The strongest one of all had forgotten his own strength

An entire army of monkeys and bears stood at the edge of the sea, defeated before they had begun. Sita was somewhere across a hundred yojanas of water, in Ravana's Lanka, and not one of them could cross it. They argued, they boasted, they shrank. And in the middle of them sat the one being who could have crossed it in a single leap — quietly, miserably, as if he were the most ordinary of the lot.

That being was Hanuman, and this is the strangest fact in his whole story: the strongest one present had completely forgotten his own strength. Not out of modesty. Out of a childhood curse that had sealed his power away until someone reminded him of it. He could lift mountains, but in that moment he could not remember he could lift anything at all.

It is easy to read this as a quaint mythological detail. But sit with it for a moment, because it may be the most honest mirror in the Ramayana. How many of us are exactly here — full of a strength we cannot feel, sitting at the edge of our own ocean, waiting, without even knowing it, for someone to say the words that wake us up?

The forgetting was not an accident; it was placed in him on purpose. As a child, Hanuman was almost dangerously powerful. The famous story has him mistaking the rising sun for a ripe red fruit and leaping into the sky to eat it — a baby reaching up to swallow the sun. He was struck down, revived, and showered with boons from the gods, until he was very nearly unstoppable.

And that was the problem. A child with limitless power and no sense of its weight is a storm with no walls. So the sages did something that looks like punishment but works like protection: they laid a curse on him. He would forget his own powers, every one of them, and remember them only when another reminded him — at the right moment, for the right reason.

Read that again, because it is not really a curse at all. It is a leash on ego. A being who cannot remember how strong he is can never strut, never bully, never lord it over anyone. His power was put to sleep so that it could only ever be woken by need, never by vanity. The very thing that looked like his great weakness was quietly keeping his greatness clean.

At the shore, when every warrior had run out of courage, it was Jambavan, the wise old bear-king, who turned to Hanuman. He did not hand him a weapon or a spell. He simply began to tell Hanuman who he was. Son of the wind. Blessed by Brahma. As fast as thought, as vast as he chose to become. Why, he asked, are you sitting here like an ordinary nobody, when there is no one alive who can do what you can?

And as the words landed, something woke. Hanuman began to grow — larger and larger on the beach — as the memory of his own power came flooding back. He had not gained a single new ability. Jambavan gave him nothing he did not already own. The old bear simply held up a mirror and named what was already there.

That is the quiet genius of this scene. Real help is often not adding power to someone, but reminding them of the power they had forgotten they were carrying. Jambavan's gift was not strength. It was a sentence: you have always been able to do this. And with that one sentence, the mightiest being on the shore finally stood up to his full height — and leapt.

Strip away the ocean and the bear, and this is not an old story at all — it is most people's ordinary week. We sit at the edge of things we are fully capable of, convinced we are the wrong person for them. The promotion we don't apply for. The conversation we never start. The work we are clearly built for but quietly assume is 'for people better than me.' The strength is there. The memory of it is what's missing.

What puts our power to sleep today is rarely a sage's curse. It is years of small voices — a teacher who shamed us, a parent's offhand 'you're not the clever one,' a single failure we decided was a final verdict. Slowly we forget our own size, and learn to sit small at the shore, mistaking a forgotten strength for a strength we never had.

Which is why the most valuable people in our lives are often our Jambavans — the friend, mentor or stranger who looks at us and says, plainly, 'why are you sitting here? Do you know what you can do?' They don't lend us anything. They just refuse to let us keep forgetting. And it is worth asking today: whose Jambavan could you be — whose forgotten strength could you name back to them with one honest sentence?

There is a deeper thread here, and it is easy to walk past. Notice when Hanuman's strength came back: not when he wanted to prove himself, not to win an argument or settle a score, but the instant there was a task larger than himself — finding Sita, serving Rama. His power had a strange lock on it. It would not turn for his own ego. It turned only for service.

The Hanuman Chalisa keeps returning to this: vidyavan guni ati chatur, Ram kaaj karibe ko aatur — wise, gifted, endlessly clever, and ever-eager for Rama's work. That last phrase is the key to the whole character. His genius was never aimed back at himself. The greatest strength in the Ramayana belonged to the one being least interested in using it for his own glory.

That is the secret learning hidden inside a children's tale. Forgetting his power was not Hanuman's flaw — it was the very thing that kept that power pure. Strength that is always remembered tends to curdle into arrogance; strength that wakes only when something beyond you needs it stays clean. Perhaps real power was never about how much you can lift. Perhaps it is about what you are willing to lift it for.

So what does this leave us with, beyond a lovely scene of a monkey growing tall on a beach? Mostly a question about ourselves. The Ramayana could have made its strongest hero someone who always knew his power and used it freely. Instead it made him someone who had to be reminded — and that choice is the whole lesson. It quietly says: your greatest limits may not be real; they may just be a forgetting.

This matters because most of us treat our smallness as a fact. 'I'm not the leader type.' 'I could never do that.' We say it the way we'd state our height. But Hanuman at the shore looked exactly that small — right up until the moment he didn't. The strength was never added; it was only remembered. The wall was never stone; it was a story we had stopped questioning.

This doesn't mean believing hard enough makes you mighty — Hanuman truly was, and pretending won't grow you on a beach. It means something gentler: you are likely carrying more than you can currently feel, and you probably can't wake it alone. So keep the kind of company that reminds you of your size, become that company for others, and when your Jambavan finally asks 'do you know what you can do?' — believe them enough to stand up. The ocean was always crossable. You only had to remember who was sitting at its edge.