The standard answer is Sūrya, and the standard story is stranger than the answer.
Hanuman approaches the sun-god and asks to be taught. Sūrya at first tries to evade the request — he cannot stop, he is in motion permanently, there is no arrangement under which a student could sit in front of him.
Hanuman keeps pace with the chariot. Flying backwards, hands folded, for the duration of the instruction, because facing away from a teacher is not available and neither is asking him to halt.
Sūrya relents and teaches him.1
The Hanumān Bāhuk is the text Janārdan Miśra reaches for, and he adds that Sūrya is his teacher in astrology and the sciences specifically — not devotion, not scripture, but the technical disciplines.1
Every element of that scene is about the student solving the teacher's constraint rather than the teacher accommodating the student, and it is the reason the story survives.
Bāburām Dvivedī takes up the question directly and does something the corpus rarely does: he lets two answers stand without reconciling them.
The first is the Sūrya account, elaborated — Brahmā asking Sūrya to grant a hundredth part of his brilliance, plus personal instruction.2
The second is Ādi Śaṅkarācārya's, and it relocates the source entirely. The learning comes from Rāma's own jñāna-mudrā, transmitted continuously to whoever stands before him with folded hands.
Dvivedī's formulation of the consequence is the sharpest sentence in the group: learning, on this reading, was never Sūrya's gift at all. It was proximity.2
Which is a considerable claim. It says the transmission had no content — no curriculum, no syllabus, nothing conveyed — and that what looked like teaching was the effect of standing near a source with the right posture.
And it explains something the Sūrya story leaves odd. Why the folded hands? Why the specific posture, preserved in every telling, when the pedagogical content is astronomy?
On Śaṅkara's reading the posture is not deference accompanying the instruction. The posture is the instruction, and Sūrya's chariot is a second instance of the same mechanism rather than a different one.
The volume does not stop at two.
Revāprasād Dvivedī has the instruction happen before birth. Kesarī guides prenatal prāṇa-vidyā into the child, and the jāto vātena formulation is read that way — with the Abhimanyu parallel supplied, since the Mahābhārata already has a foetus learning.3
And Janārdan Miśra reports a fourth from the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa: Sītā, at Rāma's own prompting, instructing Hanuman in spiritual truth.1
So the corpus holds four answers to who taught him — the sun, proximity to Rāma, his father before birth, and Sītā — and they are not variants of a single account. They differ on when the teaching happened, what kind of thing was transmitted, and whether anything was transmitted at all.
Four teachers, and the tradition's most famous student.
Sorted by function rather than by attestation the four organise immediately, which is the same result this build has found everywhere else in the corpus.
Sūrya supplies technical credentials. Astrology and the sciences — the disciplines that would otherwise be missing from a figure whose reputation is strength, and which are needed to make sense of Rāma's remark about his grammar.
Śaṅkara's proximity reading supplies a devotional epistemology. It makes learning available without a teacher, a text or a period of study, which is exactly what a bhakti tradition needs to be true and what a scholastic one cannot concede.
Prenatal instillation supplies innateness. It removes the question of when he became capable, which matters for anybody troubled by the infant leaping at the sun.
Sītā's instruction supplies something none of the others do — a moment when he is taught by the person he was sent to rescue, which inverts the rescuer-rescued relation at the story's centre. And it happens at Rāma's prompting, so the inversion is authorised.
Four answers, four jobs. And the Sītā account is the one nobody develops, in a volume with four Śaṅkarācāryas in it.
Bāburām Dvivedī supplies one image that belongs to none of the four accounts and is the strangest thing in the group.
From the Padma Purāṇa: the tail as a rope woven of learning itself.2
Take it seriously for a moment rather than as decoration.
The tail is the part of him that does the work nobody else's anatomy could — it stretches indefinitely, it wraps the mace mid-swing, it takes fire and carries it, it is the thing the guards bind and the thing that burns a city.
And it is made of vidyā.
Which puts the learning in an unexpected place. Not in the head, where the grammar and the astronomy would go. In the appendage that grips, extends and holds.
If the image is doing anything, it is saying that what Hanuman acquired from Sūrya or from proximity is not stored as content at all. It is stored as reach — the capacity to take hold of things at a distance and not let go.
