The leap Hanuman had forgotten he could make

The most striking thing about the greatest leap in the Ramayan is that the one who made it had to be talked into believing it was possible.

An army at the edge of the water

The search for Sita had come down to a strip of shore. Sampati, the old vulture, had told them what his failing eyes could still see: she was in Lanka, across a hundred yojanas of open sea. The vanar army stood at the water and looked at it, and the sea went on and did not end.

So they did what groups do. They went around the circle and each one said how far he could go. One said ten yojanas. Another, twenty. Another, thirty. The numbers rose and then stalled. Angad, the strongest among them, said he believed he could reach the far shore — but he was not sure he could come back, and a messenger who cannot return is not a messenger.

The circle ran out. And Hanuman sat a little apart from it, saying nothing, because as far as he knew he had nothing to offer.

Why he did not know

He had not always been like this. As a child he had seen the rising sun, taken it for a ripe fruit, and leapt into the sky to eat it — and the leap had carried him far enough that Indra had to strike him down to stop him. His father was the wind. There was very little he could not have done.

But a child with that much power and no sense of it is dangerous, and the sages he disturbed had laid a condition on him: the strength would stay, but the memory of it would not. He would be able to do anything, and would not know it, until somebody told him.

Nobody had told him. So he sat at the edge of the group, listening to smaller men list their limits, and assumed his own were smaller still.

···

Jambavan speaks

Jambavan, the oldest of them, had been alive long enough to remember. He turned to Hanuman and did not give him a plan or an order. He simply began to describe him to himself.

Son of Vayu. Blessed by Brahma. The one who reached for the sun. Jambavan told him what he was, patiently, while the army listened, and the accounts all agree on what happened as he spoke: Hanuman began to grow. Not because anything was added to him. Because the description was accurate, and he was finally hearing it.

By the end of it he was standing on Mount Mahendra, and the rock was cracking under his feet, and the hundred yojanas in front of him had stopped looking like a distance and started looking like a step.

Three things in the way

The crossing itself is short in the telling, and three things meet him on the way — which is exactly three too many for a journey that was supposed to be empty ocean.

Mainaka, a golden mountain, rose out of the sea and offered him rest. It was a genuine kindness, offered by a friend, and Hanuman touched it with respect and did not stop. Some obstacles are not hostile. They are simply well-timed comfort.

Surasa, mother of serpents, opened her mouth across his path and said she must eat him. She had a right to it, so he did not fight her. He grew larger; she grew larger to match; he grew larger again — and then abruptly shrank to the size of a thumb, entered her mouth, came out, and bowed. She had asked to be entered, not to be defeated. He gave her exactly what she asked for and no more.

Simhika caught his shadow from below and began to drag him down by it. That one he did not negotiate with. He went straight through her.

Rest, wit, and force, in that order — and then the coast of Lanka, and the lamps of a city that did not know he was coming.

The crossing is told in the opening sargas of the Sundar Kand in Valmiki's Ramayan, and retold in the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas.