāyu-Indra), and Vedic ritual grants him a mark of precedence: he is traditionally the first deity to receive the Soma libation at a sacrifice, an honour recorded in his epithet prathama-pā, "first drinker." Some Vedic scholars distinguish Vāta, the raw, elemental force of the wind itself, from Vāyu, the fuller personified deity, though the Vedic texts do not always draw the line sharply and the two names are frequently used for the same figure. Vāyu is counted among the Pañca Bhūta, the five elements — earth, water, fire, air, and space — that Indian cosmology treats as the physical constituents of the universe, and in later cosmological schemes he is assigned as guardian of the northwest quarter, one of the dikpālas, riding a deer or antelope.

Prāṇa in the Upaniṣads

Vāyu's importance grows substantially in the Upaniṣads, where he is identified with prāṇa, the vital breath, and made the subject of one of early Indian philosophy's best-known parables. In both the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads, the bodily faculties — speech, sight, hearing, and mind — each claim to be the most essential, and each in turn leaves the body to test the claim, causing sickness but not death; only when prāṇa, the breath, threatens to depart does the body fail entirely, proving breath the eldest and best (jyeṣṭha and śreṣṭha) of the faculties. This identification of Vāyu with prāṇa underlies the later yogic emphasis on pranayama, breath control, and its five recognized currents within the body — prāṇa, apāna, vyāna, udāna, and samāna — which yogic physiology treats as governing inhalation, elimination, circulation, upward energy, and digestion respectively.

Father of Hanumān and Bhīma

Vāyu's best-known mythological role is as father to two of the great strongmen of Indian epic. In the Rāmāyaṇa, Añjanā, Hanumān's mother, is granted a son by Vāyu's blessing, and Hanumān inherits from his father extraordinary speed, strength, and the power of flight, earning the epithet Pavanaputra, "son of the wind." In the Mahābhārata, Vāyu fathers Bhīma, second of the five Pāṇḍava brothers, whose immense strength — decisive at several points in the Kurukshetra war — is likewise attributed to his divine parentage.

The Dvaita school of Vedānta founded by the thirteenth-century philosopher Madhvācārya extends this lineage into formal doctrine: Hanumān, Bhīma, and Madhva himself are held to be three successive earthly incarnations of Vāyu, each appearing in a different age to serve Viṣṇu's own avatars — Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, and, in Madhva's own theological role, the exposition of Dvaita philosophy itself. This doctrine, distinctive to the Mādhva tradition centred at Udupi in coastal Karnataka, is largely absent from other Vaiṣṇava schools.

The Vāyu Purāṇa and worship

The Vāyu Purāṇa, which takes Vāyu as its central narrating figure, is counted among the eighteen Mahāpurāṇas and is generally reckoned among the oldest of them, retaining an old core of cosmological and genealogical material — including dynastic king-lists historians have used to help reconstruct early Indian chronology — alongside a marked Śaiva orientation. Vāyu does not have the widespread independent temple worship of Viṣṇu or Śiva, but he is invoked in Vedic-derived rites: a Vāyu Gāyatrī mantra is recited in his honour, and the Agnihotra fire ritual depends on the presence of wind to sustain the sacrificial flame, a practical dependency Vedic ritual treats as a form of Vāyu's participation in the rite.