A God, a Mount, and a National Emblem

Garuda is worshipped in his own right and not only as Vishnu's carrier: he has temples, a dedicated Garuda Purana (a text largely concerned with death, the afterlife and funerary rites), and a place in Buddhist and Jain cosmology, where the garudas become a class of great bird-beings perpetually at war with the nagas. His reach across Southeast Asia is wide and living: he is the national symbol of Indonesia (Garuda Pancasila) and lends his name to its national airline, he appears in the royal insignia of Thailand, and he is woven through Khmer, Balinese and Nepali art and ritual. These modern political and commercial uses draw directly on the classical figure of the powerful, righteous, serpent-quelling bird, and in such settings Garuda functions as much as an emblem of state protection as an object of devotion.

The single most visible modern image of Garuda is a work of recent statuary rather than of scripture: the Garuda Wisnu Kencana, a monumental copper and brass statue of Garuda bearing Vishnu completed near Bali's southern coast in 2018 and, at some 120 metres, among the tallest statues in the world, built explicitly as a statement of Balinese Hindu identity and as a tourist landmark simultaneously. Its scale illustrates how thoroughly the classical figure of the Mahabharata continues to be renewed by contemporary public commission rather than surviving only as an inherited textual or temple image confined to the past.