Nagas, the Serpent Beings

The Sanskrit word naga means “serpent”, above all the cobra, whose raised hood made it both feared and revered in India. Snakes were bound up with water, the monsoon, the earth and fertility, and the nagas that grew from them were beings of all these things. They appear in the oldest Buddhist art: on the stone railings of Bharhut and the gateways of Sanchi, carved in the second and first centuries BCE, naga kings and queens with hooded heads kneel in devotion before symbols of the Buddha.

The Mahabharata gives the nagas a family history. Kadru, wife of the sage Kashyapa, wished for a thousand serpent sons, while her sister Vinata bore the mighty eagle Garuda. After Kadru tricked Vinata into slavery, Garuda won his mother’s freedom by bringing the nectar of immortality, and from then on eagles and serpents were enemies. The epic also tells how the naga Takshaka killed King Parikshit, and how his son Janamejaya held a great sacrifice to destroy all snakes, until the young sage Astika, born of a naga mother, persuaded him to stop. The whole Mahabharata, in its own telling, was first recited at that sacrifice.

Sculptors gave nagas monumental form. In the early centuries CE, workshops at Mathura carved large standing naga figures, human in shape, with a canopy of hoods rising behind the head, and naga shrines stood beside tanks and wells in many towns. Historians see in these images a widespread worship of local water and earth spirits that Hindu, Buddhist and Jain communities all shared and wove into their own stories. In Kashmir, a text known as the Nilamata Purana describes the valley as a land protected by nagas, whose springs still bear their names.

Nagas are pictured in two forms, as great serpents or as human beings with a canopy of snake heads, and they move between them at will. Their home is a realm beneath the earth or the waters, called Patala or Nagaloka, with jewelled cities such as Bhogavati. Nagas are believed to control rain and the flow of rivers and to dwell in springs, lakes and wells, so the welfare of crops depends on their favour. When offended, by the killing of snakes or the fouling of their waters, they are said to bring drought, flood or disease.

Nagas also guard wealth: gems in their hoods, buried treasure, and in Buddhist legend relics and teachings. One story tells that nagas guarded a share of the Buddha’s relics at Ramagrama, so devotedly that the emperor Ashoka left it with them. A later tradition holds that the philosopher Nagarjuna retrieved the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures from the nagas’ realm, where they had been kept until humans were ready for them.

In Hindu tradition the greatest naga is Shesha, also called Ananta, “endless”. Between the ages of the world Vishnu rests on his coils on the cosmic ocean, and Shesha’s thousand heads are said to bear the earth. His brother Vasuki serves as the rope in the churning of the ocean, and Shiva wears a serpent around his neck. Not all nagas are friendly to the gods’ purposes: the young Krishna dances on the hoods of Kaliya, who had poisoned the Yamuna river, and subdues him without killing him, sending him away to the sea.

Buddhist scripture tells how, in the weeks after the Buddha’s awakening, a great storm arose while he sat in meditation. The naga king Mucalinda coiled his body around him and spread his hoods above his head, then took human form and bowed to him. The image of the Buddha seated on the coils beneath a sevenfold hood became one of the most loved in Southeast Asia. Another tale tells of a naga who disguised himself as a man to become a monk; when discovered, he asked that candidates for ordination be called “naga” in his memory, a custom still found in Thailand.

Jain tradition has a parallel scene. When the twenty-third tirthankaraTirthankara A “ford-maker”: one of twenty-four liberated teachers who show the way across the river of rebirth. Mahavira was the last. Glossary, Parshvanatha, was meditating, a hostile being sent storms against him, and the naga king Dharanendra and his queen Padmavati sheltered him with their hoods. Jain images of Parshvanatha almost always show the serpent canopy, and Padmavati is honoured as a protective goddess.

Nagas remain part of everyday religion across South Asia. On Naga Panchami, in the monsoon month of Shravana, many Hindus offer milk, flowers and sweets to images of serpents or at snake holes and avoid digging the earth. Snake stones, carved with intertwined serpents, stand under trees in villages of southern India, where women often pray before them for children. In Kerala, families and temples such as Mannarasala keep sacred serpent groves, and in Nepal legends of nagas are tied to the lake that, tradition holds, once filled the Kathmandu valley.

In Southeast Asia the naga became an emblem of temples and kingship. Naga balustrades line the causeways of Angkor and the stairways of temples in Thailand and Laos, where nagas are said to form a bridge between the human world and the heavens. Along the Mekong, glowing lights said to rise from the river at the end of the Buddhist rains retreat are attributed by local tradition to nagas. In Tibet the lu are water spirits akin to nagas, and in China and Japan the naga merged with the native dragon, becoming the dragon kings of sea and rain.

Snakes themselves benefit from these beliefs. In many parts of India people are reluctant to kill a cobra, and a dead snake may be given funeral rites. Conservationists have pointed out that sacred serpent groves in Kerala and elsewhere preserve patches of native forest and the wildlife within them, a link between old devotion and modern ecology that has drawn the attention of researchers and local authorities alike.

The naga continues to appear in modern art, literature and fantasy games, often far from its roots. In the traditions that gave it birth, it remains a being of water and earth, dangerous when wronged, generous when honoured, and a protector of those who seek awakening.