Vayu

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Nothing in the visible world moves faster, and nothing leaves so little behind it. A gust bends the grass, scatters the dust of a road, fills the lungs of a runner, and is gone before the eye can fix on it. The seers who composed the oldest hymns in Sanskrit, somewhere in the northwest of the subcontinent between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE, gave this moving air a name and a face, and then noticed that the same thing was happening inside their own chests. The wind that swept the plain and the breath that kept a body alive were, they came to hold, a single power wearing two appearances. They called it Vayu.

The wind that none can see

In the Rigveda the wind-god goes by two names, and the difference between them is a difference of aspect rather than of person. As Vata he is the rawer, more elemental thing — the gale itself, the air in violent motion. As Vayu he is the same power addressed as a god, harnessed to the ritual, drinking the offered drink. A third name, Pavana, “the purifier,” follows him into the later tradition. The Vedic singers do not seem troubled by the doubling; one hymn slides between Vata and Vayu without remark, because the god and the gust are not, for them, two things.

The two hymns the seer-poets addressed to him as Vata, late in the collection, are among the most striking nature-poetry in the Veda precisely because they refuse to give him a body. The first of them opens on the wind’s vehicle and its noise:

O the Wind’s chariot, O its power and glory! Crashing it goes and hath a voice of thunder. It makes the regions red and touches heaven, and as it moves the dust of earth is scattered.

The hymn then asks the question that the wind can never answer. He travels the paths of the middle air and never rests or sleeps; he is the friend of the waters, the earliest-born — and yet “where did he spring, and from what region came he?” The wind has no birthplace and no home one can point to. The final verse draws the paradox tight: this is the “Germ of the world, the Deities’ vital spirit,” a god who “moves ever as his will inclines him,” and of whom it must be said that “his voice is heard, his shape is ever viewless” (Rigveda 10.168). Here already, centuries before the philosophers, the wind is named the vital spirit of the gods — the breath that animates the high powers themselves — and named, in the same breath, as the one god who is heard and never seen.

The companion hymn turns from awe to tenderness. It asks the wind for life, and addresses him with the words of family:

May Vata pour his balm on us, healthful, delightful to our heart: may he prolong our days of life.

The singer calls him Father, Brother, and friend, and asks that the wind prolong his days “that we may live”; the store of amrta, the draught of deathlessness, lies “laid away within thy home,” and the prayer is for a portion of it (Rigveda 10.186). The wind that has no dwelling is asked, all the same, to share the immortality kept in his house. The logic is not careless. If the breath is life, then the keeper of the breath keeps the difference between living and dying, and to ask him for more breath is to ask him for more life.

Vayu, the god of wind — sculpture at the Gokarneshwor Mahadev temple precinct, Kathmandu. Photograph by Suraj Belbase, 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The first to drink, the friend of the king

Within the ritual order, Vayu holds a strange precedence. The pressed soma — the luminous drink crushed from a plant and offered in the sacrifice — was poured for him first. He is the swift one, and the first taste of the finest pressing was his. The Veda gives the privilege plainly; the explanation comes in the prose of the Brahmanas, the later ritual commentaries that loved to tell why a custom stood as it did. By one such account the gods held a footrace to decide who should taste the drink before the rest, and Vayu won it. Indra, king of the gods, came in second. The cup went to the wind because nothing in creation outruns the wind. (The race belongs to the explanatory layer, not the hymns themselves — a story told to ground a precedence the ritual already observed.)

That second place of Indra’s is no accident either, for the two gods are constantly paired. In the hymns Vayu and Indra ride together in a single shining car, and the wind is the king’s companion and, in the imagery, his driver — the two of them brought together to the offering as a yoked team. The thunder-god who breaks the demon of drought and the wind that goes before the storm are natural allies; the rains follow the wind. Vayu is given many horses to draw his chariot — the texts pile up the numbers extravagantly, ninety-nine, a hundred, a thousand, white and ruddy — because the wind harnesses everything and is harnessed by nothing. He is the messenger who moves among the gods, the one who arrives first because he is speed itself.

Set him beside the other powers of the Vedic sky and his peculiarity stands out. Surya the sun can be seen and his course traced; Agni the fire can be kindled and watched; Ushas the dawn has a face that reddens the east; Varuna keeps the cosmic order from a fixed seat. Vayu alone is defined by being unseeable while everywhere felt — the god whose presence is known only by its effects, the bent grass and the moved dust and the rising breath. It is this quality, more than the chariot or the soma, that the later thought would seize upon.

The wind in the world, the breath in the body

The decisive move comes in a hymn that stands near the end of the Rigveda and looks forward to everything that follows it. The Purusha-sukta (Rigveda 10.90) imagines the cosmos as made from the dismembered body of a primal Person, Purusha, offered up in a sacrifice that is also the first creation. The hymn assigns each part of the world to a part of his body. From his mind came the moon; from his eye, the sun; from his mouth, Indra and Agni — and from his breath, prana, was Vayu born (Rigveda 10.90.13). The wind is, by this reckoning, the exhaled breath of the cosmic Person. The air that moves over the world is the world’s own breathing.

