Ask where Hanuman is now and the tradition gives three answers, all in the present tense.
Kimpuruṣavarṣa, a land south of the Hemakūṭa mountains, where he performs daily worship accompanied by the gandharva musician Aditśena.
The Himālaya, where Viṣṇu placed him as a living monument before withdrawing into cosmic form.
And a transcendent Ayodhyā beyond the highest material heavens, at the root of countless Vaikuṇṭha realms, where he is permanently with Rāma.1
Ramlal's interest is not in choosing. It is in demonstrating that all three can be true at the same time, and the machinery he needs to do it is more interesting than the destinations.
The essay's first move is to establish that the question is malformed.
Hanuman is eternal, immortal and transcendent, and his fulfilment does not depend on a residence. Unlike deities who exercise sovereignty over particular realms, he holds no territorial dominion at all — and his satisfaction comes from presence wherever Rāma's story is being told.1
That is a real distinction in this cosmology. A god with a realm is located by the realm; Indra is where Indra's heaven is, and his identity and his jurisdiction are the same fact.
Hanuman has no jurisdiction. Which means the ordinary mechanism by which a deity acquires an address does not apply to him, and the three abodes are not competing claims to territory because none of them is a territory in that sense.
Ramlal does not dismiss the scriptural records of him being in specific places. He treats them as worth explaining rather than explaining away, and the explanation is where the essay earns its keep.
The machinery is a Vedāntic distinction and it is stated compactly.
Souls liberated through knowledge dissolve entirely into the formless absolute. Souls liberated through devotion retain a form — specifically a body made of pure undivided knowledge, eternal, but chosen rather than required.1
Hanuman belongs entirely to the second category. His union with Rāma is total and complete; the form he keeps is simply there because he wants it to be.1
That single distinction does all the work. A form that is required is a limitation, and a being limited to one body is in one place. A form that is chosen carries no such constraint, because the choosing can be exercised more than once.
So the three abodes are not a paradox to be resolved. They are three exercises of the same option.
And the essay closes on a report that makes the point at the smallest scale. Gopakumāra, guided into divine Ayodhyā, watches Hanuman perform an impossible number of services simultaneously inside a single instant — waving a white fan while singing, reciting self-composed verses with folded hands, holding the royal parasol, pressing Rāma's feet — as though ordinary sequence did not apply to him.1
Multi-location and multi-action are the same property observed at different scales. The being who is in three places is the being who does four things in one moment.
The Himālaya abode is Kālidāsa's and its logic is worth separating from the other two, because it is the only one where Hanuman is placed by somebody for a stated purpose.
After Rāvaṇa's death, before withdrawing into cosmic form, Viṣṇu establishes two living monuments to his own glory: Hanuman on the northern mountain, Vibhīṣaṇa on southern Trikūṭa — two pillars of fame marking the story's geographical extremes.1
Three things follow from that arrangement and none is remarked on.
The placement is maximally separated. North and south, the two ends of the theatre, as far apart as the narrative's map allows. Two beings who worked closely together are stationed where neither can reach the other.
The monuments are to Viṣṇu's glory, not their own. They are markers, and what they mark is somebody else's completed action.
And both are survivors of the same event who cannot leave. Hanuman by the boon, Vibhīṣaṇa by the kingship he was given.
So the tidiest of the three abodes is also the loneliest, and it is the one where the placement is somebody else's decision rather than an exercise of the retained form's optionality.
Which quietly undercuts Ramlal's own argument. If the Himālaya station is an appointment, it is a jurisdiction — and the essay's whole case is that Hanuman holds none.
The essay's best scene is a piece of reportage with a frame around it, and the frame is doing the work.
Prahlāda sends Nārada to see what a soul genuinely touched by grace looks like.1
That is a commissioned observation. Nārada is not visiting; he is being sent to look at something, by somebody who wants a specific question answered.
What he finds is not majesty. Hanuman is worshipping an image of Rāma with offerings gathered from the forest, treating the image as bodily present, listening to gandharva singers perform the Rāmāyaṇa, weeping, trembling, breaking into verses he has composed himself, prostrating repeatedly.1
The detail that matters is the image. Hanuman — who knew Rāma personally, carried him on his back, was embraced by him — is worshipping a statue, with flowers he picked, as though the statue were bodily present.
He is doing exactly what an ordinary devotee does, having had access no devotee will ever have.
And his own description of himself, when he greets Nārada, is the closest thing in the corpus to private testimony: he lives there, watching that same form directly, drinking in the story.1
So the answer to Prahlāda's question — what does a soul touched by grace look like — is: it looks like somebody doing image-worship in a forest and crying.
The Kimpuruṣavarṣa material comes with an origin story that has nothing to do with Hanuman, and its presence tells you something about how these accounts get built.