That is consistent with the gati reading of his name, where knowledge is a species of arriving rather than of possessing.3 And it is consistent with Śaṅkara's proximity claim, since a rope is woven from strands laid alongside each other rather than transmitted whole.
Nobody in the volume connects the image to either. It sits in Dvivedī's essay as one more Purāṇic detail, in a paragraph about how learning was praised.
Śaṅkara's reading deserves separating out, because if it is right it is not a claim about Hanuman at all.
Learning was never Sūrya's gift. It was proximity.
Generalise it and it says: the transmissible part of an education is not the content. Whatever Sūrya knew about astrology was not the thing that made Hanuman learned; standing before the source with folded hands was, and the astronomy came along as an artefact.
That is a real position with real consequences and the tradition holds it seriously — it is the logic of the entire guru apparatus, in which sitting near somebody for years is the method and the syllabus is incidental.
It also has an obvious failure mode that the devotional framing conceals. If proximity transmits, then proximity to somebody bad transmits too, and the tradition's own material supplies the case: another contributor observes that Rāvaṇa was a genuine yogi of real attainment whose tapas was real and whose direction was bent.4 Whatever his students got by standing near him, they got.
So the proximity claim cannot be sufficient. Something has to determine what gets transmitted, and Śaṅkara's version supplies it implicitly — the jñāna-mudrā, a specific gesture, from a specific source.
Which brings the content back in through the side door. Not a curriculum, but not nothing either: a posture on one side and a particular being on the other.
The proximity doctrine is only as good as the discrimination about whom to be proximate to, and that discrimination is a piece of knowledge nobody can transmit by proximity.
Dvivedī closes his essay with something none of the accounts requires and which does more work than any of them.
A list of who has independently assessed Hanuman as wise: Jāmbavān, Surasā, Bhīma, Kṛṣṇa and Śiva.2
That is a deliberately assembled set, and the assembly is the point.
Jāmbavān is an ally and the oldest figure present at the shore. Surasā is an obstacle sent to test him and had every reason to report otherwise. Bhīma met him as an arrogant man being humbled. Kṛṣṇa is a later age entirely. Śiva is, on the volume's own dominant reading, Hanuman himself.
Five verdicts across four eras, from an ally, an adversary, a humbled stranger, a subsequent avatāra, and — awkwardly — the same being.
Dvivedī is doing what Śaṅkarānand does elsewhere with hostile testimony: building a case out of who is willing to say it rather than out of what the thing is.4
And this list is the better instrument for the question at hand, because the four teaching accounts cannot be adjudicated — they are different kinds of claim about different moments, and no evidence would settle between them.
What can be settled is whether the outcome is real. If Surasā, who was trying to stop him, and Bhīma, who was trying to condescend to him, both came away reporting the same thing, then something is there to be explained regardless of which account of its acquisition is correct.
The chorus makes the teaching question less urgent, which is probably why Dvivedī can afford to leave his two answers standing.
You are trying to learn something from somebody who is not going to teach you.
Not hostile — unavailable. They are busy, they are senior, they do not run a class, and the arrangement under which you would sit in front of them does not exist. Sūrya's honest objection is the usual one: I cannot stop.
The three moves in the story, in order.
Solve their constraint rather than asking them to. Hanuman does not ask the chariot to halt. He flies backwards. In practice that means finding the version of access that costs them nothing — turning up to the thing they already do, doing the part of their work they dislike, being in the room where they are already talking. Every request that requires them to create time will be declined, correctly, and the decline is not about you.
Hold the posture through the boring part. Folded hands, facing them, for the duration. The unglamorous form is showing up consistently for longer than is comfortable without extracting anything — and specifically without converting each contact into a question, because a person who arrives with questions is asking for time and a person who arrives is not.
Do not confuse the content with the transmission. This is Śaṅkara's point and it is the one that will save you a year. You will be taking notes on what they say, and what you are actually acquiring is how they attend to a problem, what they look at first, what they refuse to be hurried on. The notes are the astronomy. The proximity is the thing.
And the check that keeps this from being a bad idea: choose the source before you commit to the method, because proximity transmits everything and not only what you wanted. Spend the year near somebody whose judgment you would be content to find yourself using automatically in ten years, because that is the actual outcome on offer.
