For Hindus, one of the ways to expand our mind, and discover the divine within, is by listening (shravana) to stories of the divine. Puranic stories are containers (patra) of Vedic wisdom (atma-gyan). Stories are of different types: memoirs (itihasa), chronicles (purana), epics (maha-kavya), narratives (akhyana), glories (mahatmya), biographies (charitra), songs (gita), prose-poetry (champu). Hanuman nourishes himself intellectually and emotionally by listening to stories of Ram, as we learn from this verse.