At the churning of the ocean of milk, a pot of nectar rises. Viṣṇu looks at it with joy and a tear falls from his eye into the pot. From that tear a tree grows; Viṣṇu names it Raṅgavallī — identified as tulsī — and plants it at the base of Hemakūṭa. The tree's name extends to an entire city, Raṅgavallīpur.1
And Hanuman's daily activity there is to visit and venerate that tree.
Notice the sequence. The place exists because of the tree, the tree exists because of the tear, and the tear is Viṣṇu's response to the nectar. Hanuman arrives at the end of a chain that was complete before he entered it.
Which is how a figure acquires a residence in this literature: not by being placed somewhere, but by being attached to somewhere that already had a reason to be significant.
The same pattern runs through the other two abodes. The Himālaya is Kālidāsa's — after Rāvaṇa's death, before withdrawing into cosmic form, Viṣṇu establishes two living monuments to his own glory, Hanuman on the northern mountain and Vibhīṣaṇa on southern Trikūṭa, two pillars of fame marking the story's geographical extremes.1 Hanuman is placed as a marker, and the significance being marked is Viṣṇu's.
And transcendent Ayodhyā is Rāma's city, with Agastya's etymology — A for Brahmā, Ya for Viṣṇu, Dha for Rudra, together unconquerable — establishing its standing entirely without reference to Hanuman.1
Three abodes, and in all three he is the resident rather than the reason. For a figure whose entire construction is service, that is either a fitting accident or the most consistent thing about him.
The third abode is the one with the least narrative and the most machinery, and the machinery is doing something specific.
Transcendent Ayodhyā sits beyond the highest material heavens, at the root of countless Vaikuṇṭha realms, separated from the material cosmos by the river Virajā. It is Sītā and Rāma's private, eternal dwelling and Viṣṇu's original city.1
Agastya's etymology supplies its property: A for Brahmā, Ya for Viṣṇu, Dha for Rudra — together, unconquerable. Not even the accumulated weight of every sin ever committed, brahminicide included, could successfully wage war against it.1
That is a strange thing to specify. Cities in this literature are usually characterised by splendour; this one is characterised by what cannot take it.
And the specification is military. The formulation is about waging war and failing, which imports a whole frame — siege, assault, defence — into a description of a transcendent realm that has no enemies and is not adjacent to anything.
Which suggests the etymology is answering an anxiety rather than describing a place. Ayodhyā's earthly namesake was conquerable, and was conquered, repeatedly, in the historical period during which this material accumulated. A transcendent Ayodhyā that cannot be taken is the version of the city that history cannot reach.
Ramlal notes that Hanumāngaṛhī in earthly Ayodhyā is the physical echo of the service he never ceases performing there.1 The echo runs in the direction the essay says. It may also run the other way.
Somebody asks where you actually work, or where you are based, or what your role is — and the honest answer is three things.
The instinct is to pick one and simplify, because a single answer is what the question expects and multiplicity reads as evasion or as not having decided.
Before simplifying, run Ramlal's distinction on your own case, because it separates two situations that feel identical and are not.
Is the multiplicity required or chosen?
Required multiplicity is fragmentation. You are in three places because three things need you and none of them can be dropped, and the sign of it is that each location has a claim on you that the others do not recognise. That is not a rich life, it is an unresolved one, and the tradition's word for the being who has to keep a form is not flattering.
Chosen multiplicity is different in one specific way: you could collapse it and do not. The test is concrete rather than sentimental — if a single one of the three offered to become the whole thing tomorrow, on good terms, would you take it? If the answer is no for each of them individually, the multiplicity is a position rather than a predicament.
Then the second question, which is the harder one and comes from the abodes.
In each place, are you the resident or the reason?
Hanuman is the resident in all three. The grove is significant because of a tear, the mountain because Viṣṇu marked it, the city because Rāma lives there. He arrives at somewhere that already meant something.
That is not a failure. It is the shape of a life organised around service, and it comes with a real advantage — none of the three requires him to sustain its significance, so none of them can be lost by his failing.
The person who is the reason a place matters cannot leave it, and cannot rest in it either.
The essay is unusually well-organised for this corpus: it poses a problem, supplies a doctrinal distinction, and applies it to three cases with an origin narrative for each.1 The two-liberations distinction is a real and locatable piece of Vedāntic apparatus.
No chapter or verse anywhere in the essay. Kālidāsa, Agastya's etymology, the Gopakumāra vision and the Nārada frame are all reported without texts. The Gopakumāra material derives from the Bṛhad-bhāgavatāmṛta tradition, which the essay does not name. [RENDERING — verify against Hindi]
⚑ SOURCE-UPDATE, 2026-08-15 — THE KIMPURUṢA ABODE NOW HAS A LOCATOR, FROM ANOTHER CONTRIBUTOR. Jagadguru Nimbārkācārya Rādhāsarveśvaraśaraṇ-devācārya supplies Bhāgavata Purāṇa 5.19 for it: Śuka to Parīkṣit, on Kimpuruṣa-varṣa, where the primal being — "Lakṣmaṇa's elder brother, beloved of Sītā" — is worshipped, with Hanuman worshipping alongside the kimpuruṣas and listening to Rāma's story sung by the gandharva Hatriṣeṇa.3 ⚑ This is the citation this section recorded as missing, and it comes from a different group and a different sampradāya's head — which makes the Kimpuruṣa abode the best-sourced of the three by a distance, and leaves the Himālaya and the transcendent Ayodhyā where they were.
