qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
In your hand the thunderbolt shines, and the flag shines beside it.
Across your shoulder lies your sacred thread, twisted out of munja grass.
The portrait carries on from the last verse, and now he is holding things.
Bajra is vajra — Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt, and in ordinary Sanskrit usage the byword for whatever cannot be broken. The poem has already made his body out of it two verses back; here he has one in his hand. Dhvajā is a banner, the flag carried into a field so that people know where you are, and Hanumān's own flag is a thing the Rāmāyaṇa tradition puts elsewhere too — Arjuna's chariot in the Mahābhārata flies a Hanumān banner.
The third object is the one that is easy to read past. Mūñja is a coarse tall grass, and it is the material the older ritual literature specifies for the girdle and cord a student is invested with when he begins to study. Hanumān is worshipped as a lifelong brahmacārin, and a sacred thread of grass rather than cotton says so without saying it: the student who never stopped being one. Two weapons and a piece of grass, and the grass is carrying most of the meaning.
Printed and sung texts divide over the small joining word between thunderbolt and flag — some set aru, others au — and both are current with nothing turning on the choice.
If you had to carry three things that showed people who you are, what would you pick?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made