In Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, in an episode I am calling ‘Hanumān’s medicine journey’, we learn about a resuscitative plant that grows in the Himalayas called saṃjīvanī. Although the plant has a somewhat unclear place in the materia medica of India’s classical ‘life science’ (āyurveda), in recent decades politicians in north India have attempted to connect the plant to modern Ayurveda (medicine), thereby demonstrating the epic’s scientificity, in order to fund saṃjīvanī re-discovery projects. A close look at Hanumān’s medicine journey and some of its retellings reveals the knotty and sometimes confusing relationship between medicine and religion in premodern Sanskrit literature, as well as the uses of that literature today. In this chapter, I probe the association between Ayurveda and South Asian religions, especially Hindu dharma and bhakti, in Vālmīki’s tale about the healing power of plants, and I reflect on the contemporary politics of Hanumān’s medicine journey vis-à-vis contemporary pharmacognostic research on saṃjīvanī.