⚑ And the content of the citation cuts against the essay's framing. What he is doing in his own abode is listening — not ruling, not receiving worship, not presiding. A residence in which the resident is part of the audience is a weak candidate for a dominion, which is precisely the essay's own argument for why a figure with no territorial claim cannot be located by a residence, arriving as evidence rather than as assertion. ⚠ It also sharpens the open question below: an abode where he listens and an abode where he is worshipped are different kinds of place, and the essay treats all three as coordinate.
The Agastya etymology is folk etymology and should not be cited as philology; it is evidence of what the tradition wants the name to mean.
The distinction may not do the work claimed. A chosen form explains why he may be in a place; it does not explain simultaneity in three. Choosing is still an exercise by one chooser, and the essay slides from the body is optional to the body is multiple without arguing the step.
A tension with the vault's existing liberation material. The two-liberations distinction is close to, and not identical with, the divyadeha and jīvanmukti frameworks the vault already holds from the Māheśvara-siddha and Nāth material, where a retained body is a sādhana outcome rather than a devotional privilege.
Open question. Does any source place the three abodes in a relation — a primary residence with two manifestations, say — or are they genuinely coordinate? The essay insists on simultaneity, but simultaneity with a centre and simultaneity without one are different doctrines, and the difference decides whether the Gopakumāra vision is the real Hanuman and the other two are appearances.
The essay sits beside a much shorter treatment in the same volume and the two disagree about what kind of thing an abode is.
Vaidehī Kāntśaraṇ places Hanuman in eternal Sāket-dhām, guarding the southern gate beside the Sāntānika grove, with Vibhīṣaṇa west, Sugrīva east and Aṅgada north — and a Bṛhad-Rāmāyaṇa roster of eleven vanara chiefs dwelling with him in resplendent bejewelled form, tireless in Rāma's service.2
That is a posted Hanuman. A station, a direction, colleagues, a permanent function in an ordered household.
Ramlal's Hanuman is the opposite of posted. The whole argument is that he holds no territory, is not located by any jurisdiction, and lives wherever the story is told.
Both are accounts of his eternal condition and they are not compatible. A gate-guardian at a specific compass point has an address; a being who lives wherever devotion occurs does not.
And the difference tracks what each essay is for. Kāntśaraṇ is describing a court — his subject is Rāma's eternal entourage, and a court requires positions. Ramlal is answering a puzzle about presence, and a puzzle about presence requires the positions to dissolve.
The volume prints a Hanuman who is everywhere and a Hanuman who is stationed at the south gate, forty pages apart, and neither contributor knows the other is writing.
Place-Cell Cognition and Sequence Memory. The research describes how spatial location is encoded as a substrate for organising experience — place cells firing for positions, and the same machinery recruited for sequencing events that have no spatial content at all, so that where becomes the filing system for what happened. The three-abodes doctrine is a claim that a being can be exempted from exactly that constraint. What the pairing produces is an account of why the doctrine is difficult rather than merely unusual: the tradition is asking its readers to conceive of a person whose experience is not indexed by location, using cognitive equipment that indexes by location by default. Which explains the essay's structure — it cannot simply assert simultaneity, it has to supply a Vedāntic distinction first, because the assertion alone will not survive contact with a reader's spatial intuitions. And it suggests the Gopakumāra vision does the real persuasive work, since it converts the claim from multi-location into multi-action inside one instant, which is a violation of sequence rather than of place and is oddly easier to accept.
Orient Around Freedom, Leverage and Alignment. The framework's core is that a position is worth evaluating by what it requires of you rather than by what it provides — that obligations are the real currency and options the real asset. Hanuman's arrangement is that maximised: three residences, none of them a jurisdiction, no realm to administer, no dependants, and a form retained by choice rather than by necessity. The insight the pairing yields is that the tradition has separated two things the modern framework runs together — freedom from obligation and freedom from significance. He is free of all jurisdiction and he is also, in all three places, not the reason the place matters. The second is what makes the first sustainable: a person who is the reason somewhere matters cannot hold options there, because their leaving changes the thing. Which is a genuine and uncomfortable cost of building anything — the more you are the reason, the fewer abodes you can have.
Sharpest implication. A being with no jurisdiction anywhere turns out to be present in three places at once, and the reason is that he is the resident rather than the reason in all of them. Which inverts the usual relationship between significance and freedom: the more a place depends on you, the more it holds you, and the figure the tradition puts everywhere is the one who never made anywhere depend on him.
Generative questions.