Once that identity is stated — the wind outside is breath, the breath inside is wind — it runs in both directions, and the Upanishads, the speculative texts gathered from perhaps the seventh or sixth century BCE onward, follow it inward. There the wind-god becomes prana, the vital breath, and prana is exalted above every other power in a person. The argument is made in a recurring story sometimes called the contest of the breaths. The faculties of a person — speech, sight, hearing, the mind — fall to quarreling over which of them is supreme, and in one telling they go to their father Prajapati, the lord of creatures, to settle it. He gives them a rule rather than a verdict: he by whose departure the body seems worst off, he is the best. So they put it to a test. Each faculty in turn departs the body for a year, and they watch to see whose absence does the most harm. Speech leaves, and the person lives on, mute, breathing and seeing and hearing and thinking. Sight leaves, and the person lives on, blind. Hearing leaves, and then the mind, and each time the body endures — deaf, or like a child whose mind is not yet formed, but living. Then the breath itself begins to go — and at once the others feel themselves torn loose, dragged up like a great horse tearing out the pegs to which it is tethered, and they beg the breath to stay (the episode appears in the Brihadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads, among others).

The conclusion is that the breath is the one power on which all the others depend, the life by which the senses are senses at all. The texts press the point with a further observation: of all the powers in a person, the breath alone does not sleep. The eyes close, the tongue falls silent, the mind dissolves into dream, but the breath goes on, day and night, unwearied, beyond the reach of fatigue and of the appetites that corrupt the other faculties. What does not sleep is close to what does not die. And so the breath — and the wind that is its outer body — comes to stand for the very principle of life, the thing that, when it goes, takes everything with it.

That a teaching of this kind can be quoted at all, this far from its origin, is worth pausing over. The hymns to Vata were not written down for the better part of three thousand years; they were carried in memory, by a discipline of recitation so exacting that the same syllables, pitches, and pauses were handed from teacher to pupil with the accents preserved. The wind’s own hymn calls him heard and never seen, and the irony is exact: the most fugitive of gods is fixed in a text more stable than stone, recited the same way in distant centuries because the manner of its keeping forbade drift. This is why the layers can be told apart with confidence — the gale of the early hymns, the breath of the speculative texts, the father and guardian of the later stories — and why none of them need be confused with another. The record of what the seers said about the wind is, against all expectation, one of the surest things in the documentary history of religion.

A Rigveda manuscript in Sanskrit on paper, India, early nineteenth century, with corrections in red marking the Vedic accents. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is the teaching that gives Vayu his lasting weight, and it should be kept distinct from a flat nature-allegory. The Vedic frame does not say that “wind” is a poetic figure for “breath,” or the reverse. It holds that there is one moving, living power — call it Vata where it sweeps the plain, prana where it stirs the chest — and that this power is what is meant by being alive. The cosmos breathes through Vayu; the body lives through the same breath; the unbroken thread between the two is not a metaphor but the structure of the world. That the breath does not sleep, that it cannot be made to stop and watched, that it has its dwelling nowhere and yet fills every living thing — these are said of the same single reality, whether one looks at the sky or at oneself.

The breath disciplined, the wind made father

The afterlife of this teaching runs along three roughly separable channels, and they should not be collapsed into one another.

The first is meditative and interior. If the breath is the seat of life and the one faculty that never rests, then the breath becomes the natural handle by which the inner life may be taken hold of. The later disciplines of the contemplative tradition made the regulation of the breath a practice in its own right, a way of steadying the mind by steadying the air that moves through the body, and built an elaborate physiology of inner winds and channels upon the old identity. Behind every such practice lies the Vedic equation: that to govern the breath is to touch the principle of life directly, because the breath is not merely a bodily function but the wind of the world moving in a single body. The wind that has no dwelling is, in this reading, the most intimate thing a person possesses.

The second channel is narrative, and belongs to the epics and the Puranas, the storehouses of myth that took shape across the centuries after the Veda. Here the wind-god becomes a father. In the Ramayana’s story he comes to the woman Anjana and grants her a son, Hanuman, the monkey-hero whose strength, speed, and power of flight are his father’s gifts — which is why Hanuman is called Pavanaputra and Vayuputra, “son of the wind.” In the Mahabharata, the same god fathers Bhima, the mightiest of the five Pandava brothers, whose enormous bodily force is again the wind’s bequest. The pattern is consistent: where the wind begets, it begets overwhelming physical strength and swiftness — the qualities of the gale made flesh. (These paternities are epic and Puranic; they are nowhere in the Rigveda, and reading them back into the hymns would mistake a late myth for an early one.)

The third channel is cosmological and orderly. The mature Hindu tradition arranged the gods as guardians of the directions, the dikpalas, each god assigned a quarter of space to keep. Vayu was given the northwest — a fitting station for the god of the wind, set at the corner from which, on that land, the great winds came. In temple sculpture he takes the form the iconographers fixed for him: a figure, often four-armed, riding an antelope or a deer whose bounding speed answers his own, bearing a banner that streams in the air he is. The god who in the oldest hymns had no shape that could be seen acquired, in the end, a settled image, a mount, and a place on the compass.

Hanuman, son of the wind, carries the herb-bearing mountain — a print from the Ravi Varma Press, c. 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is a long road from the gale of the hymns to the antelope-riding guardian of a single quarter of the sky, and along it the god grew more defined and, in a sense, smaller — pinned to a direction, given a face, made the ancestor of named heroes. But the older intuition was never quite lost beneath the iconography. The breath that does not sleep keeps its place at the center of the meditative life; the strength of the wind’s sons is still the strength of the wind; and the morning’s first deep breath is, on the terms the seers laid down, the same act as the wind’s first stirring over the plain. The hymn that called him the vital spirit of the gods, heard and never seen, had already said the essential thing. Everything after it is commentary on a breath.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Sacred Books of the East), trans. F. Max Müller

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