Sītā's instruction is the reminder that the teacher may not be the one you approached. It arrives from the person he was sent to help, at the master's prompting, and nobody in the corpus makes anything of it.
Four accounts from three contributors, with the Hanumān Bāhuk named for the chariot scene, the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa for Sītā's instruction, and Śaṅkara named for the proximity reading.123
No locators. No chapter or verse anywhere, and the vault holds an English rendering. [RENDERING — verify against Hindi]
The Śaṅkara attribution wants checking hardest. A reading credited to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya is doing a great deal of work on this page, and devotional literature attributes readings to him routinely. Recorded as reported by the essay.
Dvivedī lets the two stand and does not use the volume's device. Kalpa-plurality is available and would fit — different world-cycles, different teachers — and he does not reach for it, which is the same pattern found elsewhere in this build: the machinery gets deployed where a contributor treats a contradiction as their subject, not where they meet one in passing.
The four accounts are not commensurable. Prenatal instillation and instruction-by-proximity are not competing claims about a single event; they are claims about different kinds of thing. Nobody in the corpus notices that the disagreement is categorical rather than factual.
Open question. Does the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa passage make Sītā a teacher in any developed sense, or is it a single line? The corpus reports it once, in a subordinate clause, and if there is substance behind it the volume has passed over the only account in which Hanuman's instruction comes from a woman and from the person he was sent to find.
Bāburām Dvivedī is doing something none of the other contributors on this question do, and it is worth marking because it is a methodological choice rather than a lapse.
He states two answers and declines to prefer either. Not kalpa-plurality, not a harmonisation, not a ranking — just both, with the Śaṅkara reading given the more memorable formulation.
Janārdan Miśra, by contrast, gives Sūrya as the answer and mentions Sītā's instruction in passing without registering it as a rival account at all. Revāprasād Dvivedī gives prenatal instillation as part of a Yoga-Sūtra argument and does not mention the others.
So the volume contains one contributor who has noticed the question is disputed and two who have not.
And the one who noticed produces the best line in the group — it was proximity — precisely because holding two answers forced him to say what distinguished them.
That is a general property worth carrying out of this build: the contributors who register a disagreement write better than the ones who do not, because a disagreement makes you specify, and specification is where the usable material comes from. The essays that assert produce claims. The essays that hold two things produce distinctions.
The Mentor-Protégé Dynamic. The relationship is usually analysed as transmission — knowledge, access, sponsorship moving from senior to junior — with the mentor's investment as the scarce resource. Śaṅkara's proximity reading empties that account: nothing is transmitted, the mentor invests nothing, and the learning is an effect of standing in a particular relation. What the pairing produces is a distinction the mentorship literature needs and rarely draws — between what a mentor gives and what a protégé acquires by exposure, which are not the same set and are frequently disjoint. The advice is the giving; the way of attending to a problem is the acquisition, and it arrives whether or not anybody intends it. That reframes the whole selection problem. Choosing a mentor for what they can teach you optimises the smaller quantity. Choosing for whose automatic judgments you would be content to inherit optimises the larger one, and almost nobody chooses that way because the second is not what mentorship is advertised as providing.
Effortless Mastery and Hidden Labor. The analysis concerns what expertise conceals — the visible ease resting on invisible accumulated work, and the reputational economy that depends on the concealment. The chariot scene is the labour made visible and then immediately naturalised: Hanuman flies backwards for the length of a lesson, and the tradition remembers the posture as devotion rather than as effort. The insight the pairing yields is that a discipline's hardest requirement often survives in its stories as a gesture. Folded hands is what gets transmitted; flying backwards indefinitely to keep pace with a moving teacher is what actually happened, and it is the part that would deter anybody. Which is a general mechanism for how demanding practices become popular ones — the cost gets compressed into an image, the image is repeatable, and the repeatability is what carries it forward with the requirement quietly removed.
Sharpest implication. If the learning was proximity rather than content, then the transmissible part of any education is whatever you acquire by standing near somebody long enough for their judgment to become automatic in you — and that is not chosen at the point of learning but at the point of choosing whom to stand near. Which relocates almost the entire decision to a moment when you know least, and explains why the question who taught you has a different answer from what did you study for nearly everybody who has ever been asked both.
Generative questions.